Patrick F. Gillham

Strategic Incapacitation and the Policing of Occupy Wall Street in New York City, 2011

The US national response to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks accelerated the adoption and refinement of a new repertoire of protest policing we call ‘strategic incapacitation’ now employed by law enforcement agencies nationwide to police protest demonstrations. The occupation movement which formally began 17 September 2011 was the most significant social movement to utilise transgressive protest tactics in the United States in the last 40 years and posed a substantial challenge to law enforcement agencies. This research seeks to better understand the implementation of strategic incapacitation tactics through a detailed analysis of the policing of the first 2 months of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests in New York City. Original data for this study are derived from 2-week-long field observations made in New York City during the first and second month anniversaries of the OWS occupation in Zuccotti Park. These are supplemented by activist interviews, activist accounts posted on OWS websites, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds as well as news reports, official police documents, press releases and interviews with legal observers.

Whose Streets? Police and Protester Struggles over Space in Washington, DC, 29–30 September 2001

Over the weekend of 29–30 September 2001, approximately 20,000 people participated in anti-war protests in Washington, DC. Based on firsthand observations and interviews with police officials, we analyzed the response of the Metro DC police (MPDC) to three separate protests that weekend, including those sponsored by the Anti-Capitalist Convergence (ACC), the International Action Center (IAC) and the Washington Peace Center (WPC). Our observations illustrate how the MPDCs efforts to control the space in which the respective protests occurred varied across demonstrations. The MPDC tightly controlled the space in which transgressive groups (ACC) demonstrated, but were much more lenient with contained groups (WPC, IAC). We relate the MPDC tactics to changes in the policing of protests since the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle and highlight police tactics such as the partitioning of space, the rearranging of protesters, and the use of less-lethal weapons.

Participation in the Environmental Movement Analysis of the European Union

The article establishes which determinants contribute to involvement in the European environmental movement, whether participants in the movement are unique from participants in other new social movements (NSMs), and the effects of biographical availability and national social structure on environmental activism. Relevant questions include the way values, education and income, family responsibilities, national economic development and population density influence differential participation in the movement across nations. This study relies on data from Eurobarometer 25, a biannual questionnaire administered across 12 European Union nations to examine the influence of individual factors, and data from Eurostat to test the influence of national social structural factors on participation. Participation is measured by whether respondents contributed money to environmental organizations and/or participated in environmental associations, local restoration projects or demonstrations to protect the environment. Logistic regression is utilized to test hypotheses about the relationship to participation. The findings suggest that environmental activism is influenced primarily by postmaterialist values and beliefs, higher education and income, and living in nations with lower levels of poverty, unemployment and agricultural employment and greater population density. This study contradicts previous findings on the importance of biographical availability. Participants in the Western European environmental movement are similar to and different from participants in other NSMs. Ironically, those benefiting most from industrialization and its corresponding environmental impacts are more likely to engage in environmental activism.

Analyzing the impact of social media on social movements: a computational study on Twitter and the occupy wall street movement

The extensive use of digital social media by social movement actors is an emerging trend that restructures the communication dynamics of social protest, and it is widely credited with contributing to the successful mobilizations of recent movements (e.g., Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street). Yet, our understanding of both the roles played by social movements use of social media and the extent of its impact is largely derived from anecdotal evidence, news reports, and a thin body of scholarly research on Web-based technologies. In this research we explore several computational methods for measuring the impact of social media on a social movement. Inspired by methodologies originally developed for analyzing computer networks and other dynamic systems, these methods measure various static and dynamic aspects of social networks, and their relations to an underlying social movement. We demonstrated the feasibility and benefits of these measurement methods in the context of Twitter and the Occupying Wall Street movement (OWS). By analyzing tweets related to OWS, we demonstrated the link between the vitality of the movement and the volume of the related tweets over time. We show that there is a positive correlation between the dynamic of tweets and the short-term trend of OWS. The correlation makes it possible to forecast the short-term trend of a social movement using social media data. By ranking users based on the number of their OWS-related tweets and the durations of their tweeting, we are able to identify “buzz makers”. Using a strategy similar to the page-rank algorithm, we define the influence of a user by the number of re-tweets that his/her original tweets incite. By tracing where OWS-related tweets are generated, we measure the geographic diffusion of OWS. By analyzing the percentage of OWS tweets generated from different sources, we show that smart phones and applications such as tweet deck had been used extensively for tweeting in the OWS movement. This indicates the involvement of a younger and more technology-inclined generation in OWS.