ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates how scholars can use continuous freedom of information requests (FOIR) to better understand the policing of protests in the United States. FOIR refers to the process of accessing government data and records through open records law. I obtained documents from the Seattle Police Department over a two-year period to demonstrate how they contribute to two methods used to study social movements: protest event analysis and case studies. First, I compared police records of protests to protests covered in. I found that newspaper and police department coverage only overlapped on roughly 20 percent of protests. Therefore, the use of both data sources created a fuller accounting of protest occurrence in Seattle and allowed for the evaluation of biases in each source. Police documents also revealed unique accounts of protester tactics and policing strategies, which may be useful in constructing well-rounded case studies of social movements. While limitations exist, the integration of quantitative and qualitative details from FOIR data can contribute to a fuller sociological understanding of protest policing.
