Flows of protest control in São Paulo (2013-2014)

The article analyzes the dynamics of protest control in São Paulo, from June 2013 to June 2014, focusing on coalitions between actors, arenas and institutional repertoires. We argue that the police crackdown on June 13 in São Paulo encouraged ordinary citizens to join the demonstrations, as well as spurred changes in local and federal government responses to protests and in repressive repertoires of social control.

Beaten ballots: political participation dynamics amidst police interventions

What is the effect of violence on political mobilization? Taking the repression-mobilization nexus debate as a starting point, we study the effects of police interventions on political participation, focusing on the Spanish police crackdown on Catalonia's independence referendum on 1 October 2017. We analyze the effect of police actions on turnout using detailed aggregate data, as well as a survey conducted a few days after the referendum. The two empirical approaches show that police interventions had both deterrent and inverse spatial spillover effects. Although police raids had a local negative impact on turnout, they induced positive spillover effects in the surrounding areas. Our findings also indicate heterogeneity in the spatial dynamics, with police actions encouraging people to go to vote in nearby areas, but also mobilizing residents in neighboring areas to participate, especially those individuals with fewer incentives to turn out to vote.

The Activist Chroniclers of Occupy Gezi : Counterposing Visibility to Injustice

With the benefit of hindsight, this chapter casts another glance at Occupy Gezi, a landmark protest in contemporary Turkey. We reflect on the pursuit of visibility by activists on Twitter as a means to garner the attention of the Turkish and the global public to the heavy-handed police crackdown of the popular mobilization. We interpret their quest for visibility as a ‘subaltern tactic’ employed to reverse an asymmetry of power through an aesthetics of indignation at the injustice perpetrated against peaceful demonstrators. In the longer run, however, such visibility poses an important dilemma when, as in the case of Turkey, it becomes the basis for reflexive state surveillance.

Police crackdowns in Mexico City

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the design and implementation of the police crackdown strategy employed in Mexico City and to discuss its limitations toward a medium-to-long-term reduction of crime rates for six types of robberies. Design/methodology/approach The present work employs generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) models to estimate the effect of police operations on the volatility of the rates of six types of robberies in Mexico City, as well as their persistence over time. Findings Results suggest that the concentration of policing in certain high-criminality spaces reduces crime rates in the immediate term; however, its permanence is contingent on policing design and behavioral characteristics of the targeted crime. Specifically, the Mexico City police crackdown strategy seems to be better suited for combating crimes of a “non-static” nature than those of a “static” nature. Research limitations/implications Due to the nature of the data used for this research, the performed analysis does not enable a precise determination of whether the crime rates respond to temporal or spatial displacement. Practical implications Considering the obtained results, a re-design of Mexico City’s police crackdown strategy is suggested for the sustained reduction of the number of reported cases of robberies of a static nature. Originality/value Despite their importance, few studies have measured the impact of police crackdowns on city-level crime rates and whether their effect is temporary or permanent. The present study proposes the use of GARCH models in order to integrate the study of this phenomenon into criminal time series models.

Police crackdown will limit Hong Kong protest impact

Headline HONG KONG: Police crackdown will limit protest impact