Police, Picket-Lines and Fatalities

Lessons from the Past

D. Baker

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137358059
• eBook ISBN: 9781137358066
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Social Sciences

Police, Picket-lines and Fatalities explores public protests and their management by the police, focusing on the fatalities of strikers at the hands of police and outlining practices towards preventing such tragedies. Uniquely examining the only three worker fatalities in Australian industrial history due to police use of deadly force, this book analyses the frenzied policing involvement that led to the deaths; the lack of accountability of police leadership and individual actions; government and press partisanship; and the deficiencies in criminal justice administration. Baker ultimately questions: were the police merely performing their duty by enforcing the law or were they agents complicit in reckless violence and collusion? With analysis of the recent police shooting of 34 platinum miners at Marikana, South Africa in 2012, Baker looks at the lessons of these case-studies, both past and contemporary, to provide specific applications for developing best practice of police and unionpeace-keeping protocols during industrial protests and the wider issues pertinent to public order policing of demonstrations in general.

1

Police Management of Pickets and Protests: A Global Perspective

Abstract: The policing of industrial pickets and demonstrations is unpredictable, volatile and problematic. The public order literature indicates that policing in the Western world has generally experienced trends from ‘escalated force’ to ‘negotiated management’ to ‘strategic incapacitation’ in the monitoring and controlling of large-scale dissent. Historically in Australia, police ruthlessly, and sometimes brutally, quelled hostile industrial unrest. Three worker fatalities at the hands of police in early Australia form the centrepiece of this book. In August 2012, the South African Police Service shot dead 34 striking miners at Marikana. The Australian fatalities and those at modern-day Marikana are extreme and exceptional examples of police use of lethal force, but they convey important narratives and significant lessons for the policing of pickets and protests.

Keywords: Australia; fatalities; Marikana; police; protests; strikes

Baker, David. Police, Picket-Lines and Fatalities: Lessons from the Past. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137358066.0004.

State and police control

Public order policing, in particular the policing of protest, is increasingly complex, uncertain and vexatious. The art of policing is selective, especially so in maintaining public order. Large-scale protests and picketing represent considerable challenges for police in attempting to balance safety and security with the civil rights of its citizens. As regulatory agents, police encounter this perennial dilemma of how to reconcile people’s rights to express grievance while maintaining the policing mandate of order and security. Throughout industrial history, police capacity to make sound, strategic choices when handling overt manifestations of industrial disputation – pickets and lockouts – has tested police doctrines of independence and impartiality and challenged police organizational skills, resources and tactics.

Police legitimacy is entwined with the broader legitimacy and acceptance of the state. The hegemony of the state is entrusted to the police force which possesses the monopoly to use coercion. This power authorized by the power elite reflects Antonio Gramsci’s theoretical underpinnings of hegemony, the power elite in control of society (Hoare & Smith, 1971, pp. 57–59). Collins (2008, p. 112) argues that the state claims a monopoly on violence, while others are ‘expected to keep the peace’. According to Earl (2006, p. 133), ‘states have an interest in repressing targets, in part as a demonstration of the state’s power’. Demonstrations and pickets may challenge the ruling elite’s economic and industrial structure; such conflict threatens police insistence on an orderly ‘patch’. O’Malley (1983, p. 56) coined the term ‘hegemonic police’ to describe a police organization ‘not merely as a law enforcement agency but also and especially as an agency of the community, which supplies a broad range of services to secure social order and harmony’. In a democracy, policing services are depicted as being impartially administered, but the police remain the latent coercive arm of state control with ‘the capacity for paramilitary, coercive enforcement as the situation demands’ (O’Malley, 1983, p. 71).

The police mandate to preserve law and order and protect life and property is tested by street protest if it is perceived as a challenge to police and societal authority. Policing by its nature is conservative and concerned with maintaining the status quo. Police prefer order and predictability on the streets and they expect to win all public disorder confrontations. A large protest or picket presents an affront to the orderly street mentality; it represents an undisciplined situation, a potential problem for ‘street cleaning’. Police, with a highly visible street presence, are expected to maintain social control; unruly and riotous behaviour raises questions about police legitimacy and capability.

Police employ discretionary judgements about the use of force, riot squads and weaponry. They determine the parameters of acceptable and unacceptable crowd behaviour, the boundaries of freedom of dissent on the street. Pragmatically, police may claim to facilitate protest, but their coercive powers remain latent to halt the escalation of conflict. Union and protest organizers are conscious of this potential police capacity to use force. The police are in a unique position in society as they are officially licensed to exercise coercion over citizens, but in liberal democracies they are usually able to compel compliance through persuasion, negotiation, compromise or manipulation (Reiner, 2000, pp. 3, 6). The nexus between police and protesters is contentious and unpredictable: no matter how much communication may take place, both sides usually remain somewhat suspicious and distrustful of the motives of the other.

The law in relation to peaceful and passive picketing, an industrial tactic directed at disrupting work and publicising the picketers’ demands, is unclear, uncertain and ambiguous (Nyland & Svensen, 1995). Laws in Australia have tended to protect the rights of those with property and business historically at the expense of the working class. If police enforce the letter of the law, this assists commercial enterprises to conduct business unhindered. Police are obliged neither to protect a business interest at any cost nor to placate people’s right to protest at any cost. Judicial decisions in Australia have generally supported the legal view that picketing impedes and constrains business unfairly (see Baker, 2001a). The law is also inclined to subordinate political freedoms and civil rights to the demands for law and order and public safety.

Police possess the legitimate capacity to use coercion in public order situations, ‘minimum force’ appropriate to the circumstances. In practice, decisive police actions in industrial disputes – arrests, physical confrontations, summonses, dislocation of picketers – are directed against workers, especially the union organizers. Police are the controlling and coercive agents of the state; their legitimacy depends on their capacity to maintain public order without losing the consent and compliance of the people. According to P. A. J. Waddington (1994, pp. 101–127), police, as the authority figures, have an obligation to the state to remain in control of public order, including industrial disputes. But, as such, they are bound by the law and the rules of criminal procedures. The exercise of coercive powers must be capable of justification. The police order maintenance role is less clear, less supported and legally and morally ambiguous when compared to the police’s traditional crime fighting role of pursuit of criminals. Force, when applied, must be lawful, reasonable and effective (Reiner, 2000, p. 7). Ironically, police determination to win all public battles, especially those with protesting unionists, can lead to a loss of community understanding and support (Baker, 2005).

Police have shown a strong aversion to the disruptiveness inherent in politically illegitimate protest activity and suppressed it accordingly (Vitale, 2007, pp. 404, 406). Advocates of radical social change (peasant revolts, suffragettes, civil rights campaigners, anti-apartheid demonstrators) have historically encountered police opposition. The democratic state is usually restrained in using force against its citizens, but much less restraint is in evidence against those who are marginalized (for instance, the homeless, the powerless, the unemployed, the deprived, militant workers, anarchical radicals, indigenous groups) (White & Perrone, 2005). Groups who are excluded and who do not play by society’s rules (for example, ‘wildcat’ strikers) are prone to police coercion. However, when accessing police policies, one must not forget that in countries like the United Kingdom or Australia, most demonstrations remain non-violent and non-confrontational (Douglas, 2004, p. 104).

A historical perspective

Historically, the baton was the symbol of police public order might. It was the main coercive instrument of crowd dispersal and potentially a source of escalating violence (della Porta & Reiter, 1998, p. 2). In Australia, police with batons, escorting strike-breakers to the workplace was the catalyst that inflamed violent confrontation between unionists and police on the wharves, mines and shearing-sheds. Often police anticipation of major trouble resulted in the fulfilment of that expectation (D. Waddington, 1992, pp. 17–18). When political and ideological clashes between capital and labour were rife amidst the communist hysteria of the 1920s, police saw themselves as defenders of freedom and enforcers of legitimate power, particularly against waterside workers and coal miners (Baker, 2001b). Unemployment rallies and protests of the 1930s were ruthlessly suppressed at the order of police commanders. Radical strikers have often spurned police intervention in industrial confrontation as evidence of collusion between police and employer and government. Skolnick (1971, p. 59) argued that police in industrial disputation were ‘necessarily pushed on the side of property’ as they perceived ‘the striking and sometimes angry workers as their enemy’. Unionists have perceived police as the agent making it possible for the employer to safeguard production by the use of ‘blacklegs’ or ‘scab’ labour, the enemy of the unionized workforce.

Historically, police during bitter industrial strife have not been in the middle, as neutral arbiters of the law, but in accord with employer and/or government demands for decisive police action. Employers customarily relied on the apparatus of the state in the form of the police to make their plants accessible, to protect staff and strike-breakers, and to safeguard business productivity. Police have not supported strikers involved in industrial action: police allegiance has been to the state, their employer. Michael Brogden’s sociological research (1991, pp. 155–160) of Liverpool police between the two wars highlights the paradoxical position of police who were recruited from lower-class origins in order to perform the instructions of their so-called betters by imposing social order and regulation.

The history of the policing of industrial disputes in Australia covers a motley and erratic pattern of intermittent violence and suppression. Police tactics employed during the processes of curtailing public disorder often provoked considerable criticism rather than the actual police involvement itself. As the coercive arm and guardian of the state, police historically quelled vexatious and hostile industrial unrest (Baker, 2005, pp. 38–43, 53–55). The one rapid and effective method of demolishing a picket-line was for police to smash through it, which appeased employer demands but inflamed hostility between police and picketers. Police perceived picketers, especially ringleaders, as ‘trouble’, which justified selective and forceful police actions of dispersion and arrest, thereby intensifying and aggravating the unionists’ perception that they lived in an unfair and uncaring society.

The police response to industrial mayhem and open challenge by strikers was legalistic and forceful; law and order must be maintained at all costs. Perpetrators of offences were arrested; their obstruction to order and passage suppressed. Disorder was seen as stemming from the actions and provocations of radical extremists (Baker, 2005, pp. 28–49). Police sought to restore normalcy; their view of a stable and controlled public order. The police leadership of the 1920s and 1930s mirrored the hard-line conservative and reactionary position of governments and much of the mainstream press that were consistently anti-communist, anti-unionist and even anti-worker.

The failure of governments to hold police accountable for alleged excesses and violence while controlling industrial and political protest has been a feature of early Australian history. Three workers (Tommy Edwards 1919, Allan Whittaker 1928 and Norman Brown 1929) were killed as the result of frenzied police actions at industrial protests, but no one was ever held to account for the deaths (Baker, 2005, pp. 38–42). These events are the subjects of Chapters 3–5 of this book. Governments, like the police department, refused to investigate these shootings; the coronial inquests merely condoned police action in firing into the surging crowds. The daily press supported police actions – a common scenario of conservative press hostility to industrial unrest. If the triumvirate of government, press and police hierarchies remained steadfast in protecting allegedly excessive police actions, public order policing strategies continued unchecked, constant and unchanged.

The Vietnam War moratoriums and anti-conscription rallies of the late 1960s and early 1970s heralded a major transformation in the policing of mass protest. The limitations of aggressive and repressive police coercion became apparent and gradually new policing approaches were adopted to control protest in Australia. The highly political protests of the 1970s – Vietnam, anti-Springbok, feminist movement activities – were the catalysts for major changes in public order policing when police regularly found themselves outnumbered by street marchers. The introduction of mobile television cameras made both police and protesters more sensitive to the adverse publicity that violence could create. Today, the ubiquitous presence of mobile phone cameras makes visible the public actions of both police and demonstrators. The mere presence of journalists at public events and rallies in some countries appears to tame police ‘toughness’ (della Porta & Reiter, 1998, p. 18). Union community assemblies, embellished by women and children, appear often to have the same effect (Baker, 1999b). The increasing sophistication of public order planning and training has emerged from reforms instigated by better-educated, management-trained and media-savvy police leaders with greater knowledge of civil rights (Ray Whitrod, S. I. Miller and John Avery are three Australian examples). The creation of police internal investigation units and the advent of civilian oversight agencies have enhanced the accountability of police and hence the progress of police-protester communications.

The literature of the policing of protests: contemporary trends and patterns

The public order literature – McPhail, Schweingruber and McCarthy (1998), della Porta and Reiter (1998), della Porta, Peterson and Reiter (2006), P. A. J. Waddington (2001, 2007), Earl (2003), Earl & Soule (2006), D. Waddington (2007), Vitale (2007), DeMichele (2008), Gorringe, Rosie, Waddington and Kominou (2012) – discusses how the ‘escalated force’ model of the 1960s of police repressing protest symbolically reinforced state sovereignty, but was flawed by the severe and extreme police responses to protest events (Earl, Soule & McCarthy, 2003, p. 582). This model was superseded by the ‘negotiated management’ model of the 1990s, which entails a general respect for the right to protest, ongoing communication, regular under-enforcement of the law, force used only as a last resort, and open lines of ongoing communication between police and protesters. McPhail, et al., (1998) argue that the ‘negotiated management’ model constitutes an effective strategy for police to avoid public order trouble. This strategy has been effective in countries such as Canada and Australia where picket captains have ‘policed’ and maintained control of members even during agitated industrial disputation (Hall & de Lint, 2003; Baker, 2005). During protest events, police in fact may utilize dialogue and communication skills without awareness of these tactics and their positive impact on crowd behaviour (Hoggett & Stott, 2010, p. 233). This strategy is a means of winning over protest organizers so that they will ‘police’ themselves. Such a strategy was effective in maintaining peace during the bitter and protracted 1998 Australian waterfront dispute (Baker, 2005, pp. 163–190).

According to Kratcoski, Verma and Das (2001), policing of protest became less violent over the last quarter of the 20th century. della Porta and Reiter (1998, p. 2) contend that in Western democratic countries, many of which historically have been noted for militarized and armed policing (brutal, repressive, confrontational and rigid), there was a widespread trend towards softer, more tolerant, flexible, preventive, selective and less coercive styles of policing protest. Formalized negotiated management between police leaders and protest organizers has lessened the extent of coercive policing intervention through an emphasis on peacekeeping rather than rigid law enforcement. Policing protest in the 1990s was regularly characterized by under-enforcement of the law, the complex procedures of negotiation and the large-scale collection and sharing of prevention-oriented information and intelligence (P. A. J. Waddington, 1999, 2001). The policing of protest seeks containment through negotiation and cooperation with protesters, rather than physical confrontation.

Canadians Hall and de Lint (2003, p. 224) describe ‘policing at a distance’ when protest organizers monitor and control their own group. Hall and de Lint (2004, p. 360) depict how police in negotiations adroitly communicate the law and lessons of self-regulation to union organizers as ‘the substance of communication is to shift the onus of security onto the parties themselves’. Police inform protest organizers of their legal liabilities and responsibilities, which can be a daunting revelation for some. Union picketers have a specific agenda and an immediate identification with the local workplace, colleagues and union history. Hall and de Lint’s research (2003, p. 223) indicates a major shift to ‘liaison approach policing’ of labour disputes in the 1990s. Police can play a pacifying role behind the scenes; set the ground rules of appropriate behaviour; and even delay taking decisive action in order to give the protagonists or the courts time to settle the dispute. But if police are called to a dispute, either major or minor, they implement control and determine what is acceptable and unacceptable picketing behaviour. In recent decades, the relationship between police and unions in Australia has been evolving from hostile confrontation to greater contingency planning, negotiation and accommodation. No longer do employer demands for police action against picketers meet immediate adherence as often happened between the two world wars (Baker, 2007a).

As Gillham and Noakes (2007) assert, limitations have always existed to negotiated management between protesters and police. Such shortcomings can exist in police-unionist encounters, but they are especially evident in contemporary mass anti-globalization protests when police face a hazardous, unpredictable and challenging task when attempting to liaise with diverse, unrepresentative and unstructured masses of people, many of whom have rejected the hierarchical structure. Such denunciation is an anathema to police agencies with their graded ranks and strict chain of command. Also, police do not always adhere to negotiated agreements with protest groups. Ericson and Doyle (1999) detail how the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 1997 reneged on a negotiated accord with student protesters prior to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit at the University of British Columbia. Police, employing preventive arrests, censorship and violent dispersion, rejected protest rights of political expression in favour of ‘security concerns’. New Zealand, noted for its liberal democratic approach, witnessed its national police force renege on a series of arrangements with ‘Free Tibet’ protesters during Chinese President Jiang Zemin’s visit in September 1999. New Zealand Police aided Chinese officials by using buses and sirens to obstruct noisy protesters (chanting, singing, whistling and drumming) and Tibetan flags and placards from Zemin’s hearing and sight (Baker 2007b).

Much public order policing controversy and reform in Britain has been a response to industrial disputation (1926 general strike, 1972 Saltley, Grunwick 1977, 1984–1985 miners’ strike, 1987 Wapping dispute) and soccer hooliganism (Geary, 1985; D. Waddington, 2007). The Association of Chief Police Officers’ Manual of Guidance for Public Order evolved from the 1980s onwards during periods of industrial dissent, racial riots and football hooliganism in particular. Unions today often contain intelligent and articulate members who are capable of demanding interaction with police leaders (a far cry from football hooligans). Willis (2001, pp. 15–26) argues, from a UK perspective, that policing dissent in general has become less adve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Police Management of Pickets and Protests: A Global Perspective
• 2  Police and the Marikana Massacre
• 3  Death by Panic: Bloody Sunday on the Fremantle Wharf
• 4  Death by Deliberate Aim: Shootings at Port Melbourne
• 5  Death by Misadventure during the Rothbury Riot
• 6  Lessons for Managing Pickets and Protests
• Bibliography
• Index