Effective crowd policing: empirical insights on avoiding protest violence

Abstract

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to connect sociology, criminology, and social psychology to identify specific factors that keep protests peaceful, discusses empirical examples of effective peacekeeping, and develops practical peacekeeping guidelines. Design/methodology/approach -The analysis systematically compared 30 peaceful and violent protests in the USA and Germany to identify peaceful interaction routines and how they are disrupted. It employed a triangulation of visual and document data on each demonstration, analyzing over 1,000 documents in total. The paper relies on qualitative analysis based on the principles of process tracing. Findings -Results show that specific interaction sequences and emotional dynamics can break peaceful interaction routines and trigger violence. Single interactions do not break these routines, but certain combinations do. Police forces and protesters need to avoid these interaction dynamics to keep protests peaceful. Communication between both sides and good police management are especially important.Research limitations/implications -The paper highlights the need to examine the role of situational interactions and emotional dynamics for the emergence and avoidance of protest violence more closely. Practical implications -Findings have implications for police practice and training and for officers' and protesters' safety. Originality/value -Employing recent data and an interdisciplinary approach, the study systematically analyzes peacekeeping in protests, developing guidelines for protest organizers and police.Even demonstrations for peace can result in violence between protesters and police. Such violence has occupied media, the public, and various research fields for decades. Sociology, criminology, and social psychology have usually focussed on factors leading to violence. Scholars rarely ask what keeps protests peaceful to develop specific policy-oriented policing measures. Police studies call for applied research that contributes to improved policing and for research going beyond setting the organizational context as the main determinant of policing (Brodeur, 2005, p. 51 ff).This paper comparatively analyzes peaceful and violent demonstrations to determine empirically how and why demonstrations stay peaceful. Violence is defined here as a physical action with the intention of causing injury or death to another person. The paper asks three questions: Which factors ensure a peaceful protest? What do empirical cases look like in which peacekeeping is effective despite difficult circumstances? Which practical guidelines and measures can be derived from these cases to prevent protest violence?

Reclaiming the everyday: the situational dynamics of the 2011 London Riots

“…Any attempt to reconstruct interactional dynamics whether through interviews (Orsini, 2015;Gross, 2016), archives (Matt, 2011;Weenink, 2014), videos (Nassauer, 2015), or a mixture of sources (Petersen, 2002) runs into two problems. One is whether emotions can in fact be reliably reconstructed from those sources.…”

“…A mixture of methods may in fact be required to uncover the actual processes and mechanisms which underlie confrontational situations (McAdam, Tilly and Tarrow, 2008). But, whichever methods are used, micro-sociological research can be easily fitted into the pragmatist research cycle (Reichertz, 2013) of abduction of theories, deduction of hypotheses and inductive testing (recent examples of these various stages include Collins, 2012;Stevens et al, 2013;Weenink, 2014;Orsini, 2015;Nassauer, 2015Nassauer, , 2016Gross, 2016).…”

Lessons Learned from Crime Caught on Camera

“…These pioneering studies about crime based on CCTV footage are remarkable because of the degree of detail they provide into the behavior during crime events. Some of them provide insights that we simply had no knowledge of before ( Dabney et al 2004 ; Lindegaard et al 2017 ), and some refine already existing theories ( Jobard and Lévy 2011 ; Klusemann 2012 ; Levine et al 2011 ; Moeller 2016 ; Nassauer 2015 ; Piza and Sytsma 2016 ).…”

“…CCTV recordings can also document relevant static characteristics of places and persons that have thus far escaped attention. For example, variations in the spatial design of shops ( Lindegaard, Bernasco, and De Vries 2016 ) or the organization of crowds during demonstrations ( Nassauer 2015 ) can be easily observed and used to develop specific hypotheses about variations in criminal opportunities. CCTV recordings can also provide knowledge about dynamic characteristics of criminal events that are difficult to reconstruct in retrospective.…”

“…CCTV footage was also used in studies of less common phenomena such as genocide ( Klusemann 2012 ) and demonstrations ( Nassauer 2015 ). These studies were concerned with sequential patterns of interactions in the course of the crime event, including the very moment where a conflict turned into violence.…”