ISSN 1062-7421
Vol. 12 No. 3 (March 2002) pp. 124-126.

MAKING NEWS OF POLICE VIOLENCE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF TORONTO AND NEW YORK CITY by Jeffrey Ian Ross. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2000. 174 pp. Cloth $68.00. ISBN: 0-275-96825-1.

Reviewed by Thomas C. Shevory, Department of Politics, Ithaca College.

In MAKING NEWS OF POLICE VIOLENCE Jeffery Ian Ross, a professor of criminology at the University of Baltimore, provides us with a timely study on media attention to and public notice of violent police acts. The topic is an important one. As Ross notes in chapter one, the Los Angeles riots of 1992 were precipitated in large measure by a public airing of the video-taping of motorist Rodney King's beating by members of the Los Angeles police department. In fact, although the causes are complex and deeply imbedded in racism and the continuance of various inequalities, many, if not most, urban riots in the U. S. have been precipitated by police actions. In fact, horrendous acts of police misconduct, such as the torturing of Abner Louima in New York, and the shooting of Amadou Dialo, continue to put police violence in the forefront of the public consciousness. Although these have recently been counterbalanced by acts of true heroism on the part of members of the New York department in connection with 9/11, instances of police violence will undoubtedly warrant public attention again at some point in the future.

Ross is not directly concerned with the causes of police violence, its legality, or even its impact on specific individuals, rather, he is most interested in a topic seldom addressed by social scientists: Why is it that some acts of police violence draw the attention of the news media and not others? Moreover, what impacts does media attention to police violence have upon citizens and public officials, with what, if any, effects for public policymaking? Ross is, in his words, primarily concerned with "the process by which incidents of police violence come to the attention of the public, government, and police administration, and the resultant reactions by various
actors in these constituencies" (p. 11). He is more interested in effects than causes, although he recognizes that the two are interrelated over time. He asks three questions: Who gets involved when police violence occurs? How do they participate? How do various actors interact with each other after police violence becomes public?

Ross considers previous academic discussions of police violence to be relatively simplistic, dominated, as they are, by the concept of "cycles." Pierce's model (1986), for example, posits incidents of police violence as moving communities from "calm" through "incident" to "reaction," and "return to calm." Ross develops a more nuanced "political process model of public police violence." According to it, violent acts move from "media initiation" (p. 12) to "arousal" (p. 19) to "reaction" (p. 23) to "outcomes" (p. 28). The shape of each stage is influenced by multiple factors. For example, initial media treatments of an act of police violence

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are affected by the number of reporters involved, their gender, their sources, the types of news organizations to which they belong, and editorial traditions of those organizations. The degree of public arousal is influenced by such factors as racial and ethnic background of the victim, the quality of the act, and the various actors that become involved, from local politicians to senior officers and managers of the police department.

The process model mapped out by Ross has a high degree of specificity and sophistication. Its application to various instances of police violence has the potential to yield a deeper understanding of how and why specific acts elicit the attention that they do.

The proposed model is a heuristic advance, but the heart of this study is in the analysis of data. The book's important substantive contribution involves investigation of two case studies, one focusing on police violence in Toronto, the other on police violence in New York. Both studies warrant the careful attention of the reader. I found the Toronto study the most valuable. For one thing, Toronto's police department isn't one that is generally scrutinized in terms of its proclivities toward violence. Thus, readers, like myself, who have less familiarity with Toronto's department, might be surprised to learn that it has a history of violence, and that
police-community relations have often been strained by actions of its officers. Ross has a good deal of familiarity with the culture and politics of the city of Toronto, apparently having lived there for a period of time. Partly as a result, the list of interviewees is long, including not only newspaper reporters and editors, but also members of the city council, and even friends of those who were victims of police violence. These interviews give context and depth to the statistical side of the case study. The statistics that Ross includes are also useful, indicating status of the victim, perceptions of the case, and reactions of media, public officials, and citizens' organizations. The study of Toronto is thus well-conceived, incorporating multiple data sources and perspectives. The conclusion is somewhat unsettling, but perhaps not surprising. "Only when the public had incontrovertible evidence that police wrongdoing took place were the police motivated to change.... [R]eforms were, however, primarily in the area of internal controls (restraining) or directed at the individual officers who had engaged in the deviant actions (overreacting to a suspect's activities)" (p. 66).

The other case study involves New York City. New York has been more heavily scrutinized in both academic studies and the popular press. High profile incidents have often resulted in national media attention being directed at New York's police department. The methodology here employed is similar to that used in the Toronto case. Ross effectively draws upon a combination of quantitative and qualitative data sources, focusing on three specific incidents: the police shooting of Edmund Perry in June 1985, the South Ozone stun gun incident in May 1985, and the Tompkins Square "police riot" of August 1988. Combining statistical measures with contextual analysis of three events with highly distinctive characteristics allows for effective "triangulation"--the development of "converging lines of inquiry" (Yin 1994: 92). Ross concludes that in New York, as in Toronto, "the greatest changes in the police force that resulted as direct consequences of these three incidents were forced early retirement, transfers, retraining, and the laying of

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criminal charges against individual police officers, but with no appreciable changes made forcewide" (p. 100).

The New York incidents are carefully reviewed and worthy of analysis, but all took place before Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor, and Ross doesn't investigate more recent events, such as the Louima or Diallo incidents. Some attention to them would have added to the richness and timeliness of the study, but would probably not have led to a different conclusion. If anything, the actions of some members of the New York police department have become more controversial over the course of the last decade.

In the final part of the book, Ross looks into the wider implication of his study. Here he makes comparisons between Toronto and New York, and he summarizes his interpretations of the various kinds of data that he uses. His findings are not a cause for optimism. Summary of the quantitative findings yields the conclusion that "there is little police, community, or government reaction to the majority of police violence identified in this investigation" (p. 111). Likewise, his summary of the qualitative evidence suggests that only rarely do police departments respond to citizen complaints about police misconduct, and when they do, the focus tends to be on the actions of individual officers, with few changes to departmental procedures or oversight as a whole (p. 114-15). Most incidents of police violence gain
little media attention, and even when they do, there is a low level of response by public officials or managers in the departments.

In the end, "apathy" appears, in general, to be the public response to police violence, leading Ross to the conclusion that affected communities are "socialized into apathy because of previous failures when attempting to change the system" (p. 124). In this respect, responses to police violence mirror the wider political culture in the U.S., where low voting rates are evidence of broad swaths of disengaged publics. Often, moreover, those least likely to vote may also be those mostly like to be victims of police violence, further reinforcing a non-responsive system, which only takes notice when major violent disruptions, such a riots, occur.

I would recommend the book to scholars in the fields of criminology, comparative law, law and society, media studies, and journalism. Advanced undergraduates and graduate students will find it accessible. Ross's appendix on methodology should be of particular interest to scholars from multiple arenas of inquiry interested in pursuing case study approaches to the investigation of legal and political phenomena.

REFERENCES:

Pierce, H. Bruce. 1986. "Towards Police Brutality Reduction." BLACK SCHOLAR 17: 49-54.

Yin, Robert K. 1994. CASE STUDY RESEARCH: DESIGN AND METHODS. 2d ed. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

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Copyright 2002 by the author, Thomas C. Shevory.