Strategic Incapacitation Research Articles

Strategic incapacitation, scaled up: National security influence on protest policing for the 2018 Quebec G7 summit

In June 2018, the 44th Group of Seven (G7) Summit was held in La Malbaie in the Province of Quebec, Canada. Drawing from geographic and sociological literature on protest and social movement policing and applying the concept of scale, we examine techniques of summit security deployed for the event. Analysing the results of access to information requests, we investigate pre-summit planning as well as the surveillance operations undertaken by military and national security agencies in conjunction with corporate players. We demonstrate how pre-summit training, threat assessments, surveillance, and securitisation practices at the summit framed protests and social movements as the predominant threat to security. Drawing from critical geographies of security, we argue that G7 Summit planning and the security operations that followed are an example of strategic incapacitation, scaled up.

Policiamento de manifestações: Repertório da ação policial em São Paulo (2013 2016)

After the cycle of protests that brought crowds to the streets in 2013 and demonstrated the violent character of the police with protesters, police practices in demonstrations began to be monitored by civil society. This paper analyzes the field of policing demonstrations and the context of the protests that occurred in São Paulo, based on the reports of the NGO Article 19, in order to present the tactics used by the police. Thus, it was possible to conclude that the police specialized in detention and vigilantism tactics, as well as using "strategic incapacitation" with autonomist movements.

Constructed police knowledge of “marginal movements”: The SPVM’s GAMMA project

This article contributes to the growing body of sociological and criminological research on the policing of protests and those on society’s margins by analyzing the construction of police knowledge in the context of the implementation of the GAMMA project by the Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal (Montreal Police Service, or SPVM). Creation of this police project, initiated in 2010 but not made public until 2011, was announced as a means of tracking the activities of those seen as marginal or anarchist in the city of Montreal. However, following a two-year-long legal battle, documents obtained through provincial access to information legislation showed that, far from relying solely on criminalizable events, GAMMA’s goals involved problematization of certain social groups on the political margins. Characteristics of marginal movements were implicitly operationalized into visible indicators of possible criminality, as were their specific political convictions. This article explores the subjective nature of the police knowledge underlying the institutionalization of an additional level of police response differentially targeting specific marginal movements. The results are discussed in the context of recent research on protest policing and marginality, particularly the concepts of “strategic incapacitation,” “intelligent control,” and “landscapes of exclusion.”

The Effects of Selective and Indiscriminate Repression on the 2013 Gezi Park Nonviolent Resistance Campaign

We investigate the differential effects of selective and indiscriminate repression on the rate of protest actions during the nonviolent resistance campaign in Gezi Park, Turkey, in 2013. After deriving theoretical expectations about how and why these forms of repression will influence protest actions, we test them with protest event data that were collected from a major local newspaper and subsequently validated through a comparison with two other independent Twitter datasets. Utilizing a Poisson autoregressive estimation model, we find that selective repression, as measured by the number of arrested activists who were detained while they were not demonstrating, decreased the rate of protest actions. Meanwhile, indiscriminate repression, as measured by the frequency of the government’s use of lethal and nonlethal violence against protesters during demonstrations, increased the rate of protest actions. Our findings support prior research on the influence of indiscriminate repression on backfire outcomes. They also provide evidence for the impact of selective repression on movement demobilization through the removal of opposition activists. Finally, the targeted arrest strategy of selective repression that was employed in the Gezi campaign has implications for the feasibility of the strategic incapacitation model of protest policing.

Strategic Incapacitation of Indigenous Dissent: Crowd Theories, Risk Management, and Settler Colonial Policing

Engaging scholarship from sociologies of security to protest policing, this article explores how risk management and actuarial tools have been operationalized in Canadian policing of Indigenous protests. We detail RCMP actuarial tools used to assess individual and group risk by tracing how these techniques are representative of much older trends in the criminal justice system surrounding the management of risk, but also have been advanced by contemporary databanking and surveillance capacities. Contesting public claims of police impartiality and objectivity, we highlight how the construction of riskiness produces an antagonism towards “successful” Indigenous protests. Though the RCMP regularly claim to “protect and facilitate the right to lawful advocacy, protest and dissent,” we show how these practices of strategic incapacitation exhibit highly antagonistic forms of policing that are grounded in a rationality that seeks to demobilize and delegitimize Indigenous social movements.

From Overcoming the fear to Protest, to using Fear as a repressive strategy towards the 15M movement

In this article we analyse the police repression strategies that were developed around the emergence of the 15M movement in Barcelona, which was an important turning point for protest and repression. Through press reviews, discussion groups and interviews we empirically contribute to previous theoretical studies that deal with strategies for policing protests. We recognize that strategic incapacitation is a new style of policing protests that has taken hold in the last decade. However, we reflect on the importance of understanding this new strategy, within an increasingly more punitive state under transformation, that creates enemies to erode the rights of most the population. In the case of the protests, this also seeks to create fear and consequently tries to dismantle and wear down current and potential participants of social movements.

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’

Disruption is Not Permitted: The Policing and Social Control of Occupy Oakland

Negotiated management—various forms of communication, collaboration and cooperation between police and protest organizers, often taking the form of protest permits—has been mainly theorized as a means to mitigate police violence while respecting protesters’ 1st Amendment rights. A few theorists have problematized this view, suggesting that negotiated management is a form of social control that puts various restrictions on dissent. Drawing from my research on Occupy Oakland, I build upon these critiques to illustrate how negotiated management was used as a tool of repression in two key ways, and how newer forms of repression (strategic incapacitation) are still enmeshed in its logic. First, by criminalizing legal activity among protesters, through the use of a permit, who were then subjected to police repression. Second, I show how negotiated management as a normative structure of protest was used as a form of repression, even when communication and cooperation with police were clearly rejected by the movement. I illustrate how the refusal of negotiated management was used to discredit the movement and subject it to physical repression. Rather than seeing negotiated management as an alternative to police repression and strategic incapacitation, I argue that they are two sides of the same policing project, the primary aim of which is to prevent disruptive protest.

People's Mic and democratic charisma

The People's Mic is a new genre of political speech. In Occupy Wall Street (OWS) general assemblies, this tactile media for public deliberation was integral to embodying new political community across American cities in a globally oriented movement of the squares. Whether or not OWS has exemplified direct democracy per se, the People's Mic has cultivated new forms of democratic charisma between previously disaggregated constituencies-a “leaderful charisma“, with historical roots in pious American oratorical traditions (“hallowed speech“) and more recent movements for intercultural solidarity building (global justice, horizontalist, feminist, etc.). In this article, I signal how the People's Mic atavistically conjured and resembled the American town hall meeting in a contemporary and heterogeneous US frontier assembly. Before its strategic incapacitation, the Occupy movement's widespread use of People's Mic served to undermine the authority of private-public monopolies and to place a check on mounting police repression of urban space.

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.).

Strategic incapacitation and the policing of Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City, 2011

The US national response to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks accelerated the adoption and refinement of a new repertoire of protest policing we call ‘strategic incapacitation’ now employed by law enforcement agencies nationwide to police protest demonstrations. The occupation movement which formally began 17 September 2011 was the most significant social movement to utilise transgressive protest tactics in the United States in the last 40 years and posed a substantial challenge to law enforcement agencies. This research seeks to better understand the implementation of strategic incapacitation tactics through a detailed analysis of the policing of the first 2 months of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests in New York City. Original data for this study are derived from 2-week-long field observations made in New York City during the first and second month anniversaries of the OWS occupation in Zuccotti Park. These are supplemented by activist interviews, activist accounts posted on OWS websites, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds as well as news reports, official police documents, press releases and interviews with legal observers.

‘They attacked the city’: Security intelligence, the sociology of protest policing and the anarchist threat at the 2010 Toronto G20 summit

Contributing to the sociological literature on protest policing at international summits, this article analyses security intelligence practices related to the 2010 G20 meetings in Toronto, Canada. Drawing from the results of access to information requests with policing and intelligence agencies at municipal, provincial and federal levels, the authors demonstrate the central role of intelligence and threat assessments in international summit policing. Focusing on intelligence practices and police training targeting the ‘anarchist threat’, they show how intelligence agencies conflated anarchism with criminality and targeted this purported menace for strategic incapacitation through a process referred to here as threat amplification. After analysing intelligence and police training for the Toronto G20, the authors discuss the implications of their findings for the sociology of protest policing. Comparing the ideas of strategic incapacitation and ‘intelligent control’, they suggest that the enfolding of security intelligence into international summit policing has intensified the practice of ‘making up’ threat categories and strategically targeting groups that fall outside the institutionalized spectrum of negotiation and accommodation.

Securitizing America: Strategic Incapacitation and the Policing of Protest Since the 11 September 2001 Terrorist Attacks

AbstractDuring the 1970s, the predominant strategy of protest policing shifted from ‘escalated force’ and repression of protesters to one of ‘negotiated management’ and mutual cooperation with protesters. Following the failures of negotiated management at the 1999 World Trade Organization demonstrations in Seattle, law enforcement quickly developed a new social control strategy, referred to here as ‘strategic incapacitation’. The US police response to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks quickened the pace of police adoption of this new strategy, which emphasizes the goals of ‘securitizing society’ and isolating or neutralizing the sources of potential disruption. These goals are accomplished through (1) the use of surveillance and information sharing as a way to assess and monitor risks, (2) the use of pre‐emptive arrests and less‐lethal weapons to selectively disrupt or incapacitate protesters that engage in disruptive protest tactics or might do so, and (3) the extensive control of space in order to isolate and contain disruptive protesters actual or potential. In a comparative fashion, this paper examines the shifts in United States policing strategies over the last 50 years and uses illustrative cases from national conventions, the global justice movement and the anti‐war movement to show how strategic incapacitation has become a leading social control strategy used in the policing of protests since 9/11. It concludes by identifying promising questions for future research.

"More Than A March in a Circle": Transgressive Protests and the Limits of Negotiated Management

We examine how tactical innovations introduced by transgressive protesters during the Seattle cycle of protests contributed to the end of a long, relatively stable period of détente between police and protesters in the United States. Case studies of the demonstrations staged by the AFL-CIO and the Direct Action Network (DAN) during the 1999 WTO protests are used to reveal the divergent capacity of the negotiated management style of policing protest to control contained and transgressive protesters. We argue that the transgressive protesters' tactics, organizational structure, and decision-making processes all frustrated police attempts to control their demonstrations and contributed to DAN's ability to shut down the opening day of the WTO. We conclude by developing a framework for understanding how police responded in subsequent protests using what we describe as "strategic incapacitation" and by proposing research questions about the impact of this style of policing on subsequent protests in the U.S. and other Western democracies.