Protest policing in the US adheres to outdated, aggressive tactics that only deepen tensions. There is a better way

Nothing less than a crackdown (Image: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Recent scenes in Ferguson, Missouri, could have come straight from the streets of Cairo or Bahrain: police carrying shields and in full body armour firing tear gas and pointing their weapons at largely unarmed protesters. The fact that this was the US makes it seem all the more shocking.

The St Louis suburb has at times resembled a war zone following the shooting and killing of unarmed 18-year-old resident Michael Brown by a police officer on 9 August (see also “More autopsies on a body don’t mean more answers“). The large protests that followed Brown’s death were met with a harsh response from the authorities – a response that has been criticised by US president Barack Obama, among others.

One of the most worrying aspects of this drama is what it reveals about US crowd-control methods. In Europe, many police forces have started to accept that the traditional model of public-order policing, which treats all crowds as potentially dangerous, often makes things worse. This model dates back to the French Revolution, which seeded the idea that crowds turn people into primitive, dysfunctional automata, and that the only way to deal with protesters is to attack, disperse or “kettle” them – a draconian form of containment.


Such tactics are slowly being abandoned in Europe because social psychologists have shown repeatedly that they can have a dramatic and often catastrophic effect on how people in crowds behave. They have found that the way a protest is marshalled has a greater influence on whether it ends peacefully or violently than the actions of any hooligan minority within the crowd. This puts the police in a powerful position, even before they take aim with rubber bullets or tear gas.

Overly robust

A good example of how overly robust policing can change the dynamics of a crowd for the worse is the protest in London on 31 March 1990 against the poll tax. The 250,000 who turned out came from diverse backgrounds and groups, united by their opposition to the government’s plans for a community charge to be levied on all, with little regard to income. Despite the presence of thugs and opportunistic troublemakers, the vast majority were peaceful, right up to the point in the afternoon when police attempted to disperse them with baton charges. Finding themselves the target of what they considered to be indiscriminate police violence, the people in the crowd began to view the police as the enemy and so fought back. The ensuing riot did not end until 3 am the next day.

Clifford Stott, a social psychologist and criminologist now at the University of Leeds, UK, was in the crowd that day, gathering data. He typifies a modern breed of crowd researchers who prefer to study group dynamics from the inside, notebook and recorder in hand.

Stott, Stephen Reicher at the University of St Andrews, John Drury at the University of Sussex and others have overturned the old idea that crowds are always “mad and bad”. Their research shows that rather than losing their minds, people in crowds are tuned into the shared interest of those around them, be it opposition to the poll tax, support for a particular sports team, love for a band they’re watching, or, in the case of an emergency, fear of what could be about to happen.

As a result, says Reicher, crowds are highly cooperative places. From the outside, “they look incredibly dangerous, as if your life would be under threat”. But from the inside, he says, “they seem carnivalesque and friendly. People are in many ways much more sociable than they would otherwise be.” This also makes them responsive. If those policing the event become aggressive, then everyone in the crowd is likely to feel threatened together.

Social identity

This “social identity” model of crowd behaviour appears to fit with most cases for which we have relevant data, starting with the Bristol riots in the UK in 1980, and including numerous football matches monitored by Stott in Europe. It also tallies with the conclusions of the Kerner Commission into race riots in Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles and other US cities between 1965 and 1967. In Europe, this message has got through to authorities, and in many places the way major football matches and other public events are policed has changed dramatically – a standout example of research influencing policy.

The new approach involves establishing communication between police and the crowd, and targeting genuine troublemakers only. In the UK, police forces in London, Sussex and elsewhere field liaison officers in blue bibs at public events, who interact with protesters and build rapport.

In the US, however, police still seem to cling to the old “riot squad” methods. They are wedded to the idea that large protest groups are inherently dangerous and that force is the best way to deal with them. The so-called “war on drugs” and fears of terrorism post-9/11 have seemingly encouraged US authorities to equip their law enforcement agencies with military-style weapons and other high-octane hardware. Containment takes precedence over negotiatione.

Hyper-aggressive tactics

A report by the American Civil Liberties Union, published in June, noted that “American policing has become unnecessarily and dangerously militarized, in large part through federal programs that have armed state and local law enforcement agencies with the weapons and tactics of war… The use of hyper-aggressive tools and tactics results in tragedy for civilians and police officers, escalates the risk of needless violence, destroys property, and undermines individual liberties.”

The lesson of the protests in Ferguson is that a new approach is needed. The US authorities have been here before: after the 1960s, the Kerner Commission found that in Detroit the disorder was reduced where soldiers established contact and built up a rapport with residents. The authorities didn’t listen then. Will they listen now?

This article will appear in print under the headline “Gunning for trouble”