Liberty and Order

Public Order Policing in a Capital City

P.A.J. Waddington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032042718
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000424270
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This unprecedented behind the scenes analysis of public order policing, first published in 1994, investigates the impact of increased police powers and equipment on basic democratic freedoms, describing and analysing police operations from protest marches to riots, and from royal ceremonials to street carnivals. When confrontational government policies stimulate inner-city riots and violent protest, the state response is all too often to equip the police with enhanced legal powers and the paraphernalia of riot control. In Britain such developments prompted debates about a drift into authoritarianism. Here the policing of political protest is examined within its political and broader 'public order' context, and the text draws on extended and detailed observation of actual events.

CHAPTER 1

Taking rioting, protesting and policing seriously

Introduction

In the Philippines, East Germany and other former Soviet bloc countries of eastern Europe, peaceful protestors confronted the military might of authoritarian regimes and defeated them. When counter-revolution threatened democratic reform in Russia itself, “people power” became the saviour of democracy. But “people power” does not invariably succeed: in Tiananmen Square it was literally crushed by the forces of totalitarian authoritarianism. Nor is “people power” the inevitable servant of democratic values. In South Africa, violent protest by the extreme right has aimed to obstruct democratic reform. Throughout re-unified Germany, protesting crowds have resurrected the spectre of Nazism, illuminated in the glow of burning refugee hostels.

These are just some of the many faces of public protest. They illustrate the fundamental moral and political dilemmas that it poses. Mass action can be the defender or destroyer of democracy. Official repression can extinguish freedom and liberty or defend the weak and vulnerable. Liberal democracies must steer a precarious path between these opposing evils. In liberal democracies, those who repeatedly find themselves treading that path are the police. They in effect decide, within the law, the boundaries of freedom of protest. Protestors who overstep that boundary are liable to arrest, and assemblies that break the law may be dispersed. These are onerous responsibilities, but how they are exercised has remained largely obscured from public view. When protest turns conspicuously to violence, scenes of police battling with rioters are widely broadcast by the news media, but how representative of normality are such scenes? How do police deal with routine protests that may never reach the attention of the news media? Are freedom and liberty subverted or safeguarded? Are there reasons to fear for the health of democracy? These are the questions to which this book is addressed.

In this chapter, the wider context in which these questions arise will be discussed. Since it is rioting that has brought the issues of the policing of public order to academic attention, it is with this that we will begin. What are the causes of the riots that convulsed the ghettos of American cities in the 1960s and British inner-cities in the 1980s? What continuity, if any, do such riots have with more obvious forms of protest? What is the nature of protest and what are its implications for policing? What issues have given rise to protest throughout liberal democracies and how were they expressed in London during the early 1990s?

Taking riots seriously

The riots that engulfed major American cities during the 1960s, echoed in British inner-cities two decades later, propelled policing on to both the political and academic research agendas. The Kerner (1968) and Scarman (1981) reports authoritatively placed much of the responsibility for outbreaks of disorder upon insensitive and racist policing. Police reform, designed to re-legitimate policing amongst ethnic minorities, became a major plank of government policy on both sides of the Atlantic. Spurred by the shock waves that these episodes of rioting had on public life, policing also became an object of intense academic interest. Naturally, a focus of that academic interest lay in the causation and policing of riots.

Riot-as-protest

The academic debate that followed was remarkably consistent on both sides of the Atlantic and centred on the repudiation of the so-called “riff-raff” theory of rioting. This view, owing its intellectual origins to the nineteenth-century French theorist Gustav LeBon (1896), attributes outbreaks of rioting to irrationality – crowds liberate the beast that lurks in the breast of humankind. It was readily apparent that many official commentators adhered to much the same view as LeBon, dismissing the riots as orgies of lawlessness (McCone 1965). Critics of this view also detected echoes of LeBon in theories that attributed the riots to the psychology of rioters. Theories of “de-individuation” (Zimbardo 1970), imitative learning (Berkowitz 1973), frustration-aggression (Feierabend & Feierabend 1966, 1969, 1973) and relative deprivation (Gurr 1968a, 1968b, 1968c, 1969, 1970) were all repudiated because the motives they imputed to rioters did not conform to the rioters’ own perception of their actions. Rioters who felt they were expressing their rage at racial discrimination and police brutality and harassment were told that they were expressing some ulterior motive. Likewise, theories that traced the origins of riots to social and economic conditions that rioters did not comprehend were also rejected. Davies’ “J-curve” theory (Davies 1962, 1969) suggested that outbreaks of disorder tend to occur when a period of gradual improvement is interrupted by a downturn. This implies that rioters are playthings of forces beyond their control. Perhaps the most prominent theory of collective behaviour – Smelser’s “value added” theory (Smelser 1962) – was doubly repudiated. It traces outbreaks of collective behaviour to “strain” in the functioning of the social structure, compounding that by attributing riotous motivations to “generalized beliefs” that may be exaggerated and distorted (Currie & Skolnick 1972 but see also Smelser 1972).

The alternative, which came to acquire the status of an orthodoxy, was that rioters had to be taken seriously. Their motives had to be taken at face value: they were expressing profound grievances against racism and police brutality. In the United States this was articulated most coherently by Skolnick (1969), Fogelson (1970, 1971) and Hahn & Feagin (1973), and in Britain by Kettle & Hodges (1982) and Benyon (1984, 1987). It was implicitly and authoritatively endorsed by official commissions of inquiry (Kerner 1968, Scarman 1981). And it had enormous implications for policing. If rioters were to be taken seriously, then their allegations of police racism, harassment and brutality could not be dismissed. Indeed, much scholarly attention focused not upon the riots themselves, but upon the deprivations and discrimination suffered by black people in American city ghettos and British inner-cities (see, for example, Cowell et al. 1982).

The political imperative for taking rioters seriously is clear: it counters the attempt by the political establishment to dismiss rioting as merely a lawless outburst and thus to discredit the grievances of ethnic minorities. Insisting that rioting is a form of political protest dignifies it and demands that the grievances of rioters be addressed. In the political context, as Turner (1969) argues, the acceptance of violence as protest rather than as crime is crucial if demands to remedy grievances are to receive attention. Protest has the status of a communicative act, even when it is violent.

Looting is not primarily a means of acquiring property, as it is normally viewed in disaster situations; breaking store windows and burning buildings is not merely a perverted form of amusement or immoral vengeance like the usual vandalism and arson; threats of violence and injury to persons are not simply criminal actions. All are expressions of outrage against injustice of sufficient magnitude and duration to render the resort to such exceptional means of communication understandable to the observer. (Turner 1969: 186)

Thus imbued, demands for redress of grievances can legitimately be pressed, for the aggrieved rioter is as much a victim of injustice as a perpetrator of violence (Lipsky & Olson 1973).

Although the theory of riot-as-protest was undoubtedly highly influential as a political theory and programme of reform, its theoretical adequacy was much more doubtful. I have argued at length elsewhere (P. Waddington 1991, ch. 7) that the theory is better regarded as a means of attributing blame and responsibility rather than explaining the aetiology of riot. A central problem in assessing the explanatory utility of this notion lies precisely in identifying the views of rioters that are to be taken seriously. As Berk (1972) points out, there are enormous methodological difficulties in studying riots and he chastises researchers for making assertions in the absence of necessary data. Because those who live in areas afflicted by riots suffer deprivations and discrimination that would justify their rioting does not mean that, at the time of the riot, deprivation and discrimination were uppermost in their minds.

It is plausible to suppose that some riots are expressions of grievances, whereas others are not. Gary Marx (1972) suggests distinguishing between “issue-oriented” and “issueless” riots, so as to differentiate riots-as-protest from other collective outbursts. Unwittingly, however, Marx succeeds in accentuating the methodological difficulties identified by Berk (1972), for how are we to establish whether any given instance of disorder was “issue oriented” or “issueless”? Following Marx, David Waddington argues:

Whereas the disorder associated with violent demonstrations, riots or industrial confrontation tends to focus on the defence or assertion of “rights” which are perceived as being violated or denied, football hooliganism is an issueless form of activity, pursued primarily for pleasure and excitement, and to achieve the status and respect of one’s peers. (1992: 138)

The problem with this lies in adjudicating which of these motivations prompt disorder. David Waddington elsewhere (D. Waddington et al. 1989) maintains that a clash between police and young men accused of spitting on passers-by in a shopping mall was “issue oriented” because “territory is at stake”. If such a claim to territory is to qualify as “issue oriented” then why should football hooligans be deemed “issueless”? Is attacking rival fans, as did supporters of Liverpool fc in the Heysel stadium, resulting in 38 deaths, “for pleasure and excitement” or to assert the “right” of Liverpool supporters exclusively to occupy a section of the terraces? Such attributions are inevitably contestable and are often contested as part of the process of political inquiry that follows significant disorder, but academic researchers are rarely in a position to confirm any attribution because they lack the necessary data.

Black ghetto and inner-city rioters were dignified as “issue oriented” for well-intentioned but transparently political reasons. However, participation in these riots may have had a more prosaic academic explanation. McPhail & Miller (1973) suggest that participation in rioting may have simply been a consequence of availability. Most riots in America and Britain occurred on warm summer weekend evenings near the intersections of major roads where people tended to congregate. McPhail’s secondary analysis of a plethora of research studies on participation in riots concludes:

There is no compelling reason to accept the inference that persons are more impetuous because of their youth, more daring because of their gender, more disenchanted because of their race, or less rational because of their educational level. An equally plausible interpretation of these data is that such persons are simply more available for participation by virtue of the large amount of unscheduled or uncommitted time which results from being young, black, male, and without educational credentials in the urban ghettos of contemporary u.s. society. (McPhail 1971: 1069)

Nor is there any compelling reason for believing that any common motivation lay behind the many and diverse actions of individuals during the course of a riot. As McPhail (1991) has convincingly argued, to do so is, perversely, to accept the assumption of LeBon and his intellectual heirs that the crowd is a single entity. Rioting may have emergent properties of social organization, but there is no reason to suppose that that organization arises from common motivation.

The implication of taking rioters seriously is that riot is just a species of the genus protest. Eisinger (1973) insists, however, that riot and peaceful protest are both conceptually and empirically distinct. It is true that ghetto and inner-city rioters, like protestors, tend to be “relatively powerless people” and that protest is one of those “collective manifestations” that are “disruptive in nature”. However, the crucial distinction, according to Eisinger, is that peaceful protest is an instrumental act in which protestors weigh the costs and benefits of their actions. “Violent actors in contrast have essentially thrown cost considerations to the winds” (p. 13) and are engaged in an expressive, rather than instrumental, form of activity. Moreover, he finds that the social, economic and political correlates of riot and peaceful protest, even by black ghetto dwellers, do not correspond, suggesting that they are quite distinct forms of activity.

Perhaps conceptual confusion owes much to the indiscriminate use of the term “riot” itself. There are circumstances when demonstrations, pickets and other forms of overt protest turn violent, but these are quite distinct from the “community disorders” that convulsed American ghettos and British inner-cities. They arise in the context of a scheduled event organized for the purpose of protest (McPhail & Miller 1973). Protestors articulate their grievances quite explicitly through their banners and orchestrated slogans. Here violence may be used quite instrumentally to achieve the goal of the protestors, for example the closure of strike-bound premises. However, this does not apply to “community disorders” whose rationality, purpose and instrumentality rely on inference to a degree that becomes almost entirely speculative. While actors on the political stage (who may include academic researchers) may contest the motives to be attributed to participants in such “community disorders”, academic researchers seeking an explanation for riot will be in no privileged position to determine what those motives actually were.

Taking protest seriously

Taking overt acts of protest seriously poses few of the problems that accompany taking rioters seriously. Few inferences need to be drawn about the purpose of protestors, compared with the motivations of rioters. Protestors hold marches, demonstrations, rallies, lobbies, pickets, sit-ins and so forth, consciously designed to bring about some form of social change. These usually occur in the context of a protest movement, or what is more commonly called a “social movement”.

There is, however, a version of the “riff-raff” theory that applies even to such overt acts of protest. It dismisses any genuine sense of grievance that protestors may express and attributes participation in social movements to the personal deficiencies of the protestors or their isolated and marginal position in society. This is the view that protestors a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Front matter
• 1 Taking rioting, protesting and policing seriously
• 2 Law and the authoritarian state
• 3 Avoiding trouble: the public order context
• 4 Negotiating protest: policing by consent?
• 5 Relationships
• 6 Remote control
• 7 Commanding the ground
• 8 Institutionalizing dissent
• 9 Power and public order policing
• Appendix: research methods
• References
• Table of cases
• Index