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 protestors. 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. The large demonstrations 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 protestors is to attack, disperse or "
Such tactics are slowly being abandoned in Europe because social psychologists have demonstrated time and again 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 against the poll tax in London on 31 March 1990. The 250,000 who turned out that day came from diverse backgrounds and interest groups, united by their opposition to the government's plans for a community charge levied on all, with little regard to income. Despite the presence of thugs and opportunistic trouble-makers, the vast majority were peaceful, right up to the point when police tried to disperse them with baton charges. Finding themselves the target of what they considered to be indiscriminate police violence, they began to view the police as the enemy and to fight back. The ensuing riot did not end until 3am the next morning.
Clifford Stott, a social psychologist and criminologist now at the University of Leeds, UK, was in the crowd that day. He typifies a new 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 lose their minds, people in crowds are instead tuned into the shared interest of those around them, whether that be opposition to the poll tax, support for a particular football 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 where relevant data has been collected, 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 academic research influencing public policy.
The new approach involves establishing communication between police and the crowd, and targeting only genuine troublemakers. In the UK, police forces in London, Sussex and elsewhere field liaison officers in blue bibs at public events, whose job is to interact with protestors and build rapport.
In the US, however, police appear still 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 encouraged US authorities to equip their law enforcement agencies with military-style weapons and other high-octane hardware. Containment takes precedence over negotiation every time.
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