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Modeling Repressive Policing: Computational Analysis of Protocols from the Israeli State Commission of Inquiry into the October 2000 Events

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2021

Renana Keydar Open the ORCID record for Renana Keydar [Opens in a new window] ,
Yael Litmanovitz ,
Badi Hasisi  and
Yoav Kan-Tor
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Abstract

This article addresses the gap between normative expectations of the right to protest in liberal democracies and the continued practice of repressive protest policing. The empirical literature has identified three types of factors explaining repressive policing: macro- or societal-level factors, meso-level factors relating to the police organization, and micro-level factors pertaining to specific events. Yet these factors provide only a fragmented understanding of the phenomenon. In this article, we put forward a novel three-tiered methodology of scaled reading, which is able to examine all these explanations together. We use scaled reading to analyze the protocols of the Or Commission of Inquiry, which investigated lethal clashes between the Israeli police and Israel’s Arab minority in October 2000. Through large-scale algorithmic topic modeling, we found that all types of empirical explanations of repressive policing co-exist within the October events. The mid-scale analysis revealed that no type of explanation exclusively belongs to a specific group of actors. The small-scale reading of the most representative documents for each topic demonstrated that this coexistence of mechanisms is also present within single testimonies. Together, our findings challenge existing empirical categories and illuminate repressive policing as a nonlinear, nonbinary, noncausal, and nonunitary phenomenon. These insights help make sense of the phenomenon’s persistence in deeply divided societies.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 47 , Issue 4 , November 2022 , pp. 1075 - 1105
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Bar Foundation

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Footnotes

*

Renana Keydar and Yael Litmanovitz contributed equally to this article.

The authors wish to thank the participants of the Empirical Studies in Public Law and Human Rights 2019 workshop at the Hebrew University, the speakers at the 2020 commemorative event marking twenty years to the October 2000 events, hosted by the Institute of Criminology at the Hebrew University, and our co-panelists at the 2021 Law and Society Association Annual Conference for their valuable comments and inspiring presentations. We thank Michael Livermore for his critical methodological guidance. The article benefited greatly from the institutional support of the Center for Interdisciplinary Data Science Research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, directed by Dafna Shahaf and Yuval Benjamini.

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