Group 5. Research Proposal

Collective perception and coping with police violence in transcultural perspective:
cases of Israel and Russia
Group 5

Emotions are not random impulsive reactions. Emotions reflect ideas of good and evil formed by moral experience. Human emotions are a kind of "language" that might be relatively equally understood by a certain community. Emotions are a natural response that indicates whether a particular behavior is moral and appropriate in a given situation.
Emotions can be one of the causes of violence, but not always paramount. The main driving emotion in the case of violence is shame. Violence is usually provoked by one of three factors: fear of revealing a secret that causes shame, social rewards that override shame, and lacks feelings that inhibit the violent impulses that are stimulated by shame. In the case of police violence, we most often see the second situation, but we cannot exclude the last option. The researcher dealt with murder in her essay, but we can talk about violence in a broader sense.
Theodor Gerber and Sarah Mendelson also also add the term “predatory policing”. In their article, they focus primarily on the material aspect, drawing attention to the connection of the police with corruption schemes. In our study, we can develop this term by adding an emotional aspect, like obtaining positive emotions from police activities that go beyond their prescribed. Thus, the "predatory" portrait of the police will become more detailed.
Speaking about the predatory behavior of the police, it is worth talking about “legitimized  violence". This factor gives the police the opportunity to commit immoral acts with impunity. The so-called monopoly on violence - the state's ownership of such repressive institutions as the army and the police - leads to a situation in which some of the violence is not only not punished by law, but is also encouraged by law enforcement agencies and partially justified by the population. In the case of legitimate violence, the perpetrators often do not receive the punishment they deserve. In the same situation, two groups of people who commit the same violent acts (a gang of criminals and a police squad) receive a different reaction from society. The context of violence becomes important. In our study, based on the experience of predecessors, we want to identify emotional communities – groups of people united by common emotional reactions to the same events. We will also use a comparative method, to compare the emotional reactions of two different emotional communities.

In our research we decided to analyze emotions to police violence as a mechanism of collective coping in two different societies, Israeli and Russian. The transcultural perspective will allow us to examine how different political regimes and modes of legitimization of police violence affect its perception by direct victims of such violence and the whole society. We will focus on analyzing the media articles covering chosen cases of police violence (interviews with victims) and the comments of the wider public under these articles and in social networks. The latter part will allow us to make a cast of public reaction to the unfolding events and trace what feelings help the general public to cope with them.
For the Israeli case we choose Solomon Taka (18) murder by off duty police officer. Our choice was based on a wide media coverage of the case in the local Israeli media, including interviews with relatives and family, and affiliation to our theoretical frame: state's monopoly on violence and emotions as public moral checkpoints. Solomon Taka was shot dead by the off duty police officer during heated conversation between him, Solomon and couple of Solomon's friends. Officer threw a bullet near Solomon's feet while he was running in the opposite direction, parts of the bullet ricocheted from the ground and killed Solomon. Officer claimed to "feel endangered" during the conversation with the suspect, Solomon's family claimed for murder in cold blood and on racial basis. Solomon's death sparked riots across the country, ethiopian community was enraged, they demanded justice, truth and unbiased investigation of the murder. Claims about racial discrimination towards the Ethiopian community by the law authorities and Israeli society in general were raised. On those grounds we consider to add "African American Offending Theory" (Moize, 2022) to our methodological framework, the theory's main argument is "that most Afro-Americans share a worldview that the US is a racist society and that being Black matters, because the US is a racist state". It was first introduced by Unnever and Gabbidon in 2011 and it deals, mostly, with a quantitative media content analysis.
For the Russian case we choose recent “mobilization protests” that took place all over the country in September 2022. Citizens of numerous regions protested against the mobilization launched by the Russian government. Similarly to Israel, the protests had ethnic dimension due to the more harsh mobilization in national republics and stronger backlash from national activists and women. We are going to utilize works that analyze Russian context and the perception of police forces in Russia (for example see Gerber, Mendelssohn, 2008; Van der Vet, Lyytikäinen, 2015) to break down what feelings dominate in the interaction of Russians with the police.

References:
Gerber, T. P., & Mendelson, S. E. (2008). Public experiences of police violence and corruption in contemporary Russia: a case of predatory policing?. Law & society review, 42(1), 1-44.
Mozie, D. (2022). “They Killin’Us for No Reason”: Black Lives Matter, Police Brutality, and Hip-Hop Music—A Quantitative Content Analysis. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 99(3), 826-847.
Sheff, J. T. (2011).  Social-emotional origins of violence: a theory of multiple killing.Agression and violent behavior, 16(6), 453-460.
Unnever, J. D., & Gabbidon, S. L. (2011). A theory of African American offending: Race, racism, and crime. Taylor & Francis.
Van der Vet, F., & Lyytikäinen, L. (2015). Violence and human rights in Russia: how human rights defenders develop their tactics in the face of danger, 2005–2013. The International Journal of Human Rights, 19(7), 979–998.

Dear group 5, I like very much yours ideas and the level of progress already. My suggestion is to elaborate more Russian empirical case (not very clear for now how to compare the protests and a very concrete racialilized violent Israeli act), to think about the possible dimensions of comparison (what contexts are important for differneces in emotional communities and how to analyse the differences of empirical cases - or similarities) and to theorize more critically on category of "shame", which is considered by Scheff and many others as the main background of violence

I agree with Anna - well done overall. I would also suggest to select a more specific empirical case for the Russian side (off the top of my head, confrontations between protesters and the police in Dagestan - but you might have better ideas). I am also not quite sure who is included in the emotional communities that you study - is it only the victims of police violence? Their friends and relatives? Certain ethnic communities at large? Then, how would you deal with a hypothetical situation when you discover not common, but diverging emotional reactions to police violence within the same community?

Great topic indeed! I agree with the suggestions of Anna and Pavel.
At this moments two parts of the proposal seem as separate, think about a better connection between the theory and empirical cases. The idea of shame as a base of violence or specifically police violence is interesting but not obvious (how about anger, hate, disgust?) and there is a need to explain it more. I would also suggest that in case of police violence BOUNDARIES - cultural, race, ethnic, class - are important, that's also why theories of RACE relations are so used to explain it. In Israeli and Russian case the boundaries will be different even if you take a "black Israeli" and protests in Dagestan, I am not sure you need to search for equivalence in hierarchy and distance, it will be a bit false. Instead of this you can work thought difference between the manifestations of violence and the emotional expressions involved in it (you take the reactions to it as well? maybe it is too much already). think about how the different circles of inclusion and exclusion of the objects of violence, boundaries and hierarchies between them and the police play role in these manifestations. There is also a French scholar who work on these issues - https://www.sciencespo.fr/ceri/cerispire-user/7220/0