Author: David P Waddington
ISBN No: 978 1 84392 23
Review date: 17/12/2025
No of pages: 240
Publisher: Willan
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
A new book about the policing of public disorder throws light on the difficulties of keeping everybody happy during protests, climate camps, even football matches, writes Mark Rowe.
The photo on the cover sums it up: a young unshaven man raising his hand towards police officers, who are standing in front of police vans, wearing helmets with visors down, and holding transparent shields in gloved hands. Police versus protesters. Yet just in sight behind the police line, leaning out of a first floor window, are two people. In other words: besides the ‘them and us’ that can lead to disorder, doing damage to property, there are spectators, public opinion. Private security comes in here because guards and technology have to protect buildings and people. The book touches barely on private security, noting only that at say motorcycle events police ought to be low-key and encourage stewards and marshals.
The bulk of the book is given over to studying US and British recent urban riots; worldwide anti-globalisation protests; and the G8 justice and home affairs ministers’ meeting in Sheffield in June 2005, ahead of the G8 summit at Gleneagles. The author, a Sheffield Hallam academic, interviewed the authorities and protesters in Sheffield. Security does come into the equation – the need to protect venues and VIPs – but there is besides a need to uphold the right to protest. The very success of policing an event – defending a perimeter, corralling protesters – might lead to protester anger if they feel they aren’t making their case. Politics comes into it too: a host city, or businesses of a financial district, might not want its streets seen on TV hosting running battles. Intelligence and briefings, then, matter, to allow calculations of ‘trouble’. Quakers holding candles do not pose the same threats as the sort of people who resort to violence and spraying statues.
Waddington gives a reader the impression that the wishes of businesses – that they come through a protest unscratched – might, in the heat of the day, be a victim of the police’s tactics. Waddington repeats an assertion by other academics that at the May Day 2000 demonstration in London, a McDonald’s near Trafalgar Square got attacked. The assertion is ‘that police deliberately exposed the restaurant to the mercy of the crowd as part of a well-choreographed containment exercise. Once the demonstrators had responded on cue by smashing in the shop’s doors and plate-glass windows, the police could confidently justify their recourse to harsher tactics’. Nor are all protests alike – to use Waddington’s unfortunate phrase, police may have to ‘die in a ditch’ to protect world politicians at a summit meeting, but maybe not so for a pub, club or hotel next door to a football stadium.
The book gives an interesting backdrop to the August 2007 climate camp against Heathrow Airport. Little publicised at the time were the risks to carriers, suppliers and providers of services, from hotels to cash and valuables in transit firms. So-called ‘direct action’ could have come against a business that supplies Heathrow or relies on – so the protesters would say – the wicked high-carbon aviation industry (and which business around Heathrow does not?). You can be sure that Heathrow and its passengers, wanting business as usual, would not take kindly to excuses if protesters did a blockade and delayed some service, whether public (a train station) or private. Hence just as the Met Police concentrated officers at Heathrow for the week of action, so security guardforces had much on their plate – from observing protester scouts taking notes of buildings, operational routes and CCTV systems, to security managers doing their own ‘scouting’ of websites, say, to find out where the climate camp(s) would be, to anticipate possible flashpoints.
Even this academic book at times puts across the raw, scary nature of a riot or protest, and how they can turn nasty quickly. And messy – people get in the wrong place at the wrong time. Security guarding forces like police may have to be flexible to the threat in front of their faces, cheeky laughter and fancy-dress one hour; and screaming, spitting and swearing the next. Equally, guard forces and police can choose styles of guarding and policing – hard or soft, interventionist or liberal. And note that word liberal. After some threshold, as soon as a receptionist calls security, or a security officer seeks to deny someone entry, or a police officer enforces an ‘exclusion zone’, they’re taking a political decision. Because protesters and those providing a security service for a client will have different views about the human right of expression, and the right of all to go about their lawful business. There’s practicalities too: a visibly under-staffed guard force will encourage a crowd. In other words, understanding the ways that crowds move is important.
Police do have ‘a national public order tactics manual’, SIA-badged contract security officers have one day of conflict management training. Yet interestingly Waddington notes that officers on the ground may be best placed to handle a protest – because they know the side alleys that a dispersed crowd could go out of control along, or the pile of unused paving slabs that could be used as vandals’ weapons. Bussed in officers may lack ‘situational adjustment’, to use an academic term – that is, through fear, officers may be indiscriminatingly unfair, and stoke up a crowd against them. To sum up, success by securing a protested-against site is only temporary. If organised protests have their leaders arrested, protest movements avoid having leaders, making liaison harder for the authorities. If the climate campers felt their week was a success, they may try again next summer, hoping for better weather. If not, they may try something else. Theory and practice of policing public disorder, then, stands still at order’s peril.
