Public Order Policing Research Articles

'We will facilitate your protest': Experiments with Liaison Policing

This article explores innovations in public order policing during Edinburgh’s Nato Parliamentary Assembly protests of 2009. When masked anarchist protesters gathered to ‘Smash Nato’, they were met by three plainclothes police negotiators rather than a line of public order officers. This article reflects on their attempts to interact with protestors and minimize disorder while ‘facilitating lawful protest’. We welcome the shift in attitudes and approach towards political protest, and draw on our observation of Nato and the 2010 Climate Camp to consider the efficacy of liaison policing tactics and the lessons to be learned.

Crowd Flight in Response to Police Dispersal Techniques: A Momentary Lapse of Reason?

AbstractThere has been much debate about the use of certain public order policing tactics in Britain in response to the disorder seen in recent years. This paper explored the use of an indiscriminate public order tactic that has received comparatively less attention, that of crowd dispersal techniques. More specifically, the use of police charges (either by mounted police or on foot) and subsequent collective flight was investigated. An interview study was conducted with 20 participants who experienced such charges at protests in English cities. Thematic analysis of the data found that although participants reported fear and initial crowd scattering, these instinctive responses were quickly replaced by more socialised reactions, such as co‐operation with others and an increased sense of collective unity. Furthermore, participants reported greater determination to resist what were considered as illegitimate attacks by the police. This increased collective unity was explained in terms of a shared sense of experience that was similar to that found in previous crowd behaviour research. It was concluded that rather than fragmenting crowds, the tactic of crowd dispersal can unite previously heterogeneous groups to resist further police charges and so may be counter‐productive as a public order policing strategy. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Giuliani in Izmir: Restructuring of the Izmir Public Order Police and Criminalization of the Urban Poor

This paper examines the recent restructuring of the Izmir Public Order Police, launched in 2006 to address the rise in urban crime in Izmir, Turkey. Transforming itself into a professionalized and effective organization against ‘criminals’ and claiming to institute a proactive policing strategy, the Izmir police have expanded their control over the urban space, while specifically targeting the poor segments and populations in the city, and carefully distinguishing them from the ‘respectable’ and ‘innocent’ citizens. The paper details the elements of the new policing in Izmir and demonstrates that it has rested on profiling and criminalization of the ethno-racially differentiated urban poor populations, especially Kurdish migrants. The new policing in Izmir, the paper argues, is not an isolated case but an example of the neoliberal transformations around the globe, where regulation and management of urban poor populations are increasingly relegated to the penal rather than the social state.

Total policing: reflections from the frontline

Drawing on discussions at a symposium in June 2012, on ‘Policing communities: race, class and the state’ (organised by the Institute of Race Relations and the Power, Conflict and Justice Research Group, Edge Hill University, in conjunction with the Tottenham Defence Campaign), the author reflects on public order policing, past and present, and traces the ways in which strategies used in Northern Ireland were and are transferred to Britain, especially in relation to black and minority ethnic communities. She draws attention to the ways in which emergency anti-terror legislation and numerous new laws further criminalise and control poor and marginalised communities today. It is only through showing solidarity that a new ‘frontline’ can be established to protect those communities no longer policed ‘by consent’, but ‘by enforcement’. Further analysis on the implications of policing following the Good Friday Agreement is presented by Daniel Holder in his commentary, ‘Police accountability, the Irish peace process and the continuing challenge of secrecy’, in this issue.

Reforming the Policing of Public Order in Sweden: Combining Research and Practice

Following disturbances during the EU summit in Gothenburg in 2001, the Swedish police adopted a new concept, called special police tactics, for the policing of public order. In 2006, the Swedish National Police Board decided to start a 3-year project to develop a long term strategy for knowledge development with regard to these tactics, integrating research, training, and practice. This article reports on the set up and results of this reform project. Changes in the planning, carrying out and evaluation of police operations at major events were observed. The project provided a theoretical foundation for the special police tactics and a practical evaluation method for continuous knowledge development. The project methodology contributed to a developmental climate in the special police tactics organization. The project work also reinforced the basis for public order policing of crowds, to contribute to uphold- ing consitutional rights of assembly and freedom of speech.

Facilitating ineffective protest? The policing of the 2009 Edinburgh NATO protests

This paper reports on innovations in public order policing during the protests surrounding the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) Parliamentary Assembly in Edinburgh, November 2009. When masked anarchist protesters determined to ‘smash NATO’ gathered on the streets on the first morning of the Assembly, they were initially confronted by three plainclothes police negotiators rather than a line of riot police. In this paper, we draw on empirical data to offer an analysis of these developments and gauge the extent to which they meet the stated intentions of the police to ‘facilitate lawful protest’. Whilst welcoming the shift in attitudes and approach towards political protest, we argue that the accent on facilitation in this operation ultimately appeared neither innovative nor effective in practice and frequently reverted to styles of policing designed to contain protest.

Post G20: The Challenge of Change, Implementing Evidence‐based Public Order Policing

AbstractIn the wake of the 2011 ‘riots’, public order policing tactics in England and Wales have once again been brought into question. Yet, the riots came two years since police regulatory authorities in the UK called for fundamental reforms to the policing of public order. Questions are raised about why the change called for appears to have been so slow and what can be done to assist reform. This paper suggests that developing an evidence‐based policing approach within the field of public order policing to inform police decision‐making would provide the answers. By doing so, the paper addresses some of the possible barriers to implementing evidence‐based policing in public order and calls for police academic partnership to overcome these to make ‘change’ an ongoing reality. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Dialogue Police, Decision Making, and the Management of Public Order During Protest Crowd Events

AbstractFollowing the major riots within England in August 2011, the efficacy of public order police decision making was brought into a sharp focus. None the less, the reform of this mode of policing within the UK was already underway with a strong emphasis upon policing through consent and the need to facilitate peaceful protest through dialogue and communication. This paper reports upon a critical ‘test case’ for this ‘new approach’ by analysing the policing of a series of protests against Government policy across 3 days that surrounded a Government party conference in Sheffield, a large city in the north of England. This paper draws out lessons to be learned from what proved to be a highly successful dialogue‐based approach to policing protests. We contend that dialogue and liaison were effective because they allowed for an ongoing dynamic risk assessment that improved command‐level decision making and enhanced police proportionality. The subsequent impact upon crowd dynamics allowed for an improved capacity for proactive public order management, encouraged ‘self‐regulation’ in the crowd, and avoided the unnecessary police use of force at moments of tension. The implications of the analysis for theory and practice are discussed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Policing Civil Disobedience

Civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious infringement of law carried out to express opposition to law and policy. The normative literature provides thorough treatments of several key issues related to the post-arrest treatment of civilly disobedient citizens, such as the propriety of imposing various types of legal sanction. An important issue that has received rather less consideration, though, is the matter of how police forces should react to civil disobedience prior to and during its commission. This article aims to encourage reflection on this issue by sketching a normative framework to orientate moral evaluation of the ways in which liberal democratic societies police civilly disobedient protest. The central argument is that the police should, wherever possible, adopt a strategy of ‘negotiated accommodation’ towards civil disobedience. The core requirement of this strategy is that police officers should attempt to engage in dialogue with protest groups before or during their civil disobedience actions. This dialogue must be underpinned by a conscientious and sincere commitment on the part of officers to balance the traditional goals of public order policing with the good of accommodating civil disobedience. The article contrasts the idea of negotiated accommodation with alternative strategies for policing civil disobedience, illustrates its practical implications through considering various examples, and defends it against important objections.

Public Order Events in the Headlines: The Media Construction of Threat and Dangerousness of Public Order Events in Israel

This paper examines the role of levels of threat on the newspaper coverage of public order policing. We distinguished between macro/national and micro/local types of protest involving the Arab minority in Israel, and tried to illustrate how threat was constructed differently by the media. Following the protest paradigm and the threat hypothesis, we focused on the newspaper construction of the threat of two violent public order events in which police used live ammunition against members of the Israeli Arab minority: the October 2000 events (macro) and the Pki'in 2007 event (micro). Our analysis shows that the newspapers highly emphasised the perceived threat of the October 2000 events — much more than in the Pki'in 2007 event. Furthermore, in the October 2000 events the coverage was mainly episodic and profiled the Israeli Arab protesters as ‘an enemy within’, while in the Pki'in 2007 event, reporting was more thematic and contextualised the protest within the social problems of the Druze minority in Israel society. The fact that the Israeli Arab minority is perceived by the State as a dissident minority (‘the enemy within’), whilst the Druze Arabs are not, influenced the way public order events were covered by the media.

Public order policing in South Yorkshire, 1984–2011: the case for a permissive approach to crowd control

The Metropolitan Police Service's handling of the anti-G20 demonstration on 1 April 2009 attracted widespread public criticism and indignation. Mass media coverage of the event emphasised how police officers had reacted to protesters in a sometimes violent and allegedly indiscriminate manner, and had resorted to the now familiar and controversial tactic of ‘kettling’ demonstrators into a confined space before detaining them for several hours. Media reports initially echoed police briefings in disclosing that the death of a male passer-by, unintentionally caught up in the event, was due to natural causes. Video footage of the incident subsequently contradicted this account, suggesting that the fatality resulted from an unprovoked attack by a police officer. Reports prepared by Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary have since called on the police to adopt a more permissive approach to managing political protest, predicated on a commitment to facilitating the right to protest. This paper lends weight to arguments in favour of such an approach by highlighting the experience during the last 28 years of South Yorkshire Police, a force which has not only revised its practical and philosophical approach to handling public dissent, but also developed a more open attitude in its dealings with the media in a bid to restore public confidence and staff morale, following nationwide controversy around the Orgreave mass picket of 1984 and the Hillsborough stadium tragedy of 1989.

State of Vulnerability and Humanitarian Visibility on the Verge of Sudan’s Secession: Lubna’s Pants and the Transnational Politics of Rights and Dissent

The case of Lubna Al-Hussein, dubbed “the pants journalist,” who was sentenced to flogging after an arrest by public-order police in Sudan, in July 2009, became one of the most widely reported narratives about the subordination of Muslim women in the world. Her case mobilized human rights advocates, politicians, and diplomats to contest discrimination against Sudanese women and to shame the government of Sudan. In this article, I show that beyond media sensationalism and the logic of saving and shaming that characterizes human rights practices exists a feminist opposition politics concerned with equal citizenship rights and invested in protesting both local and global hegemonies and oppressions. I argue that Lubna’s pants served as a symbolic site for competing visions about morality and freedom. One vision represents a transnational hegemony anchored in a neoliberal moral ethos and in discursive practices of universal humanitarianism and human rights, and the other represents a translocal political order grounded in religiosity and bodily containment. Both visions, however, render women’s struggles visible on exclusionary moral terms. I suggest that Lubna’s transnational visibility be situated in a critical historical moment, a state of vulnerability and moral panic that characterizes the present location of Sudan in the global political map. At this historical juncture, feminist politics lend legitimacy to Sudanese translocal dissent politics and highlight women’s multiple alliances and the competing hegemonies that constrain their political struggle.

Massacre by the Book: Amritsar and the Rules of Public-Order Policing in Britain and India

In the immediate aftermath of the 1919 killings at Amritsar, where British forces commanded by Reginald Dyer gunned down hundreds of unarmed Indians at an illegal demonstration, debate centered on whether Dyer's actions were typical or atypical of British behavior in India. While British commentators generally regarded this violence as aberrant and ‘un-British,’ Indian nationalists and some British observers saw the killings as merely an unusually naked manifestation of the generalized violence of British imperialism. This article offers a re-examination of the Amritsar killings by placing Dyer's behaviour within the context of the rules governing public-order policing in both India and Britain. While broadly agreeing that the killings were part of a pattern of state violence in British India, it argues that the killings were not carried out in opposition to the rule of law but were, in fact, authorized by the law. In both Britain and India, the rules of public-order policing gave police and military commanders the power to use deadly force in dispersing crowds and by remaining deliberately vague about when such force should be used. The restraint of state violence in Britain came about through the vigilance of the press and Parliament, but in India state violence against large crowds was much more common due to fewer external checks. The killings at Amritsar did not violate the rule of law, therefore, but they did expose a profound difference between Britain and India in how that law was enacted.

The Role of Crowd Theory in Determining the Use of Force in Public Order Policing

The Role of Crowd Theory in Determining the Use of Force in Public Order Policing

Intelligent Control: Developments in Public Order Policing in Canada

Intelligent Control: Developments in Public Order Policing in Canada

We Predict a Riot?: Public Order Policing, New Media Environments and the Rise of the Citizen Journalist

This article explores the rise of ‘citizen journalism’ and considers its implications for the policing and news media reporting of public protests in the twenty-first century. Our research focuses on the use and impact of multi-media technologies during the 2009 G20 Summit Protests in London and evaluates their role in shaping the subsequent representation of ‘protest as news’. The classic concepts of ‘inferential structure’ (Lang and Lang 1955) and ‘hierarchy of credibility’ (Becker 1967) are re-situated within the context of the 24–7 news mediasphere to analyse the transition in news media focus at G20 from ‘protester violence’ to ‘police violence’. This transition is understood in terms of three key issues: the capacity of technologically empowered citizen journalists to produce information that challenges the ‘official’ version of events; the inclination of professional and citizen journalists to actively seek out and use that information; and the existence of an information-communications marketplace that sustains the commodification and mass consumption of adversarial, anti-establishment news.

The role of crowd theory in determining the use of force in public order policing

Social psychological research suggests that where police hold a theoretical view of the crowd in line with the ‘classic’ crowd psychology of Gustavé Le Bon this can lead to police practices that inadvertently escalate public disorder. This research reflects debates within the criminology literature which suggests that a primary factor governing police tactics is police knowledge. However, the existing research on the specific relationships between police theoretical knowledge of crowds and their practice towards them is limited by its reliance on post hoc data. This paper addresses this limitation by examining the role of police theoretical view of crowd psychology and their operational practice during a high risk football crowd event. The analysis supports the argument that when the police hold a view of the crowd as inherently irrational and dangerous they rely upon tactics of mass containment and dispersal. This study advances the literature by suggesting that this ‘classic’ theoretical view of the crowd is leading to missed opportunities for the police to develop more efficient, effective and less confrontational approaches to the management of public order during crowd events.

Crowd psychology, public order police training and the policing of football crowds

PurposeThis study seeks to examine what theory of crowd psychology is being applied within public order police training in England and Wales and what accounts of crowds, police strategies and tactics subsequently emerge among officers who undertake this training.Design/methodology/approachThe study uses a multi‐method approach including observations of public order training courses, interviews with students and instructors, and the dissemination of questionnaires.FindingsThe analysis suggests that a form of crowd theory associated with the work of Gustave Le Bon has become institutionalised within police training. This in turn is leading to a potentially counter‐productive reliance on the undifferentiated use of force when policing crowds.Practical implicationsThe study illustrates that such training outcomes not only are counter to the recent developments in evidence, theory and policy but also undermine the police's ability to develop more efficient and effective approaches to policing crowds.Originality/valueThe study provides a systematic review of public order training which demonstrates how crowd theory is used as a rationale and justification for the use of tactics based on undifferentiated force. It makes suggestions for improving police training so that updates in policy and theory can be translated into operational practice.

Intelligent Control: Developments in Public Order Policing in Canada by WILLEM DE LINT and ALAN HALL

Intelligent Control: Developments in Public Order Policing in Canada by WILLEM DE LINT and ALAN HALL

Willem de Lint and Alan Hall Intelligent Control: Developments in Public Order Policing in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009, 365 p.

Willem de Lint and Alan Hall Intelligent Control: Developments in Public Order Policing in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009, 365 p.