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+The Discovery of Discourse; The Heroic Struggle of the Boston Minorities to belong among “Us” and not “Them”
+############################################################################################################
+
+:category: research
+:date: 2006-02-19T23:00:00
+:tags: boston, murders, policing, criminology
+
+{abstract prepared for the Annual Meeting of the Law & Society
+Association}
+
+The dramatic decrease in murder rate in the City of Boston in the late
+1990s (so called “The Boston Miracle”) was explained by many researchers
+in many different ways and therefore seen as a result of many different
+actions of different actors. So, for example, `Winship (2002)`_
+explained The Boston Miracle as result of the cooperation between The
+Ten Point Coalition (a coalition of local mostly Black churches) and the
+authorities of the City of Boston (esp. police, social and youth
+services), where Black ministers functioned as the mediating factor
+which provided an “umbrella of legitimacy” for BPD strategies, which
+could otherwise be understood as the use of excessive force against the
+minority community. At the same time the ministers provided valuable
+information for the police about the most troublemaking elements in the
+minority community. This story has now returned to the predominant
+position in the press and media, because of the 2004-05 rise of the
+murder rate again to the highest level in the ten years.
+
+On the other hand, the project of police operation created by the team
+around the Harvard professors David Kennedy and Anthony Braga `(Braga,
+Kennedy, 2001)`_ was labelled by many others as the main cause of the
+successful crime prevention. And there are many other contenders (less
+influential and less visible ones) to claim the credit (for example, The
+Nation of Islam was credited by the local African-American community
+newspaper as the most influential factor in the decrease of crime). And
+of course, local politicians (whether African-American, Latino, or
+white) claimed their credit as well.
+
+In view of the number and persuasiveness of different theories
+explaining The Boston Miracle, I do not want to add yet another
+all-explaining theory, because I think that the whole success of the
+Bostonian anti-crime policy of the late 1990s has multiple causes which
+mutually enforced each other and lead to the final success. On the other
+hand, I would like to suggest one more point of view on the whole
+history which could conveniently bind together many of these
+explanations. Symbolic interactionism `(Blumer, 1969)`_ explains the
+development of self-understanding as a by-product of the interaction
+between different actors and in the same moment predicts that the
+expected behavior can be linked to the actor’s self-perception generated
+in the past interactions `(Mead, 1934)`_.
+
+The purpose of this research is to understand one particular aspect of
+this self-perception at the level of the community, and that is division
+into “Us” and “Them” between minority and majority actors. Analysis of
+the newspaper articles will be used to find out how much narrowing (or
+widening) of the gap between majority and the official establishment on
+the one side and minority communities on the other side made their
+mutual collaboration possible. Emphasis will be put on the relationship
+between long-term processes (as the redefinition of the community self
+is) and short-term consequences of changes during these processes.
+
+.. _`Winship (2002)`:
+    http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/winship/End_of_a_Miracle.pdf
+.. _`(Braga, Kennedy, 2001)`:
+    http://jrc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/38/3/195
+.. _`(Blumer, 1969)`:
+    http://worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/isbn/0520056760
+.. _`(Mead, 1934)`:
+    http://www.worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/ow/357fd970b6b590f8.html