Papers by Patrick Gillham
RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 2018
The Kerner Commission identified factors contributing to police ineffectiveness during the 1960s ... more The Kerner Commission identified factors contributing to police ineffectiveness during the 1960s civil disorders. Since release of the Kerner report, the frequency and intensity of civil disorders has declined and the policing of disorders has changed. Using the report recommendations as a framework, we analyze changes in police disorder management during the 2014 events in Ferguson as these involve operational planning and equipment. Data for the Ferguson case are constructed from media reports, police and activist accounts, after action reports, and field observations. We link changes seen in Ferguson to larger institutional changes in law enforcement over the last fifty years. We conclude with discussions on what did and did not work in the policing of Ferguson and highlight implications for policing of protest and disorder in the twenty-first century.
Sociological Perspectives, 2018
This paper examines how threatening economic conditions and preexisting community resources facil... more This paper examines how threatening economic conditions and preexisting community resources facilitated the spread of Occupy Wall Street protest groups to more than 600 counties in the continental United States in 2011. Using a generalized linear mixed model, we find that economic threats and accessible resources are complementary facilitators of movement mobilization. But contrary to the expectations based on earlier media and scholarly accounts, the “disruptive threats” caused by the Great Recession failed to predict the formation of Occupy groups. Instead, groups were more likely to mobilize in counties that had the “positional threats” of relatively higher income inequality and relatively lower median incomes in comparison to state norms. However, the effect of positional economic threats was nuanced as counties with lower than average unemployment more likely had groups mobilized. In addition, resources continue to demonstrate empirical importance in explanations of social movement mobilization, as Occupy groups were more likely to form in counties with greater access to social-organizational and human resources. Combined, these findings suggest that scholars can strengthen their analyses by considering threats and resources as complementary facilitators of local protest mobilization and by focusing greater attention on how differing types of threats may influence the mobilization of social movements.
Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining - ASONAM '13, 2013
The extensive use of digital social media by social movement actors is an emerging trend that res... more The extensive use of digital social media by social movement actors is an emerging trend that restructures the communication dynamics of social protest, and it is widely credited with contributing to the successful mobilizations of recent movements (e.g., Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street). Yet, our understanding of both the roles played by social movement's use of social media and the extent of its impact is largely derived from anecdotal evidence, news reports, and a thin body of scholarly research on web-based technologies. In this research we explore several computational methods for measuring the impact of social media on a social movement. Inspired by methodologies originally developed for analyzing computer networks and other dynamic systems, these methods measure various static and dynamic aspects of social networks, and their relations to an underlying social movement. We demonstrated the feasibility and benefits of these measurement methods in the context of Twitter and the Occupying Wall Street movement (OWS). By analyzing tweets related to OWS, we demonstrated the link between the vitality of the movement and the volume of the related tweets over time. We show that there is a positive correlation between the dynamic of tweets and the short-term trend of OWS. The correlation makes it possible to forecast the short-term trend of a social movement using social media data. By ranking users based on the number of their OWS-related tweets and the durations of their tweeting, we are able to identify "buzz makers". Using a strategy similar to the page-rank algorithm, we define the influence of a user by the number of re-tweets that his/her original tweets incite. By tracing where OWS-related tweets are generated, we measure the geographic diffusion of OWS. By analyzing the percentage of OWS tweets generated from different sources, we show that smart phones and applications such as tweet deck had been used extensively for tweeting in the OWS movement. This indicates the involvement of a younger and more technology-inclined generation in OWS.
Representing resistance: media, civil …
The US national response to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks accelerated the adoption and ... more The US national response to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks accelerated the adoption and refinement of a new repertoire of protest policing we call ‘strategic incapacitation’ now employed by law enforcement agencies nationwide to police protest demonstrations. The occupation movement which formally began 17 September 2011 was the most significant social movement to utilise transgressive protest tactics in the United States in the last 40 years and posed a substantial challenge to law enforcement agencies. This research seeks to better understand the implementation of strategic incapacitation tactics through a detailed analysis of the policing of the first 2 months of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests in New York City. Original data for this study are derived from 2-week-long field observations made in New York City during the first and second month anniversaries of the OWS occupation in Zuccotti Park. These are supplemented by activist interviews, activist accounts posted on OWS websites, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds as well as news reports, official police documents, press releases and interviews with legal observers.
Social Problems, Jan 1, 2011
Throughout much of 2001 the Mobilization for Global Justice Coalition (MGJC) planned a series of ... more Throughout much of 2001 the Mobilization for Global Justice Coalition (MGJC) planned a series of mass demonstrations targeting the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to occur in Washington, DC in late September. The terrorist attacks of September 11 created a crisis for the 117 social movement organizations (SMO) involved in the broad-based coalition and forced protest leaders to reevaluate their coalition strategy. This analysis chronicles the dissolution of the MGJC and explains the decisions made by SMO leaders to abandon or disband the coalition. By leading their organizations in ways they expected to be perceived as legitimate in the eyes of key allies and supporters, leaders sought to preserve their SMO's core exchange relationships through the 9/11 crisis. At a minimum, leaders sought to insulate their organizations from irreparable harm and position them competitively for the uncertainties of the post-crisis environment. Many organizations made decisions commensurate with homophilous or exemplary organizations in a process resembling "social contagion" while others capitalized on the crisis enhancing their influence. This research relies upon participant observations of pre-and post-9/11 organizing meetings, examination of coalition documents, and interviews with key MGJC leaders.
Beyond September 11th: An Account of Post- …, Jan 1, 2003
Contemporary protesters confront a dual-struggle. Most obviously, the struggle of protest is dire... more Contemporary protesters confront a dual-struggle. Most obviously, the struggle of protest is directed at targets in an effort to make social, cultural or political change. Yet, in order to engage the struggle of protest, activists must prevail to some degree in a struggle to protest. The struggle to protest pits citizens against a multidimensional policing strategy designed to incapacitate the protest itself. The research here examines the Occupy Wall Street struggle to protest by identifying and analyzing a dozen “moves of resistance” performed by protesters to counter the New York Police Department’s efforts to incapacitate protest through spatial constraints, surveillance and information control. The analysis here focuses on the first two months of OWS protests in New York City based on data derived from two week-long field observations in New York City during the first and second month anniversaries of the occupy protests as well as interviews with activists, news media and activist accounts, legal reports, and legal observers.
Throughout much of 2001 the Mobilization for Global Justice Coalition (MGJC) planned a series of ... more Throughout much of 2001 the Mobilization for Global Justice Coalition (MGJC) planned a series of mass demonstrations targeting the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to occur in Washington, DC in late September. The terrorist attacks of September 11 created a crisis for the 117 social movement organizations (SMO) involved in the broad-based coalition and forced protest leaders to reevaluate their coalition strategy. This analysis chronicles the dissolution of the MGJC and explains the decisions made by SMO leaders to abandon or disband the coalition. By leading their organizations in ways they expected to be perceived as legitimate in the eyes of key allies and supporters, leaders sought to preserve their SMO's core exchange relationships through the 9/11 crisis. At a minimum, leaders sought to insulate their organizations from irreparable harm and position them competitively for the uncertainties of the post-crisis environment. Many organizations made decisions commensurate with homophilous or exemplary organizations in a process resembling "social contagion" while others capitalized on the crisis enhancing their influence. This research relies upon participant observations of pre-and post-9/11 organizing meetings, examination of coalition documents, and interviews with key MGJC leaders.
Sociology Compass, 2011
During the 1970s, the predominant strategy of protest policing shifted from ‘escalated force’ and... more During the 1970s, the predominant strategy of protest policing shifted from ‘escalated force’ and repression of protesters to one of ‘negotiated management’ and mutual cooperation with protesters. Following the failures of negotiated management at the 1999 World Trade Organization demonstrations in Seattle, law enforcement quickly developed a new social control strategy, referred to here as ‘strategic incapacitation’. The US police response to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks quickened the pace of police adoption of this new strategy, which emphasizes the goals of ‘securitizing society’ and isolating or neutralizing the sources of potential disruption. These goals are accomplished through (1) the use of surveillance and information sharing as a way to assess and monitor risks, (2) the use of pre-emptive arrests and less-lethal weapons to selectively disrupt or incapacitate protesters that engage in disruptive protest tactics or might do so, and (3) the extensive control of space in order to isolate and contain disruptive protesters actual or potential. In a comparative fashion, this paper examines the shifts in United States policing strategies over the last 50 years and uses illustrative cases from national conventions, the global justice movement and the anti-war movement to show how strategic incapacitation has become a leading social control strategy used in the policing of protests since 9/11. It concludes by identifying promising questions for future research.
The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, 2013
We examine how tactical innovations introduced by transgressive protesters during the Seattle cyc... more We examine how tactical innovations introduced by transgressive protesters during the Seattle cycle of protests contributed to the end of a long, relatively stable period of détente between police and protesters in the United States. Case studies of the demonstrations staged by the AFL-CIO and the Direct Action Network (DAN) during the 1999 WTO protests are used to reveal the divergent capacity of the negotiated management style of policing protest to control contained and transgressive protesters. We argue that the transgressive protesters' tactics, organizational structure, and decision-making processes all frustrated police attempts to control their demonstrations and contributed to DAN's ability to shut down the opening day of the WTO. We conclude by developing a framework for understanding how police responded in subsequent protests using what we describe as "strategic incapacitation" and by proposing research questions about the impact of this style of policing on subsequent protests in the U.S. and other Western democracies.
Policing Political Protest After Seattle, 2006
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Papers by Patrick Gillham