Riots happen when marginalized communities feel brutalized by harsh police tactics, according to research done in their aftermath since the 1960s.
Baltimore Police officers in riot gear on April 27.
Drew Angerer / Getty Images
As Edward Ransford, a sociologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, listened to reports from his car radio of the rioting in Baltimore this week, he was transported back to the summer of 1965.
Then a young graduate student at UCLA, Ransford was studying civil rights activism in the city's Watts neighborhood. Ironically, he was interested in why Los Angeles seemed more peaceful than other cities. Then, on Aug. 11, Watts erupted into six days of rioting, looting, and arson. Thirty-four people died, and order was only restored after 4,000 members of the California Army National Guard were put onto the streets.
Ransford quickly adapted his survey questions to ask neighborhood residents about the root causes of the violence. Two-thirds of respondents mentioned long-standing tensions between the police and the local black community — including allegations of frequent excessive force. (The immediate trigger was a dispute that followed the arrest of a black motorist for drunk driving.) Ransford also asked about people's willingness to engage in violent protests, and found that this was linked to political powerlessness: Those who endorsed violence felt that other forms of protest weren't getting anywhere.
This week's Baltimore riots are "so very much like my old 1965 Watts study, in which police tension and perceived brutality were the big things," Ransford told BuzzFeed News.
That study, published in the American Journal of Sociology and in a later book, is one of many sociological studies, journalistic investigations, and official reports to have since explored why riots happen. Although the precise circumstances that cause a city to erupt into violence vary from case to case, these events have a common thread. They usually happen when poor communities with little hope of economic or social advancement are subjected to harsh and discriminatory policing. Economic deprivation alone, without tension between a community and the police, does not seem to spawn riots.
It's a relatively simple lesson that we've seen again and again, from Detroit in 1967, to Los Angeles in 1992, to London in 2011.
In Baltimore, as in Ferguson before it, there's little doubt that aggressive policing helped create the tinderbox that exploded this week. And given that Baltimore — unlike Ferguson — is a city where the mayor, police commissioner, and many police officers are black, it should be clear that it's the system, not the race of those enforcing it, that matters.
Detroit, 1967
A federal soldier stands guard in a Detroit street on July 25, 1967.
AFP / Getty Images / Via gettyimages.com
Back in the 1960s, such disturbances were known as "race riots." That's why the five days of violence that convulsed Detroit in July of 1967, leaving 43 dead and 2,000 buildings in ruins, had city leaders grasping for an explanation. At the time, Detroit saw itself as a leader in race relations, a liberal counterpoint to attitudes that prevailed in the Deep South.
Perhaps the riots had been led by migrants from the South who were not assimilating well, commentators speculated, or maybe by a disaffected minority who'd fallen off the bottom of the economic ladder. It took a pioneering journalist, who believed in applying scientific methods to answer questions about how society works, to demolish those explanations.
Philip Meyer of the Detroit Free Press devised a questionnaire to test theories of why the riot happened, and sent black interviewers — mostly school teachers — into the affected neighborhoods to gather responses. He found that blacks who grew up in Detroit and other northern cities were more likely to have participated than black migrants from the South, and that college graduates were as likely as high-school dropouts to have gotten involved.
The Detroit Free Press, which won a Pulitzer for its coverage, concluded that the main cause was a pervasive lack of opportunity for advancement in the local black community — even in the face of gains made by the civil rights movement. "The closer you get to an unreached goal, the greater your frustration at not reaching it," Meyer told BuzzFeed News.
The trigger for the riot was a police raid on a late-night drinking den. And the leading explanation given by the black residents interviewed by Meyer's team was "police brutality," mentioned by 57% of them. A year later, when his team surveyed the area again, the proportion citing police brutality as a major complaint had risen to 71%.
