Public Order Policing Research Articles

We need a complicit police! Political policing then and now

South Africa is witnessing a build-up of cases of public order policing gone wrong, in fact deadly wrong. Even the police are willing to admit that something is amiss. Yet the police response is a short-sighted one, which places the responsibility for the eruption of violence squarely with the people protesting, and underestimates its own role in aggravating the situation. I argue here that if the police wish to break the patterns of their long history of protecting a government and its partisan interests, and do not want to be misunderstood in their intention to serve the people, then simply increasing the capacity of public order policing will not help. On the contrary, we might end up (again) with a permanent occupying army. Instead the police have to become more explicitly partisan towards the citizens they serve, and help deliver the message inherent in each protest.

Policing football ‘risk’? A participant action research case study of a liaison-based approach to ‘public order’

ABSTRACTThis paper reports upon the first formal academic analysis of the deployment of a dialogue based and explicitly non-coercive ‘Police Liaison Team’ (PLT) within the public order policing operation surrounding a football fixture. The study uses an approach based upon Participant Action Research to first generate changes to operational practices and then to analyse the consequences of these changes upon the dynamics of the event and of the public order policing operation itself. Data is drawn from multiple sources including direct observation and post event focus groups. It is argued that the PLT played an important role in terms of enhancing police capacity for dialogue and communication with ‘risk’ fans, adding depth and quality to risk assessment as well as assisting in the avoidance of ‘disorder’ and police coercion. Problems were identified in terms of strategy, inappropriate deployment of the resource by police commanders and resistance to change among police staff. The implication of the study for understanding ‘risk’ is discussed along with the role of PLTs in helping to achieve proportionality and efficiency in the policing of football.

The use and abuse of police data in protest analysis South Africa's Incident Registration Information System (IRIS)

South Africa’s Incident Registration Information System (IRIS) is a comprehensive, computerised database maintained by the South African Police Service (SAPS). In principle, it records all public order policing activity including all crowd incidents. While IRIS data is, potentially, a unique source for protest event analysis, considerable care is required. We aim to correct misunderstandings about the data advanced by academics and in the media, and expose its misuse by police chiefs and politicians. In particular, the incidents that IRIS reports are not protests, though protests can be found in the raw data. This article is based, in part, on records of 156,230 incidents covering the period 1997-2013.

Palgrave Dictionary of Public Order Policing, Protest and Political Violence

Palgrave Dictionary of Public Order Policing, Protest and Political Violence

Unchanging public order policing in changing times in East Africa

ABSTRACTThis article offers a political analysis of the practices and motives of public order policing in Ethiopia and Uganda. It offers an explanation of the continuation of forceful tactics against political protest in a context of changing methods of information gathering, organisation and mobilisation by urban activists resulting from their access to internet and communication technology. It finds the two regimes, as anocracies, are caught between legally allowing protest and yet, conscious of their fragility, determined to crush opposition. For the latter approach, their militarist leaderships rely heavily on continued police violence. The paper concludes that failure of the police to adapt their public order policing to the new protest environment leaves them increasingly ineffective and unpopular. It is likely to provoke an escalation of violence and may both undermine the legitimacy of their regimes and reverse their attempts to open political space that justified their rebellions against former autocracies.

South Africa: Exploding with Rage, Imploding with Self-Doubt—but Exuding Socialist Potential

The fast-reviving South African left is urgently coming to grips with the most acute national crises of structure and agency the country has experienced since the historic freeing of Nelson Mandela in February 1990 and the shift of the entire body politic in favor of the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP).… The subsequent rise in unemployment, inequality, poverty, and environmental degradation soon reached some of the worst levels in the contemporary world. The consequent social unrest is now so high that President Jacob Zuma…promised increased "public order policing" personnel and the purchase of a new generation of technologically advanced weapons, including sonar canons…. In this conflagration, what survived of the left is now growing by leaps and bounds. Within a decade, it may become a force capable of an electoral challenge to the ANC for state power. But much will depend upon how it regroups amidst shards of splintered radical projects, with myriad questions hotly debated in the movement.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-2" title="Vol. 67, No. 2: June 2015" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Peter Joyce, Neil Wain, Palgrave Dictionary of Public Order Policing, Protest and Political Violence

Ce dictionnaire est consacre au maintien de l’ordre et a la gestion policiere des actions protestataires et de la violence politique. Il prend en compte la nature et les specificites des actions protestataires et de la violence politique pour mettre en lumiere ensuite les differentes manieres de maintenir l’ordre. Le dictionnaire consacre une place importante aux methodes et aux pratiques policieres dans l’encadrement des actions protestataires. D’une part, la police specialisee dans la gesti...

Governance and Virtue: The Case of Public Order Policing

For Aristotle, virtues are neither transcendent nor universal, but socially interdependent; they need to be understood chronologically and with respect to character and context. This paper uses an Aristotelian lens to analyse an especially interesting context in which to study virtue—the state’s response when social order breaks down. During such periods, questions relating to right action by citizens, the state, and state agents are pronounced. To study this, we analyse data from interviews, observation, and documents gathered during a 3-year study of riot policing in the U.K. In doing so, we contribute by joining a number of other conversations within JBE, suggesting detailed empirical examination of this context is useful in opening up considerations relevant to ‘virtue’ elsewhere. This extreme context helps us raise interesting and empirically informed questions that can encourage future theoretical and empirical contributions to virtue in business ethics. One such question is on the role of habituation in virtue, which is not just the inculcation of a reflex or automaticity, but can also refer to a trained and developed tendency to behave in the right way, for the right reasons, at the right time. Whilst we stop short of a simplistic alignment of habituation and virtue, we show ways in which it can inform understanding of both courage and phronēsis.

We need a complicit police!: Political policing then and now

South Africa is witnessing a build-up of cases of public order policing gone wrong, in fact deadly wrong. Even the police are willing to admit that something is amiss. Yet the police response is a short-sighted one, which places the responsibility for the eruption of violence squarely with the people protesting, and underestimates its own role in aggravating the situation. I argue here that if the police wish to break the patterns of their long history of protecting a government and its partisan interests, and do not want to be misunderstood in their intention to serve the people, then simply increasing the capacity of public order policing will not help. On the contrary, we might end up (again) with a permanent occupying army. Instead the police have to become more explicitly partisan towards the citizens they serve, and help deliver the message inherent in each protest.

Forgoing primacy: damaging democratic policing in the West Bank

Since the Oslo Accords were signed between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in September 1993, the international community has supported civil policing programmes. It has done so as part of its development commitments to Palestinian state-building. Such programmes were, until the outbreak of the second Intifada in 2000, largely regarded as successful in terms of supporting the establishment of a Palestinian civil police (PCP). Such programmes were essentially Western imported models which loosely mixed community and public order policing approaches. With re-engagement in the Palestinian security sector (PSS) in the West Bank in 2007, the international community has once again sought to play a major role in PSS reform. This role includes supporting rehabilitation and retraining of the PCP as a principal institution of state-building. Such activities alongside the so-called transformation efforts within the wider realm of the PSS have re-established as their goal law and order. Within the transformation agenda, there are inherent demands with respect to Israel and the Palestinian National Authority's security and counterterrorism agendas. This analysis examines these activities, and accompanying political intent to contend that such approaches are undermining principles of democratic policing including civil police primacy (CPP). CPP reinforces police universality and means supporting rule of law by putting security under governmental control with proper mechanisms of accountability. This article argues that support to the security sector in the West Bank has increasingly only paid lip service or sought to subvert normative approaches to democratic policing.

Intelligence gathering and the need for control: managing risk in public order policing

When policing public order, the police are asked to consider and protect the democratic and human rights to assemble in public and to express our political opinions. The police are also tasked with preventing or managing disorder. The tension between these competing duties affects how the police react to public order situations and contributes to their noted desire to maintain as much control as possible over their often precarious working environment (Waddington, 1994).

Vinod Kumar, T. K. Public Events and Police Response: Understanding Public Order Policing in Democratic India

Vinod Kumar, T. K. Public Events and Police Response: Understanding Public Order Policing in Democratic India

Pacification and Indigenous Struggles in Canada

Front-line police operations are deeply entwined with less visible activities – or practices not commonly identified as policing – that are carried out by a wide range of participants as strategies of settler-colonial pacification operating through the organizing logics of security and liberal legalism. Using open source texts and records obtained through access to information requests, this article unmaps some of the contemporary strategies employed by Canadian institutions to pacify Indigenous resistance. As a contribution to the body of work seeking to develop the politics of anti-security, the analysis disrupts the binary categories that animate security logic by examining the public order policing approach of the Ontario Provincial Police, the framing of Indigenous resistance as a security threat, and the integral role of Indian Affairs in securing the settler-state.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: ‘Securitizing America: Strategic Incapacitation and the Policing of Protest Since the 11 September 2011 Terrorist attacks’

Teaching and Learning Guide for: ‘Securitizing America: Strategic Incapacitation and the Policing of Protest Since the 11 September 2011 Terrorist attacks’

Women Police Officers in Hong Kong: Femininity and Policing in a Gendered Organization

Police work is considered to be a masculine, male-dominated occupation, where studies show that women officers generally tend to play a complementary role. This paper examines how femininity has been articulated in the Hong Kong Police (HKP), which was first established in 1844 and recruited its first female officer in 1949. Early female recruits in the HKP were initially confined to supporting duties, and differential arrangements for male and female officers were commonplace. However, the turning point appeared to have come during the 1967 riots, when a number of female officers took up front-line positions for the first time. After that female officers began to receive training in public order policing, carry firearms, and are today regularly deployed to the front line. Does this development indicate an increasingly inclusive and gender-neutral HKP? Through analysis of documentary and archival materials and in-depth interviews with 13 female police officers who variously served between the 1950s and the present, and using the gendered organization perspective as our framework, we examine the perceived qualities of femininity associated with female officers in the HKP, and discuss whether the changing roles of female officers indicate a more inclusive and gender-neutral police force.

The Ambiguous Role of the Popular, Society and Public Order Police in Sudan, 1983–2011

This article addresses a number of obscurities surrounding the role of the various Sudanese police units often referred to as the ‘religious police’ or ‘morality police’. These include the Popular Police, Society Police and Public Order Police. Although these units have often been analysed as agents of ‘Arabization’, ‘Islamization’ and the cultural domination of peripheral groups by the hegemonic northern riverain faction within the state, this article focuses instead primarily on the intra-northern debate over these units, which is suggestive of a variety of internal crises the northern government will need to resolve in the wake of secession. It contends that the Sudanese government has never resolved the ambiguity over whether these units function as local crime fighters or as guardians of religious morality. Although a number of analysts argue that the Sudanese regime has become less ideological and thus scaled back the morality police, this ambiguity remains highly relevant today, to the extent that it causes divisions within the security forces and even the government itself. The article further identifies the centrality of the debate over the public order units to the period of self-questioning that has characterized the ‘post-Islamist’ phase in Sudanese politics. It discusses the ambiguous social status of these units, who have been represented as guardians of urban Sudanese culture by their champions and a threat to it by their detractors.

Forty Years After Abramson

In the early 1970s, Dr. Marc Abramson, a jail psychiatrist, was the first author to observe in the scholarly literature that people with serious mental illnesses (PSMI) were being criminalized--that is, processed through the criminal justice system instead of the mental health system (Abramson, 1972). This essay examines four common beliefs about the criminalization of PSMI. The first belief is that criminally involved PSMI are homogeneous. A close inspection of their characteristics and pathways into the criminal justice system proves otherwise (Lurigio & Lewis, 1987). PSMI can enter the criminal justice system through criminalization or standard criminal justice processing. Criminalization occurs only when PSMI are arrested for publically displaying the signs and symptoms of serious mental illness (SMI). These arrests are typically for public-order offenses, stemming mostly from psychiatric symptoms, not from a deliberate neglect of the rights of others (Council of State Governments, 2002). Heightened awareness of the problem of PSMI in the criminal justice system resulted in the implementation of diversionary police and court programs, which have decreased the likelihood of the mentally ill being criminalized. PSMI can still be criminalized when contact with the police is mishandled and eventuates into charges for assaulting a police officer or when aggressive public-order policing initiatives sweep people who are homeless, publicly intoxicated, or panhandling into the courts or jail (Lurigio, Snowden, & Watson, 2006; Skeem, Manchak, & Peterson, 2011). Other distinctions among criminally involved PSMI include differences in psychiatric severity and treatment needs as well as the risks for crime, violence, and recidivism. Language: en

Whatever can go wrong will: situational complexity and public order policing

Police response to public protest in the USA has been seen as stemming from both threats to the interests of political and financial elite as well as threats to the maintenance of public order. Indeed, many of the same features of protest events are used as indicators of both types of threat, leading to substantial uncertainty regarding the interpretation of threat at public gatherings. In this study, we draw on over 16,000 protest events identified from daily issues of the New York Times (NYT) from 1960 to 1995 to develop a more complete picture of public order policing. In doing so, we identify several dimensions of protest events that lead to more complicated and complex interactions between protestors and police. These features, including a diverse tactical repertoire, diverse protesting groups and event size, create crowd management difficulties that contribute to an overall more aggressive police response. Tactical diversity is an especially strong predictor of police action, while protest event size is found to interact with threatening protestor behaviours that largely necessitate a police response. We conclude by placing these findings firmly within a public order management approach to protest policing, thereby clearing up some of the ambiguities in existing protest policing research.

Advances in Liaison Based Public Order Policing in England: Human Rights and Negotiating the Management of Protest?

This article provides further analysis of an emerging ‘liaison’ based approach to the policing of public order in England and Wales (Gorringe, H., Stott, C. and Rosie, M. (2012). ‘Dialogue Police, Decision Making, and the Management of Public Order During Protest Crowd Events.’ Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling 9(2): 111–125.). Data is gathered from a range of sources including direct observation of a series of six protest events across two cities in England between May and November 2012. The research was conducted using principles of ‘participant observation’ within an ‘action research’ framework (Lewin, K. (1958). Group Decision and Social Change. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.). The qualitative analysis suggests that liaison based approaches are effective where they enhance police capacity for problem solving, conflict reduction, limit setting, and mediating during protest events. It is asserted that liaison based tactics can be undermined, however, through poor understanding of the approach among police commanders and inadequate sensitivity to interactions between police tactics, protest identities, ideology, and history. The implications of the data for understanding wider debates concerning iterative processes between ‘transgressive’ protest and shifts toward strategic incapacitation are discussed (Gillham, P. F. (2011). ‘Securitizing America: strategic incapacitation and the policing of protest since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks.’ Sociology Compass 5(7): 636–652.).

Making Sense of 'Riot': The Fragile Legitimacy of Police Powers and Public Order Offences in an Intervention

This paper examines the legitimacy of public order offences in a contested intercultural space. Other scholarship has exposed how public order offences are best understood, not as offences that are legitimate in themselves, but as a mechanism by which police can lawfully (but not necessarily 'fairly' or 'justly') increase their powers; this is to facilitate the 'maintenance of the peace' and to pre-empt crimes. This paper instead considers more fundamental issues on which public order policing and laws are founded. It challenges common sense assumptions what is 'public', 'offensive' or 'disordered'. Even when considered within a Western cultural frame, these can be seen to be highly constructed and culturally contingent concepts. These concepts become much more unstable with they are transplanted to a liminal or frontier space, such as a remote Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory of Australia. In this highly contested space, the common sense appeal of these concepts is destabilised, and their legitimacy becomes tenuous, particularly for those who are the new objects of such ideas.Since the commencement by the Australian Federal Government of a dramatic and controversial intervention into the Aboriginal affairs of the NT, police have been authorised to exercise unprecedented powers with respect to Aboriginal people and use an array of offences that have facilitated the suppression of resistance to Intervention and cultural assimilation, and to finally secure control of this space in which Aboriginal people have continued to exercise domain as Aboriginal people, despite Australia’s ongoing colonial project.By reference to a case study in which an attempted Aboriginal dispute resolution process is reconstructed as a ‘riot’, this paper explores the impact of the attempted suppression of cultural practices using public order offences, and examines the early impacts, which include: increased political resistance to Intervention through deliberate flaunting of public order offences, lawlessness (where successful suppression of tribal practices results not in embrasure of mainstream values and practices but instead creates a vacuum where no social constraints operate), an exacerbation of the cycle of criminalisation and victimisation of Aboriginal people, and the possibility that tribal dispute resolution processes are withdrawing to spaces where Aboriginal people remain sovereign.