CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2008
| Author | DeBartolo, Peter John |
|---|---|
| Title | NYPD Protest Policing: An Analysis of Discourse, Dissent, and Redefinition |
| Summary | The focus of the project is to study the specific police knowledge that was discursively and socially constructed as truth within the protest policing discourse of the New York Police Department (NYPD) prior to the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC) political demonstrations. During these protests, the NYPD arrested a record number of political demonstrators; however, charges were dismissed against 90% of those arrested (Moynihan 2008). The excessive use of preemptive arrest and preventative detention that took place during the RNC 2004 convention similarly followed suit with the policing tactics employed by the NYPD during the 2003 anti-war protests in New York City (Dunn 2003). Although not often identified as such, these recent policing methods represent an intentional policy departure from the traditionally recognized approach to handling American political protests. While various scholars have argued that there has been a recent radical transition in the ways that protest policing strategies have been conceptualized and utilized by U.S. police departments, no scholar to date has adequately analyzed how recent state discourses and truth regimes have influenced the ways in which this policing has been carried out in post-9/11 social space of New York City. The study also explores how the NYPD’s new counter-terrorism discourse and social practices are now remapping the local social spaces of New York City as sites of danger. This is a process that now influences the Department’s perceptions of and interactions with the public and political protesters alike. In this sense, the study argues that although the vast majority of the protesters who attended the 2004 Republican National Convention demonstrations were completely peaceful, the harsh tactical responses of the authorities were the result of the discourse of fear and terror that had been constructed and adopted prior to the political demonstrations, which necessarily depicted the future events as sites of local danger, disorder, and potential terror. |
| Supervisor | Prem Kumar Rajaram; Carol Harrington |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2008/debartolo_peter-john.pdf |
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