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The article focuses on the relationship between city characteristics and racial violence in the U.S. Previous research examining the impact of city characteristics on racial violence has generally failed to support most commonly asserted hypotheses, and/or has not systematically treated complex theories requiring multivariate controls. These ambiguous findings strengthen earlier explanations which deemphasize intercity differences in the condition of blacks and attribute primary importance to societal determinants, notably institutionalized deprivation of blacks and white racism. Although the emphasis is perhaps warranted, it is easy to overemphasize deprivation and racism as societal causes when such factors can be conceptualized as varying by cities. An unresolved issue, which can only be verbally addressed in this paper, concerns qualitative variations in racial violence. Those incidents occurring early in this century were characterized by white attacks on blacks and set against the background of black competition in the white labor markets of the North.

The article presents a paper that addresses the ways in which black citizens from 15 large American cities broadly assess the performance of their local economies and municipal administrations. These findings about black perceptions are part of a much larger study using a rather unique set of data and reflect the critical impact of five aspects of institutional urban life--police practices, welfare policies, employment, retail merchandising, and public education. The initial purpose of the research was to detect critical political differences between "riot" and "non-riot" cities, a task which was aborted in the spring of 1968 when three of the five "non-riot" cities experienced some of the most severe civil disorders of the entire 1960's period. The findings indicate that it is possible to uncover connections between political regimes, the behavior of municipal delivery systems, and citizen responses of confidence or despair in local political regimes. The crucial point is that the actions of city officials and delivery system personnel have substantial consequences for local residents.