NCJ Number
171551
Journal
Social Forces Volume: 75 Issue: 3 Dated: (March 1997) Pages: 835-854
Date Published
1997
Length
20 pages
Annotation
This analysis of annual changes in African-American civil rights-related collective actions and African-American and white arrest rates (robbery, homicide, and burglary) for 1955-91 shows a more complex relationship than is usually hypothesized; collective actions and crime rates are positively related until the mid-1970s for both African-Americans and whites, but unrelated, or negatively related, afterward.
Abstract
The longitudinal analysis included the 1950s, the period when the amount of African-American civil rights actions began to increase rapidly. Such a series was collected from 1955 to 1976 by McAdam (1982) and extended to 1980 by Jenkins and Eckert (1986). This series is based on a content analysis of the abstracts of news stories recorded in The New York Times Annual Index. Crime data involved African-American and white arrest rates for robbery, homicide, and burglary. Data for 1955-59 were taken directly from the Uniform Crime Reports; those for 1960-91 were revised estimates supplied by the FBI. Findings suggest that collective action during the 1950s and 1960s established a "vocabulary of motives" that could be used by offenders to justify or "neutralize" (Agnew 1994; Minor 1980) their criminal actions. This conclusion is historically contingent, however; for example, the portrayal of street criminals as "political prisoners" was more successful during the height of the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s than during the near absence of direct action by the civil rights movement in the 1990s. Similarly, the ability of officials to define rioters as criminals is likely to be more successful during the Los Angeles riot of 1992, when street crime rates remained high but direct political action had virtually disappeared, than during the Watts riot of 1965. 1 table, 6 figures, 9 notes, and 66 references