TURN-TAKING AND TURNING POINTS IN VIOLENT ENCOUNTERS. TOWARDS AN EXPLANATORY THEORY OF HOW CONFLICTS IN URBAN PUBLIC SPACE BEGIN, TRANSFORM AND END

Introduction

Although violent police-civilian and civilian-civilian encounters constitute a tiny sliver of the social interactions that take place each day, their consequences can be far-reaching. Images of assailants committing bestial violence against vulnerable victims arouse public fear and indignation, while the excessive use of force by police undermines public trust, cooperation, and the rule of law in democratic societies.

The Meaning of Violence

Depicting such violence as senseless obscures the fact that violent action has meaning to the assailants. Based on the granular analysis of 126 publicly available phone camera recordings of real-life interpersonal conflicts in Paris, London, and Berlin, the research program will advance an empirically grounded theory that explains how non-violent altercations between strangers in public space develop into encounters in which physical violence is the dominant mode of interacting, especially one-sided violence against vulnerable/subdued victims.

Scientific Contributions

The program breaks new scientific ground by:

1. Showing that episodes of interpersonal conflict can be causally explained by understanding how the antagonists and their audiences (co-present peers, colleague police officers, unknown bystanders) structure their interactions in culturally meaningful ways.
2. Analyzing how slurs, insults, and provocations pertaining to race, ethnicity, class, gender, and age, as well as differences in policing practices, influenced the trajectories of civilian-civilian and police-civilian conflicts.
3. Developing the methods of ethnomethodological/conversation analysis to transcribe and analyze in meticulous detail how sequences of bodily actions and verbal utterances become turning points towards the beginning, transformation, and ending of violence.
4. Advancing the scientific use of now ubiquitous phone camera data.