Repertoires of Control: Explaining Organizational Innovation and Change in US Protest Policing

Jennifer Earl, University of Arizona
Repertoires of Control: Explaining Organizational Innovation and Change in US Protest Policing

Abstract
The protest cycle in the late 1960s and early 1970s brought police and protesters into regular contact, and often, conflict. This conflict occurred as policing was going through a second wave of professionalism, as public trust of police was wavering, as claims of police brutality were rising, and as jurisprudence around First Amendment protections and the rights of criminal defendants were changing. These factors, among others, influenced how police developed new and reorganized existing protest control strategies to form a new repertoire of protest control. This new repertoire, which developed across the late 1960s and 1970s, resolved critical professional dilemmas, extended the on-going professionalization project of police, and responded to public criticism of police, all in the shadow of national and law enforcement about civil rights and racism. Specifically, in this chapter we introduce an overview of our arguments, which call into question dominant accounts of protest policing in this period. We draw on qualitative and quantitative data from police journals, among other data sources, from 1960-1980 to show that there is little evidence of transition the literature expects from escalated force to negotiated management, but instead substantial evidence that a repertoire of strategies was apparent even in the early 1960s, grew across the 1960s until innovation and vetting processes hit an inflection point in 1971, and then continued its reorganization, ultimately ending the 1970s with a reorganized repertoire of control that featured repositioned modular solutions and other new and/or repositioned specialized solutions. We show that foundational scholarship from science and technology studies can be used to shine a light on the processes driving these changes, including conflict over the problems policing faced related to protests, the support and opposition to different solutions from groups who held different social positions and statuses, and the ability of opportunists within policing to attach preexisting policing agendas to innovations in protest control. We suggest this case study serves as an example of the difficulties studies of organizational field change face when they fail to surface long lost competitors (what we call alternative blindness) and the solutions scholars can use to improve research on policing and organizational field change more generally.