Download or read book Exploring Urban Unrest in American Cities Through the Lens of Focusing Events and Social Science Theory written by David Patrick Karas and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, cities across America have experienced critical, high-profile incidents involving law enforcement, particularly police-involved shootings and the deaths of civilians while in police custody. In some urban communities, demonstrations and sometimes violent unrest have come in the wake of such incidents, prompting concern among urban leaders throughout the country. This study explores focusing events involving law enforcement that occurred in 2015 in four cities - North Charleston, South Carolina; Baltimore, Maryland; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Wilmington, Delaware - with a focus on the social and community characteristics in those cities. In addition to exploring the focusing events and responses in each of the communities, this study involved administering a questionnaire to well-informed individuals in each city representing a range of vantage points. This research is premised on social cohesion and its constituent and related dimensions, employing a set of ten theories and concepts from which questionnaire items were derived. The objective was to explore the characteristics in each community and to assess which factors shape how urban communities respond to focusing events involving law enforcement, as well as which theories and concepts provide insights in this regard. Findings from the 67 study participants revealed largely disconnected, stratified communities with generally weak levels of social capital and cohesion, and illustrated the importance of scale when assessing such factors at the urban level. Several theories and concepts - namely civic capacity and engagement, place attachment and identity, and equity - were found to offer the most assistance in explaining the response of the four communities to the focusing events. This study's analysis also included considerations of social media and the construct of a tipping point, which serve to explain some of the findings. Research findings and conclusions were leveraged to create an assessment strategy, a set of questions offered for urban leaders to take stock of social and community characteristics in their communities. The value of this endeavor lies in the unique application of these theories and concepts to a contemporary urban phenomenon, and the posing of questions to provide support to community leaders seeking to understand how their community might respond to a focusing event involving law enforcement.