Civil disobedience has been practiced by peaceful protesters long before Henry Thoreau penned the essay with this name after a night in jail for refusing to pay the poll tax. In the US, when protester arrests are mentioned, Rosa Parks’ and Dr. Martin Luther King’s bus protest comes to mind together with an understanding of its roots in the Indian independence movement, led by Mahatma Gandhi. In the last decade, there has been a spike in publicized arrests that might only be rivaled by the combined civil movements of the 60s. Have these recent arrestable protests been successful? What were the reasons for the arrests? Are there patterns we can learn from?
One recent study, Why Civil Resistance Works by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, shows how it succeeded in the Iranian Revolution, 1977-9, the First Palestinian Intifada, 1987-92, and the Philippine People Power Movement, 1983-1986, but failed in the Burmese Uprising, 1988-90. In their review of previous literature on the subject, they argue that most scholars agree that violent revolutions, terrorism and other aggressive rebellions are more likely to succeed in contrast with the tamer method of non-violence (6). In contrast, they argue that civil resistance succeeds because of: “lower barriers to active participation in nonviolent resistance, the disruptive effects of mass nonviolent noncooperation, and the increased likelihood of backfiring and loyalty shifts during nonviolent campaigns.” (82).
The spike in recent arrests is demonstrated by the fact that prior to the death of Ian Tomlinson “(who was not a protester) at the G20 protests, in 2009, the last two people to die after contact with the police at protests in Britain were Kevin Gately, in 1974, and Blair Peach, in 1979,” according to David Mansley’s Collective Violence, Democracy and Protest Policing (75). He explains that statistics about protest-related arrests are difficult to find because individual police departments deny freedom of information requests, and there is no national database. Mansley also points out that new laws in the UK (and the US) make it easier to convict those charged with rioting; for example, he sites that “in Bristol in 1980, none of the sixteen people charged with riot were convicted. By contrast, the 183 people charged with riot under the new definition,” of the Public Order Act 1986 “in Bradford and other towns in 2001, 90 per cent were found guilty” (72).
There are some calculatable measures of the level of unrest, such as the Insurance Information Institute’s “Top 10 Most Costly U.S. Civil Disorders” list that reports the Los Angeles riots of 1992 as costing the insurance industry $1.3 billion in today’s money, with only 60s protests in Detroit and Los Angeles rivaling these numbers. The only event on the list from the last decade is from Baltimore’s April 25-7, 2015 incident that cost $24.3 million. Thus, civil unrest does not cost American businesses nearly as much today as it did in the 60s and 70s, so it is counter-intuitive that arrest statistics for protests seem to be going up.
Protester Arrests: 2007-17
by: Anna Faktorovich, PhD