9 Public order policing in the twenty-first century
Police forces in Britain thus entered the 2000s having spent several decades honing tactics, equipment and command structures appropriate for riot control situations. They drew on approaches informed by paramilitary/counter-insurgency techniques. Use of these in protest and riot situations was sometimes successful in preventing and quelling disorder but was often seen as overly coercive and confrontational.
In recent decades, there has been something of a revision and rebalancing of public order policing towards ‘negotiated management’, a more sensitive form of policing protest which involves:
… a greater respect for the ‘rights’ of protesters, a more tolerant approach to community disruption, closer communication and cooperation with the public, a reduced tendency to make arrests (particularly as a tactic of first resort) and application of only the minimum force required in order to control a situation.
The policing of disorderly demonstrations and riots, nevertheless, remains a complex and demanding aspect of police practice. Policing inherently fast-moving and unpredictable events which often involve violence can be extremely stressful and demanding for the officers involved, as the next activity will explore.
Activity 5 The impact of the 2011 riots on police officers
While the success or failure of public order policing is of crucial significance to the smooth functioning of society, it is important also to investigate and understand the impact of involvement in such exceptional duties on police officers.
Figure 13: Police in Manchester during the 2011 riots [Description: Photograph of a group of police officers in riot gear with shields, helmets with visors and batons running down a street. There is broken glass and debris on the ground.] Source: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/06/reading-the-riots-manchester-salford
Read the excerpts below from The Guardian in which police officers from Manchester and London detail their experiences of the 2011 riots and its aftermath. As you read, consider the following question:
What do these quotations indicate about the preparedness of the police for the riots, and about the psychological aftermath for the officers involved?
In Manchester:
‘As a police officer, you develop this sixth sense,’ said a 39-year-old constable. ‘Everybody knew something was going to happen.’ The challenge was working out where the disorder would begin. Initially, most resources were deployed in Manchester city centre. The level of unrest in Salford was underestimated. ‘Five-, six-hundred people stood around this roundabout, vehicles parked everywhere … people piling up ammunition at the sides of the road, helicopters up. Some [people] were laughing, you could see the anger in the faces, and you’re thinking: it’s only a matter of time.’
There was silence in the van. ‘It was very, very quiet – almost eerie, like when you jump into a swimming pool and you can’t hear anything.’ Then the crowd began hurling blocks of concrete at the vans. ‘We were shouting at each other: “Get your shields up – the window's gonna go in!”’ They fled, took stock, and returned on foot to disperse the crowds.
[...]
One of the missiles – a breezeblock – struck him on the head. ‘I've dropped to the floor, my shield is on the floor. For that period of, like, five to 10 seconds, I just took blows all over the body … After I’d been hit in the head and [got] back up on my feet, somebody was shouting: “Kill the f**king pigs!” That’s when I almost felt a shiver through my spine.’
The bronze commander who issued the order to withdraw from Salford – ‘van up and get out!’ – was a 45-year-old superintendent. He likened what happened in Salford to the movie Black Hawk Down, the 2001 war film about disastrous operation by US armed forces in Somalia.
His officers had become the focal point of violence, were seriously outnumbered and were ‘just making it worse’, he said. The superintendent clambered on to one of the departing vans. Sat in the same vehicle was a 35-year-old constable, who described his boss as looking dishevelled. ‘He had no shield,’ he said. ‘We just got absolutely annihilated and battered.’
In London:
When the van door slid open, he was struck by the noise. ‘Chanting, shouting, things smashing, bricks, bottles, sirens in the distance.’ He and his colleagues joined a line of about a dozen police who were battling 300 rioters. ‘It’s difficult to breathe with the smoke. The helmet steamed up immediately, so I could just about see where I was going.’
In the distance, the constable saw the rioters had access to a building site. ‘You could see a hole in the fence. And that was just this infinite source of brick and scaffolding and everything that you want to throw.’
Making a hasty retreat, the officers managed to scramble back over the trolleys – except him. ‘I couldn’t quite get off [the trolley],’ he said. ‘Next thing I knew, all I could feel were hands clawing down the back of my overalls, trying to grab me and pull me back. There was a moment where I thought: if I get dragged back, there’s so many people here, it’s so dark and it’s so chaotic, that might just be it. I might just be gone. Just disappeared.’
[...]
By now, tens of thousands of people were out on English streets to riot and loot – most of them in London. Police deployed in the capital that night would use words like ‘outnumbered’, ‘frustrated’, ‘scared’ and ‘overwhelmed’ to describe what happened.
[...]
At the height of the chaos, the riots may have felt like defeat to the police. But after months of reflection, the widespread view among officers appears rather different. They admit there were times they lost control, but ultimately, officers point out, they regained order – with fewer injuries and deaths than might have been expected.
Many police believe they averted civil unrest on a grander scale: the disorder in 2011 was, at times, more intense than the riots of the 1980s, but it lasted four days rather than several months
[...]
The constable with the iPhone, who was almost dragged off a shopping trolley in Tottenham into a mob of rioters, only realised the full impact of that night when he went to see a counsellor. Asked to fill out an ‘anxiety indicator’ questionnaire, he was told: ‘You know, we start to get concerned when people score about 20 or more. You’ve scored 86.’
The constable wrote out his experiences on a piece of paper and reflected: ‘I genuinely thought there was a chance I was going to die when I got stuck on those trolleys […] But yeah: that little incident will stay with me forever.’
Discussion
At the time, officers on the front line of the 2011 riots felt it was chaotic, frightening and that they were losing control. In Manchester a dishevelled superintendent in charge signalled a withdrawal from Salford. Officers felt resources were late in arriving or in the wrong place. In London officers described feeling ‘outnumbered’, ‘scared’ and ‘overwhelmed.’ They said if felt like they were ‘defeated’ but later, on reflection, that they did regain order with fewer injuries and deaths than expected. Individual officers show immense bravery, fearing for their lives. One officer described that the events of 2011 would stay with him forever.
Violent public disorders are shocking events which call into question the daily stability of society on which we all rely. The police have a greater range of equipment and tactics to draw on than ever before, but the policing of violent disorder, while relatively infrequent, remains one of the most challenging aspects of policing.
In the final section of this week, you will consider how the history you have covered is relevant to contemporary public order policing.