The Discovery of Discourse; The Heroic Struggle of the Boston Minorities to belong among “Us” and not “Them”
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:category: research
:date: 2006-02-19T23:00:00
:tag: 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