Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-2lccl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T20:55:40.485Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Modeling Repressive Policing: Computational Analysis of Protocols from the Israeli State Commission of Inquiry into the October 2000 Events

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2021

Renana Keydar Open the ORCID record for Renana Keydar [Opens in a new window] ,
Yael Litmanovitz ,
Badi Hasisi  and
Yoav Kan-Tor
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article addresses the gap between normative expectations of the right to protest in liberal democracies and the continued practice of repressive protest policing. The empirical literature has identified three types of factors explaining repressive policing: macro- or societal-level factors, meso-level factors relating to the police organization, and micro-level factors pertaining to specific events. Yet these factors provide only a fragmented understanding of the phenomenon. In this article, we put forward a novel three-tiered methodology of scaled reading, which is able to examine all these explanations together. We use scaled reading to analyze the protocols of the Or Commission of Inquiry, which investigated lethal clashes between the Israeli police and Israel’s Arab minority in October 2000. Through large-scale algorithmic topic modeling, we found that all types of empirical explanations of repressive policing co-exist within the October events. The mid-scale analysis revealed that no type of explanation exclusively belongs to a specific group of actors. The small-scale reading of the most representative documents for each topic demonstrated that this coexistence of mechanisms is also present within single testimonies. Together, our findings challenge existing empirical categories and illuminate repressive policing as a nonlinear, nonbinary, noncausal, and nonunitary phenomenon. These insights help make sense of the phenomenon’s persistence in deeply divided societies.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 47 , Issue 4 , November 2022 , pp. 1075 - 1105
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Bar Foundation

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Renana Keydar and Yael Litmanovitz contributed equally to this article.

The authors wish to thank the participants of the Empirical Studies in Public Law and Human Rights 2019 workshop at the Hebrew University, the speakers at the 2020 commemorative event marking twenty years to the October 2000 events, hosted by the Institute of Criminology at the Hebrew University, and our co-panelists at the 2021 Law and Society Association Annual Conference for their valuable comments and inspiring presentations. We thank Michael Livermore for his critical methodological guidance. The article benefited greatly from the institutional support of the Center for Interdisciplinary Data Science Research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, directed by Dafna Shahaf and Yuval Benjamini.

References

REFERENCES

Association of Civil Rights in Israel. 2017. Petition against Department of Internal Investigations: Collect Data on Police Brutality. September 6. https://law.acri.org.il/he/40573.Google Scholar
Adler, Meni, and Michael, Elhadad. 2006. “An Unsupervised Morpheme-Based Hmm for Hebrew Morphological Disambiguation.” In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and the 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 665–72. Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Ashforth, Adam. 1990. “Reckoning Schemes of Legitimation: On Commissions of Inquiry as Power/Knowledge Forms.” Journal of Historical Sociology 3, no. 1: 1–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
BBC News. 2020. “Huge Anti-Racism Protests Held across US.” June 7. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52951093.Google Scholar
Blalock, Hubert Morse. 1967. Toward a Theory of Minority-Group Relations. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Blei, David M. 2012. “Probabilistic Topic Models.” Communications of the ACM 55, no. 4: 77–84.Google Scholar
Blei, David M., Ng, Andrew Y., and Jordan, Michael I.. 2003. “Latent Dirichlet Allocation.” Journal of Machine Learning Research 3: 993–1022.Google Scholar
Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights. 2020. “Shrinking Space for Freedom of Peaceful Assembly.” April 23. https://www.coe.int/en/web/commissioner/blog/-/asset_publisher/xZ32OPEoxOkq/content/shrinking-space-for-freedom-of-peaceful-assembly.Google Scholar
Della Porta, Donatella. 1995. Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State: A Comparative Analysis of Italy and Germany. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dieng, Adji B., Ruiz, Francisco J. R., and Blei, David M.. 2020. “Topic Modeling in Embedding Spaces.” Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 8: 439–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DiMaggio, Paul, Nag, Manish, and Blei, David. 2013. “Exploiting Affinities between Topic Modeling and the Sociological Perspective on Culture: Application to Newspaper Coverage of U.S. Government Arts Funding.” Poetics, Topic Models and the Cultural Sciences 41, no. 6: 570–606.Google Scholar
Earl, Jennifer, and Sarah, Soule. 2006. “Seeing Blue: A Police-Centered Explanation of Protest Policing.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 11, no. 2: 145–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Earl, Jennifer, Soule, Sarah A., and McCarthy, John D.. 2003. “Protest under Fire? Explaining the Policing of Protest.” American Sociological Review 68, no. 4: 581–606.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ellison, Graham, and Greg, Martin. 2000. “Policing, Collective Action and Social Movement Theory: The Case of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Campaign.” British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 4: 681–99.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Eve, Martin Paul. 2019. Close Reading with Computers: Textual Scholarship, Computational Formalism, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Fielding, Nigel. 1991. The Police and Social Conflict: Rhetoric and Reality. Conflict and Change in Britain Series 2. London: Athlone Press.Google Scholar
Fillieule, Olivier, and Fabien, Jobard. 1998. “The Policing of Protest in France: Toward a Model of Protest Policing.” In Policing Protest: The Control of Mass Demonstrations in Western Democracies, edited by Donatella Della Porta and Herbert Reiter, 70–90. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Gabbay, Nadav. 2015. “State Commissions of Inquiry and Crises of Legitimation: The Or Commission and the Palestinian Citizens of Israel.” Democratic Culture 16: 7–43.Google Scholar
Gamson, William A. 1975. The Strategy of Social Protest. Dorsey Series in Sociology. Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press.Google Scholar
Gavison, Ruth. 2010. “Contemplations on State Commissions of Inquiry and the Status of Israel’s Arab Minority.” In The Arabs in Israel, edited by Lavie, Ephraim, 5–27. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung.Google Scholar
Gerber, Monica M., and Jackson, Jonathan. 2017. “Justifying Violence: Legitimacy, Ideology and Public Support for Police Use of Force.” Psychology, Crime & Law 23, no. 1: 79–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldsmith, Andrew. 2002. “Policing Weak States: Citizen Safety and State Responsibility.” Policing and Society 13, no. 1: 3–21.Google Scholar
Grimmer, Justin, and Stewart, Brandon M.. 2013. “Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts.” Political Analysis 21, no. 3: 267–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haaretz. 2020. “Israel’s Police Minister vs. the Right to Protest.” August 29. https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/.premium-israel-s-police-minister-vs-the-right-to-protest-1.9111920.Google Scholar
Hasisi, Badi. 2010. “Policing Minorities in a Deeply Divided Society: Police Performance and Presence in Israel.” In Plurality and Citizenship in Israel, edited by Avnon, D. and Benziman, Y., 178–96. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hass, Amira. 2020. “Israelis’ Shock at Police Violence at Anti-Netanyahu Protests Is Quite Shocking | Opinion.” Haaretz, August 25. https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-israelis-shock-at-police-violence-at-anti-netanyahu-protests-is-quite-shocking-1.9101121.Google Scholar
Hirschfield, Paul J., and Simon, Daniella. 2010. “Legitimating Police Violence: Newspaper Narratives of Deadly Force.” Theoretical Criminology 14, no. 2: 155–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horovitz, Sigall. 2017. “Transitional Justice without Transition: Or Commission and the Ethno-National Divide in Israel.” Law, Minority and National Conflicts 11: 251–89.Google Scholar
Hutchinson, Bill. 2020. “Police Declare Riots as Protests Turn Violent in Cities Nationwide; 1 Demonstrator Dead in Austin.” ABC News, July 27. https://abcnews.go.com/US/police-declare-riots-protests-turn-violent-cities-nationwide/story?id=71994983.Google Scholar
Jackson, Pamela Irving. 1989. Minority Group Threat, Crime, and Policing: Social Context and Social Control. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Jacobs, David, and O’Brien, Robert M.. 1998. “The Determinants of Deadly Force: A Structural Analysis of Police Violence.” American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 4: 837–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jefferson, T. 1990. The Case against Paramilitary Policing. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.Google Scholar
Keydar, Renana. 2020. “Listening from Afar: An Algorithmic Analysis of Testimonies from the International Criminal Courts.” Illinois Journal of Law, Technology and Policy 2020, no. 1: 55–83.Google Scholar
Kraska, P. B. 1999. “Questioning the militarization of US police: Critical versus Advocacy Scholarship.” Policing and Society: An International Journal 9, no. 2: 141–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Law, David S. 2016. “Constitutional Archetypes.” Texas Law Review 95: 153–243.Google Scholar
Litmanovitz, Yael D. 2016. “Moving towards an Evidence-Base of Democratic Police Training: The Development and Evaluation of a Complex Social Intervention in the Israeli Border Police.” PhD diss., University of Oxford.Google Scholar
Livermore, Michael A., Riddell, Allen B., and Rockmore, Daniel N.. 2017. “The Supreme Court and the Judicial Genre.” Arizona Law Review 59: 837–901.Google Scholar
Livermore, Michael A., and Rockmore, Daniel N., eds. 2019. Law as Data: Computation, Text, and the Future of Legal Analysis. Santa Fe, NM: SFI Press.Google Scholar
MacDonald, John M., Kaminski, Robert J., Alpert, Geoffrey P., and Tennenbaum, Abraham N.. 2001. “The Temporal Relationship between Police Killings of Civilians and Criminal Homicide: A Refined Version of the Danger-Perception Theory.” Crime & Delinquency 47, no. 2: 155–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCarthy, John D., and McPhail, Clark. 1998. “The Institutionalization of Protest in the United States.” Social Movement Society: Contentious Politics for a New Century 1: 83–110.Google Scholar
McPhail, Clark, and McCarthy, John D.. 2005. “Protest Mobilization, Protest Repression, and Their Interaction.” Repression and Mobilization 21: 3–32.Google Scholar
Moretti, Franco. 2000. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 2, no. 1: 54–68.Google Scholar
Moretti, Franco. 2013. Distant Reading. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Nguyen, Dong, Liakata, Maria, DeDeo, Simon, Eisenstein, Jacob, Mimno, David, Tromble, Rebekah, and Winters, Jane. 2020. “How We Do Things with Words: Analyzing Text as Social and Cultural Data.” Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, August 25.Google Scholar
Office of the Special Rapporteur for the Freedom of Expression, and Organization of American States. 2019. Protest and Human Rights Standards on the Rights Involved in Social Protest and the Obligations to Guide the Response of the State. http://www.oas.org/en/iachr/expression/publications/Protesta/ProtestHumanRights.pdf.Google Scholar
Parker, Charles F., and Dekker, Sander. 2008. “September 11 and Postcrisis Investigation: Exploring the Role and Impact of the 9/11 Commission.” In Governing after Crisis: The Politics of Investigation, Accountability and Learning, edited by Boin, A., McConnell, A., and Hart, P., 255–82. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pinson, Halleli. 2008. “The Excluded Citizenship Identity: Palestinian/Arab Israeli Young People Negotiating Their Political Identities.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 29, no. 2: 201–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rafail, Patrick, Soule, Sarah A., and McCarthy, John D.. 2012. “Describing and Accounting for the Trends in US Protest Policing, 1960–1995.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 56, no. 4: 736–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rehurek, Radim, and Petr, Sojka. 2010. “Software Framework for Topic Modelling with Large Corpora.” Paper presented at the Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation 2010 Workshop on New Challenges for NLP Frameworks, 17–23 May, Malta.Google Scholar
Reiner, Robert. 2000. The Politics of the Police. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Rosland, Sissel. 2008. “Narratives of Legitimacy: Political Discourse in the Early Phase of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.” Peace and Conflict Studies 15, no. 1: 21–42.Google Scholar
Ruhl, J. B., John, Nay, and Gilligan, Jonathan M.. 2018. “Topic Modeling the President: Conventional and Computational Methods.” George Washington Law Review 86: 1243–1315.Google Scholar
Schneider, Cathy Lisa. 2008. “Police Power and Race Riots in Paris.” Politics and Society 36, no. 1: 133–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Skolnick, Jerome H., and Fyfe, James J.. 1994. Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force. New York: Free Press and Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada.Google Scholar
Soule, Sarah, and Christian, Davenport. 2009. “Velvet Glove, Iron Fist, or Even Hand? Protest Policing in the United States, 1960–1990.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 14, no. 1: 1–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sprinzak, Ehud. 1999. Brother against Brother: Violence and Extremism in Israeli Politics from Altalena to the Rabin Assassination. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
State Commission of Inquiry into the Events of October 2000. 2003. Report. 2 vols. Jerusalem: State Commission of Inquiry into the Events of October 2000. https://web.archive.org/web/20061126160542/http://elyon1.court.gov.il/heb/veadot/or/inside_index.htm.Google Scholar
State Comptroller’s Office. 2017. Special Review Report. https://www.mevaker.gov.il/he/Reports/Pages/582.aspx.Google Scholar
Vitale, Alex S. 2005. “From Negotiated Management to Command and Control: How the New York Police Department Polices Protests.” Policing and Society 15, no. 3: 283–304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Waddington, P. A. 1994. Liberty and Order: Public Order Policing in a Capital City. London: University College London Press.Google Scholar
Waddington, P. A.. 1999. “Swatting Police Paramilitarism: A Comment on Kraska and Paulsen.” Policing and Society 9, no. 2: 125–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Waddington, P. A.. 2007. Policing Public Disorder: Theory and Practice. Cullompton, UK: Willan.Google Scholar
Warner, Cody, and McCarthy, John D.. 2014. “Whatever Can Go Wrong Will: Situational Complexity and Public Order Policing.” Policing and Society 24, no. 5: 566–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
White, Michael D. 2001. “Controlling Police Decisions to Use Deadly Force: Reexamining the Importance of Administrative Policy.” Crime & Delinquency 47, no. 1: 131–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winter, Martin. 1998. “Police Philosophy and Protest Policing in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1960–1990.” In Policing Protest: The Control of Mass Demonstrations in Western Democracies, edited by Donatella Della Porta and Herbert Reiter, 188–212, vol. 6. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar