NCJ Number
126564
Date Published
1989
Length
215 pages
Annotation
Often a trivial incident or a routine arrest will act as a "flashpoint" for widespread disturbances; this study shows how and why this happens in Great Britain by investigating the underlying causes, the immediate context of the events, and the communication between police and crowd.
Abstract
Findings are based on research into case studies of community disorder, political demonstrations, and industrial picketing in South Yorkshire over a 5-year period. The analysis covers industrial relations, police-community relations, and issues of political representation and legal rights. The authors' theoretical analysis draws on both sociology and social psychology. The model of factors found to be crucial determinants of order and disorder contains six levels of analysis: structural, political/ideological, cultural, contextual, situational, and interactional. The term "level" indicates that the processes and structures involved are of qualitatively different kinds. The authors' working model of public disorder is compared with the established sociological theory of Smelser (1962), the analyses of urban social movements by the Marxist geographer Castells (1983), and recent work by Moscovici (1985) on social representations within the perspective of social psychology. An examination of policy argues that the focal concerns of the police occupational subculture and increasingly repressive legislation have together dominated public order policy to the detriment of concern with disorder causes and citizens' civil rights. 150-item bibliography and a subject index