Public Order Policing and Liberal Democracy

Policing, like liberal democracy, is dialogical. It is a relation between representatives of a state authority and denizens of a political community. The nature of this relationship is fundamental to the effective and proper application of order maintenance resources. Its nurturance requires visible observance to norms, including adherence to the rule of law by both parties. Where either party is widely perceived to be out of step with requirements of a civil dialogue, the status of the relationship becomes parlous. Thus there is a burden on the part of authorities to seek the most limited intrusions against freedoms, even where there is a threat to public order. Accordingly, public order policing is defined as “the use of police authority and capacity to establish a legitimate equilibrium between governmental and societal, collective and individual, rights and interests in a mass demonstration of grievance” (de Lint 2005, p. 179).

Foundational principles and values are informative but not determinative of practices. The institutionalization of police in liberal democracies allows that there is a balancing act between multiple mandates (crime prevention, law enforcement, order maintenance) and authorities (the lower judiciary, the public constituency, the executive, epistemic authority or “best practice,” etc.). In the meantime, as pointed out by Arendt, the ideals of democracy are contradicted by the material needs of capital accumulation; capitalism pulls liberalism through its elites toward totalitarian practices (Arendt 1994, p. 282). In managing the gap between the ideals of democracy and the tendency toward authoritarian liberalism, police adapt practices that respond to this structural dilemma (Davenport 1995). Whilst struggling to bridge the widening gulf between social and economic winners and losers, they maintain in this dialogical enterprise the legacy of liberal democratic values.

At the same time, and as pointed out by Waddington (2007), among others, when we typify public order policing as expressing the fundamental nature of the police in a given liberal democratic state or the character of liberal democracy (as described earlier), we may be taking from a very skewed standard and atypical expression of police mobilization. Waddington notes that the policing of public order is “universally” performed to be “set apart from ‘normal’ policing;” the policing of violent disorder is “different from routine policing” where the police are duty-bound to be partisan (Waddington 2007, p. 375). He cites Dahrendorf (1985) to make the case that there may be some partiality built into public order in the sense that some “disorder and violence (whatever its cause) challenges the capacity and will of the state to secure its own homeland” (Waddington 2007, p. 375). Here is the crux of the problem: What quotient of independent agency do we attribute to police and specifically public order policing? Does adapting public order police practice bring about more liberal democracy to civil society? Or do we take the view that the real change agent is in the ideological and structural condition in the civil society to which police react?

In this article I consider public order policing adaptations under liberal democratic rule. I first provide a synopsis of the role of the policing of protest, dissent, or mass public disorder across the formative development of modern policing in a sampling of countries (England, Canada, and the United States). I review and refine the argument that police institutionalization and organization is very much predicated on the public order problem. I then turn to analyses of styles and strategies of public order policing, taking and expanding the connection between police autonomy and liberal rule to demonstrate a double-edge: the alignment with neoliberalism cuts both ways to support and rebuke authoritarianism. I take public order or protest policing as a bellwether, signaling transitions toward and from the project of liberal democracy.

Public order policing is a subfield of sociology, political science, criminology, and, in particular, police studies. For half a century or more, analysts have drawn from psychology, political science, sociology, law and legal studies, and other fields to attempt to explain and to a lesser degree predict police and protestor conduct or action. Across divergent disciplinary traditions, analysts have queried sites of protest as exemplary of the condition and representations of government. In political science and sociology, international relations and behavioral science, social movement analysts have reviewed public order against such divergent factors as political opportunity structure, resource mobilization, securitization, incapacitation, and more. Legal studies scholars and criminologists have interrogated how law and legal instruments are designed and deployed in support of regulatory institutions that, by and large, attempt to broker the divide between the ideals of liberal democracy and the practical expediency of order maintenance and law enforcement. An offshoot is dedicated to understanding public order as it expresses features of policing as a common good under liberalism.

As noted by Warner and McCarthy (2014, p. 567), “much of the existing research on protest policing has been motivated by the view that police response to protest is a reaction to the threats directed at elite political and financial interests.” Turk (1982) has rightly argued that police view protest relative to the challenge to the authority of the state. It has also been demonstrated that police moderate their conduct against the significance of the authority that is being challenged (Waddington 1993) and that the greater the symbolic and instrumental authority represented in protester targets, the more firm the material and symbolic police response in defense of that authority (Ericson and Doyle 1999). To reframe the previous quote, then, much of the public order policing literature may be interpreted as inquiring into police adaptation to the necessity of maintaining two related but distinct authorities: the authority of police and policing in its more or less independent expression as an institution of liberal democratic governance and the authority of political and economic elites in their everyday manifestation of (neo)liberal governance. As described in the first half of this article, it is from their relative insulation from public and private authorities that police draw their power in liberal democracies. Understanding public order policing, it follows, requires an appreciation of how that power interacts with antiauthoritarian or counterideological expression.

In Anglo-American countries the historical role of police in supporting the nascent state and repressing its antagonists is not hard to summarize. As Manwaring-White (1983) and Spitzer and Scull (1977, p. 21) have pointed out, the establishment of public police is intimately connected to public disorder. The development is one “which all along the line has been modified by parliamentary and police reaction to violent disturbance—just as it is today” (Manwaring-White 1983: p 5). Associated with this, police establishment and development is linked to proletarianization (Vogler 1991, p. 94), industrialization (Geary 1985), liberalization (Critchley 1978; Elias 1994), and political ideology (O’Malley and Palmer 1996). As Fielding (1991) notes, police legitimacy has drawn from the earliest years of institutional development on the autonomy of the police from both the military and the executive function of government. He adds, citing Evans (1974), that “the ‘stock’ of police is lowest when protest is at its highest and the gap widest between sections of the public and government.” In police development and reform, as we shall see, police have other attachments that also influence their legitimacy, giving the quest for autonomy a double edge.

Although a matter of no small dispute among scholars (Palmer 1988; Critchley 1978; Fielding 1991; Uglow 1988; Vogler 1991; Thompson 1993), the observation of astute contemporaneous leaders that there was a crisis in public order in parts of England and Wales in the late 18th and early 19th century has been repeatedly made. Industrialization caused tectonic ruptures, resulting in high levels of unemployment, poverty, and social and political unrest. This was expressed in significant sectarian and agrarian disturbances and outbursts. Public demonstration was a primary means by which masses expressed grievances and consolidated or challenged norms, and it often involved the seizing or destruction of common or private property and/or violent altercations between contesting groups. As expressed by Hobsbawm (1968, p. 446) “no other European country has so strong a tradition of rioting as Britain … The riot, as a normal part of collective bargaining, was well established in the eighteenth century.”

Yet, the extent and intensity of disorder, in addition to being potentially regime threatening (Shorter and Tilly 1971), also indicated the gradual, if sometimes explosive, expansion of the political franchise beyond a narrow propertied elite. The system of peacekeeping and order maintenance through an amateur civil authority of magistrates, constables, or grand jurors on one hand and military force on the other was perceived as corrupted by sectarian loyalties and pushed beyond its rudimentary order maintenance function by industrialization and urbanization. A new mercantile class was particularly keen to establish a quasi-civilian body that could bring a less transitory order, one less dependent on the bridging capacity of the local magistrates on one end and the most draconian measures of martial law on the other. In no small part, mass public disorder may be summarized as presenting authorities with the problem of how to manage the local/central relationship.

If the extent and intensity of protests against political elites or elitist or sectarian structures and policies were a major precursor to the formation of police, it may be added that police insularity from the populace was both an initial target and a result of some significant public affray. Here it may be noted that the Gordon Riots (1780), which are often cited as significant in this regard, while initially an anti-Catholic protest against the Papists Acts of 1778, also targetted “the architectural symbols of a newly powerful criminal justice system,” including the “aggressive new-style policing and pre-trial process” associated with Henry Fielding’s police initiative located in Bow Street (Hitchcock 2012, p. 189). The legitimacy of social control was being robustly reviewed from below, necessitating a salient modifier to reformist initiative (in this case, private policing) whenever reform was insufficiently sensitive to the emergent demos. If public disorder and mass protests played a significant role in mobilizing efforts to establish a modern police, significant police development and reform was also met by protests (Palmer 1988).

The Peace Preservation Act, which became law in Ireland in 1814, authorized the lord lieutenant to proclaim a district to be in a state of disturbance and therefore “requiring an extraordinary establishment of police” and a “peace preservation force,” called “Peelers” (after their staunch advocate, Robert Peel), to assist local magistrates (MacMahon 2004). Once declared, a stipendiary magistrate could dispatch a force of up to 50 experienced yeomanry officers as trouble-shooters to put down disturbances (MacMahon 2004). As recounted by MacMahon, this new force was effective in conditions in the west of County Clare, Ireland, where crime was widespread, noncompliance with the law was rampant, and the local constabulary, consisting of only one or two magistrates with no means of enforcing the law, “was of a very bad description.” The need to create a readily available force that was sufficiently established in local jurisdictions to give it de facto authority and yet also sufficiently removed from the most concrete labor interests was arguably a driving force behind the establishment of the new police.

Once established, the new police interacted with an increasingly complex web of local/central and public/private authorities and were more or less supported in their relative institutional and professional autonomy. Having provided sufficient evidence of success, the Irish Constabulary’s formation in 1822 provided that the constables would live in rural barracks. In other words, they would be insulated to the greatest extent possible from improper entreaties of the policed locality. And so it was regarding the establishment of the Metropolitan Police of London: constables were instructed and supervised on their choice of residence and their off-duty employments; the legitimacy of the new police was announced through their presentation in uniform, in the disassociation of their housing (in barracks or section houses), and in the symbolism of their being marched out to their beats, as if emanating out from an impervious center.

As organized labor became institutionalized throughout the early to mid-20th century, police response to industrial strife and strikes gradually accommodated these mass demonstrations. In addition to the continuous development of police knowledge, capacity, and autonomy the type (economic or social-political), extent, and intensity of protest registered a significant impact. Regarding protests against perceived economic or industrial injustices or unfairness, the gradual legitimation of worker rights led to, as Geary (1985) summarizes, violent confrontations (e.g., Featherstone in 1893) and baton-wielding police strikebreakers (e.g., South Wales Coal in 1910) in “the Great unrest” prior to World War I. This was supplanted mainly by an era of legalized nonviolent picketing and rare “pushing and shoving” between 1915 and 1980. As collective bargaining and worker’s rights were gradually institutionalized so too was industrial conflict ritualized or normalized (Tilly 1978), so that police could expect “responsible unionism” under the rule of law.

The countering of public disorder and dissent was also pivotal in the development of federal Canadian policing. In British North America, as Jamieson (1971) and Kealey (1984) argue, protest and/or riot was a primary vehicle of political expression by a growing constituency of itinerant laborers and subsistence farmers that was otherwise unable to find sufficient political purchase or representation. As in Britain, in Canada the establishment of police forces was justified in no small part by the perceived incapacity of the amateur constabulary and militia to quell a variety of public order (industrial, settler–native) disturbances. Public and official criticism of response to major public demonstrations or riots led to the first major government inquiries into British North American policing systems and to calls for its reform. These inquiries began to question blatant sectarian repression by police or militia as increasingly unpalatable to leaders, the reformers among whom wished to establish permanent police organizations modeled after reforms in Great Britain.

In 1868 the Canadian government established a 12-member Dominion Police with a mandate to protect government buildings, investigate federal crimes such as mail theft, and, more broadly, undertake the political policing that was being undertaken by a handful of men of the Western Frontier Constabulary. The Dominion Police provided government with a body of informants in a systemic effort to stem security threats, and Fenian counterinsurgency was the springboard for its establishment (Parnaby and Kealey 2003). The Northwest Mounted Police (NWMP), whose founding and funding had often been contested in the Canadian Parliament, was mandated to bring “order and good government” to the western and northern regions of the country and specifically to manage relations with the First Nations. Commissioner French, in organizing the NWMP, saw its core mission in the west’s development, including the pacifying or assimilating of natives into the treaty and reservation system and the colonizing of claimed territory with secure supply lines to settler communities. In little more than 10 years after its establishment, the NWMP put down the most significant insurrection, the North-West Rebellion (or Resistance), a violent insurgency against the Canadian government by the Metis and aboriginal allies. They also made defending the Canadian Pacific Railway part of their mandate, guarding it “against Indians, settlers and their own employees” (Brown and Brown 1978, p. 24, italics added).

Indeed, in a fairly short period of time, labor became a critical area of concern, and the NWMP were increasingly tied to policing strike activity around mines and lumber camps. Macleod (2000) notes that the “perceived necessity to have a national police force that could be called upon to back up local authority when order was threatened brought about a new government plan for the police.” Leading up to the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, the new organization’s “primary mandate” was to monitor labor and political organizations for subversion and to act as “a mobile reserve in case local police forces could not cope” (Macleod 2000) According to Brown and Brown (1978), the NWMP began breaking strikes for the Canadian Pacific Railroad during the 1880s, and by the 1920 and 1930s, the NWMP was the most notorious strikebreaker in Canada.

In the United States it was largely a similar story. There were more than 35 major strikes between 1830 and 1860 in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston alone, and nearly 23,000 strikes between 1880 and 1890 (Spitzer and Scull 1977, pp. 21–22). By the 1850s, the protection of railroad lands, lines and goods from pickpockets, employee theft, and robbery spurred the railway companies to hire private detectives to prevent loss. Wilson (1973, p. 589) argues that the development of the first centralized police systems between 1845 and 1858 was attributable not to crime rates or even the routine improprieties of quotidian conduct but rather to the enormous and growing levels of civil strife and mass public disorder that emerged with the shifting burden of order maintenance services between public and private providers.

The reality is more nuanced. As Lane (1967) notes, mid-19th-century American police did not experience the kind of centralized control of their public and private lives that reduced their “organic involvement” in the policed community. That organic involvement played out in the corruption of police and municipal politics by ethnic divisions (Fogelson 1977), and it also meant that police were likely to avoid putting down riots. Reformers enacted and established state police where they could, to discredit party machines and control wayward municipal force. In the meantime, there was much public anger leveled at private security. Following the 1892 Carnegie Steel Company strike in Homestead, Pennsylvania, the US House of Representatives issued a report critical of private policing of labor by Pinkerton detectives (Weiss 1986, p. 93). As Weiss recounts, it was the offensive practices of Pinkerton’s men together with what the violence, mass industrial strife, and corruption suggested about the capacity and legitimacy of local and state governments that resulted in states’ legislating and establishing state police that were capable of mobilization for larger strikes.

The burden of strike-breaking, pacification, and/or maintaining public order fell back on the state just as the scale of the problem (the first nationwide strike was in 1877 and left 26 dead “in Pittsburg alone” [Rathbone 2005, p. 1]) made it acutely burdensome. Nonetheless, well into the 20th century private security forces and federal troops continued to be responsible for much of the extraordinary death toll. According to Rathbone’s (2005, p. 3) synopsis of the US record, even when they were the primary social control agent, the police at all levels (municipal, state, and federal) were deployed (and, as I have indicated, reorganized) to act against “anti-capitalist and un-American” labor protesters and unions, which they did “often with no real justification.” As Rathbone notes, this began to change only with a softening of government attitudes between the 1930s and 1950s that in turn influenced the passing of legislation and judicial findings that were less anti-union, permitting less public and violent settlement of labor grievances.

As Manwaring-White (1983) concludes of British police development, so Monkonnen (1981, p. 550) concludes of 19th-century US police development—namely, that it is linked to a tipping point beyond which the legitimacy of the extant system can no longer hold; civil society can no longer withstand extensive public or urban disorder. As a grievance and demand develops coherence, it mobilizes leadership, develops organization and structure, steps into adjacent or external resources, and then makes demands or launches challenges. As the protest “wave” gains in extent and intensity, it forces accommodations and cooptation or threatens the regime with an existential crisis. In this regard, social movement is appreciable as a “parabolic pattern” (Tarrow 1989); there are “waves of protest” that grow in extent and intensity, reach a crisis, and then recede. Accordingly, the US labor and industrialization protests presented some significant cresting but gradually ebbed into the middle half of the 20th century, releasing some of the pressure on policing and police organizational adjustments. It is not that labor was ultimately successful in achieving its progressive aims, but with recognition and then normalization or ritualization of the conflict process in collective bargaining a violent outcome was increasingly avoided. In addition, the post–World War II context of a growing economy and, until the late 1970s, decreasing social and income inequality (Piketty and Saez 2003), was not one in which industrial strife necessitated a fight to the death. In Britain, as per Geary’s analysis (1985), an incipient period characterized by violent confrontation and police protection of strikebreakers gave way by 1915 to nonviolent picketing in which strikes experienced occasional baton charges (until 1945), after which there was a long postwar period “of rare violence or pushing and shoving.”

In the postwar period, the next stage of major development in police reform (and space requires much parsing here) was precipitated by sociopolitical protests in the 1960s and 1970s, specifically the antiwar, race, and police riots in urban centers and university campuses throughout the United States. According to some policing scholarship (Platt et al. 1982), police played a part in aggravating the social and political malaise that goes back to the scandal of corrupt machine politics¹ exposed in the Wickersham Commission (National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement 1968). Seizing on this criticism of police involvement in community politics, US police reformers, including August Vollmer (1920s) and his protégé O. W. Wilson (1950s), sought to sever the “organic involvement” of police and community, championing a so-called professional, scientific, legalistic, and technocratic model that was ideally impervious to the corruptions of locality. But it was precisely this impervious (legalistic) detachment that was cited in the negative by federal commissions (United States and Kerner 1968; Graham and Gurr 1969; Scraton 1987) investigating serious public disorder in the 1960s. According to the National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorder (United States and Kerner 1968, p. 80), widespread American rioting in the mid-1960s was caused by police practices, which ranked number 1 in the grievance categories of blacks (unemployment was number 2 and housing was number 3). The committee concluded with a “remarkable degree of consensus” that police could do much to stem the violence by changing their response to a “balanced approach to crime” (Currie 1998, p. 185). It concluded that reactive, mechanical policing tended “to aggravate the already volatile nature of the urban poor” (Platt et al. 1982, p. 128). Empirically, the committee found that “some 40 percent of the prior incidents” (United States and Kerner 1968, p. 69) involved alleged abusive or discriminatory police practice, many of which attended routine patrol, and that the riot process was set off by the accumulated reservoir of grievances and exacerbated by shortcomings in the police control effort (United States and Kerner 1968, p. 67). In the aftermath, as Platt et al. conclude, two-pronged policing would be pursued: a community-oriented prong that borrowed from the service and civility ideal of the new police and a harder, preventative countering prong that would step up police capacity particularly to interdict large-scale public disorder crises (de Lint and Hall 2009; Balkan et al. 1980, p. 104).

A view to re-embedding policing on the predicate of public disorder also appeared in Canada and Britain. In Britain, the Brixton Riots of 1981, as interpreted by inquiry by Lord Scarman, was a consequence of significant sociopolitical disenfranchisement. Scarman (1982) cited police ignorance to the local context as the immediate trigger: two officers, in stopping a driver to look for drugs in conditions of heightened tensions between police and that the black community of Brixton, should have prioritized keeping the peace over law enforcement. In remarks that echoed the Kerner Report, Scarman noted that the collapse of the police liaison committee at the same time as a ratcheting up of enforcement (use of the paramilitary Special Control Group) and a widely distrusted complaints procedure (that arguably failed to address police misconduct) set the scene for the rioting that followed (Jefferson 1990). In Canada, a thread of reports (Task Force on Policing in Ontario 1974; Metropolitan Toronto 1982; Normandeau and Leighton 1990), while crediting the military tradition and the legalistic approach with facilitating uniformity and improving standards and “giving forces the ability to deploy men swiftly and efficiently to meet crisis situations,” also blamed the approach for its contribution to false or “forced objectivity” (Task Force on Policing in Ontario 1974, p. 20).

The modern historical development of policing in Anglo-American countries has been shaped in no small part by the accommodation, incorporation, co-optation, and/or suppression by authorities of open political opposition (encompassing industrial [or economic] and social strife). This suggests the default, formative structure or template: liberal policing is expressed in and draws its legitimacy from occupying a space of relative autonomy between private and public, state and market, and central and local authorities. In mass demonstrations of grievances, it has been a challenge to restrict the use of police authority and capacity to establish a legitimate equilibrium between governmental and societal, collective, and individual rights and interests (de Lint 2005, p. 179).

This is not to suggest that there is a clear continuity in the historical pattern. With regard to sociopolitical disorders in Canada, the United States, and Britain, major events continue to challenge police in their relative independence from political authorities. It may be argued, as per Jefferson (1990), that neoconservative leaders beginning with Thatcher wished to reassert a more authoritarian model of policing, in part through challenging public order police to act repressively through paramilitary mobilization. At the same time, as per Johnston (1992), neoliberalism was demanding that the provision of public services, including public policing, mimic the discipline of the so-called free market. Consequently, industrial disputes reverted to more violent form in the 1980s. As we shall see later in this article, an authoritarian variety of liberalism is now prominent throughout the West, placing new pressure on the tradition of consent policing.

Until perhaps the 1970s, protest (or public order) policing could be characterized by the terms escalated force, to denote a one-dimensional repressive, brutal, and heavy-handed coercion (della Porta 1998; della Porta et al. 2006). As they articulated with liberal authority, police reacted to an uptick in the extent and intensity of protest with a concomitant escalation of their opposing strength. According to Gillham (2011, p. 637), police responded to mass protests by “trampling on protesters’ expression and other rights,” resorting frequently to mass and unprovoked arrests, and relying often in the first instance on indiscriminate coercion (Noakes and Gillham 2006, p. 101). The ineffectiveness of many occasions of public order policing was in part directly related to how it manifested police authority, and this was directly challenged in the United States and Great Britain following various federal inquiries referred to previously.

From the mid- to late 1970s to the end of the 20th century the negotiated management model began to replace the escalated force approach (McPhail et al. 1998, pp. 55–57; US President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice 1967). Negotiated management is defined by McPhail, Schweingruber, and McCarthy (1998) as centrally involving a negotiation of orders and grounded in the anticipated benefits of demonstrator–police communication and liaison. They analyze an instrumentality of protest policing according to five dimensions, including First Amendment Rights, toleration of community disruption, communication (between police and protestors), use of arrests, and use of force (p. 51). Their approach incorporates the “soft power” approach of community policing (McPhail et al. 1998; McPhail and McCarthy 2005). These and other scholars (della Porta, Peterson, and Reiter 2006; de Lint and Hall 2009) noted a decline in the reliance on the resort to arrest and force as opposed to communication or liaison as public order became a specialist police activity. Accordingly, as experienced actors involved in social movement organizations took lead roles in managing expectations that incorporated reasonable objectives and strived to keep the outlier actors in their organization in check, there was increased ritual and diminished ambiguity. Not only is liaison policing or negotiated management more selective in the application of repression, but it is also more developed in requiring co-responsibility through the permit system and the designation of protest leaders. Hall and de Lint (2003) suggest that by formalizing and institutionalizing march routes, protest permits, and field marshals—all hallmarks of what they call the liaison and others call the negotiated management approach—tangible benefits are realized by state and police officials (i.e., lowering operating costs, greater intelligence and predictive function, public perceptions of police legitimacy, de-escalation in confrontations).

By the end of the 1990s (and particularly after major protests in Vancouver in 1997 and Seattle in 1999), negotiated management began to falter. Following a “documented absolute decline in repressive policing” (arrests and the use of force) between 1960 and 1995 (Rafail, Soule, and McCarthy 2012, p. 736), Gillham (2011), Vitale (2005), and others (Mansley 2014) noted a hardening of police tactics.² According to significant current research, strategic incapacitation is now the normative expression of public order policing (Noakes and Gillham 2006; Gillham and Noakes 2007; Gillham 2011; Gillham, Edwards, and Noakes 2013). It incorporates “a range of tactical innovations aimed at temporarily incapacitating transgressive protesters, including the establishment of extensive no-protest zones, the increased use of less-lethal weapons, the strategic use of arrests, and a reinvigoration of surveillance and infiltration of movement organizations” (Gillham and Noakes 2007, p. 343). Protestors are sorted by taxonomy as either “contained” (good) or “transgressive” (bad). The former are those characterized as predictable (the symbolic institutionalized group manufactured by negotiation management, i.e., field marshals), while the latter is featured as unpredictable and uncooperative, having the potential to breach proscribed custom and advocating for more or less “nonfigurative articulations” (Gillham 2011).

As Rafail, Soule, and McCarthy (2012, pp. 740–741) point out, one widely researched explanation for the changing profile of public protest is the institutionalization, routinization, or professionalization of social movements on one hand and police response on the other. As several scholars have pointed out, this drive toward the routinization and ritualization of protest met its Waterloo at Seattle in 1999, when police and some protest organizers recognized that a change in tactics predicated the failure of police to avoid the embarrassing spectacle of seemingly being outmaneuvered - the protests having achieved derailment of the World Trade Organization negotiations. Now not only the most disenfranchised groups sought to retool. Platforms of ritual and routine expression gave way to leaderless affinity groups, a tactic that dodged police responsibilization efforts, that is, to place named protesters in positions of responsibility for the actions of all in the organization. From the point of view of police, post-Seattle, negotiated or brokered agreements could no longer be assumed to suffice to predict protester actions. Irregular affinity group organizations explicitly rejected taking leadership responsibility and therefore did not make reliable protest management “partners” in a compliance regime.

As per Lichbach and Gurr (1981, pp. 4–5), open political conflict between authorities and challengers, defined as “physical confrontations between collective actors over political issues,” may be measured by properties including the “extent of human effort mobilized by challenging groups” and the “intensity of the action” measured by deaths caused. Researchers have accordingly found it useful to distinguish open conflict according to the target of the grievance, so that protest concerns the policies followed by regimes and rebellion concerns “who rules and through what structures” (p. 5). The strategic incapacitation style of public order policing is primarily “‘aimed at neutralizing transgressive protestors’” by deploying specific repertoires of action that include “‘surveillance and information sharing, proactive policing, and the elaborate control of space’” (Noakes and Gillham 2006, p. 350).

Taking from the observation concerning extent and intensity, it is useful to place public order on a continuum whereby the character of the demand issue is relevant inasmuch as it excites those two factors. The intensity of police action is a product of the absence or lack of the full institutionalization (and, concomitantly, ritualization) of the actors’ responses to the underlying grievance (Tilly 1978). At the same time, I would add that the character of that institutionalization is regime dependent, so that in autocracies police and military may be institutionalized to carry out more intensive countering actions whereas in liberal democracies the military is more restricted from participation and the police are institutionalized to use nonviolent strategies. In liberal democracies, as per Dean (2002), there is an acute dilemma in that public police lose legitimacy as defenders of the extant order where the extent and intensity of their actions in that defense are perceived as not sufficiently self-limiting.

Therefore, an alternative explanation for the shift in some protests to strategic incapacitation (or what de Lint and Hall [2009] refer to as “intelligent control”) is that, as neoliberalism continued to unfold, it invited greater authoritarianism on the part of the government sector. Since the extent and intensity of police response is conditioned by the threat to material and symbolic goods, a threat’s extent and intensity is predicated on a view to protect the strongest ideological position.

Explanations for public order policing cannot ignore structural or ideological conditions. Much of the work that problematizes it laments a creeping militarization or securitization that is periodically rebuffed by reformers’ recourse to claims making that revivifies democratic rights and liberal freedoms (e.g., Scarman 1982, President’s Task Force 2015). As argued by Neocleous (2010) and Kienscherf (2014), this remains a pluralist account. In other words, it accepts that the state is adaptive, albeit imperfectly, to multiple authorities.

In opposition, Neocleous provides an analysis that resituates police not as relatively autonomous but as institutionalized from the outset as a martial arm of the capitalist state, as part of the fabrication of an “international and domestic bourgeois order” (2011, pp. 154–155). The concept of pacification rejects the “key liberal myth” that domestic police services is separate in principle and practice from the war-making function (p. 156). For Neocleous (2013), the concept of security as pacification “capture[s] the way in which war and police are always already together” that police and war-making operate “conjointly under the sign of security, and the way in which this operation is entwined with the process of accumulation” (p. 9).

Holding on to the idea of war as a form of conflict in which enemies face each other in clearly defined militarized ways, and the idea of police as dealing neatly with crime, distracts us from the fact that it is far more the case that the war power has long been a rationale for the imposition of international order and the police power has long been a wide-ranging exercise in pacification. (p. 9)

Kienscherf (2014) similarly critiques public order by collapsing internal/external security and suggesting that consensus and coercion are both sides of the coin of pacification, with the stronger stuff given to those who are incapable or unwilling to participate in the processes of accumulation and involved in dangerous “circulations.” Pacification in this respect signals a “single apparatus” that is deployed to “target particular populations” based on “rule and warfare” akin to “counterinsurgency” tactics that are embedded in biopolitical technologies.

Community policing and paramilitary policing thus ought to be seen as part of an overall pacification program that targets individuals, populations and spaces according to their position on the scale of liberal development: beneficent, albeit sometimes highly paternalistic, means are directed at those who may still develop these abilities, while those who are seen as embodying a threat to the social order are met with coercion.

(Kienscherf 2011, p. 520)

It is well-documented in wider studies of societal changes between the late 1970s and the late 1990s under the rollout of neoliberalism that the state relies on a more authoritarian manifestation of government strategies and practices (Scraton 1987; Hall 1988; Bruff 2014; O’Malley and Palmer 1996; Pratt, 2000). In such a view, police are institutionally calibrated alongside other criminal justice agencies to defend a “hard knocks” liberalism that divides civil society between compliant self-governing subjects and dangerous others. As per Dean (2002), liberal governments adapt the norms that convert “the substantive content of freedom” into enforcements “by sovereign means” and do so dispensing with the so-called pluralist contest between political ideologies. As part of the machinery of the state, police secure “governmentally contrived markets” or turn common or public domains into places of private exchange. Dean (2002) argues that it may be “a necessary feature of all liberalisms” that govern through freedom to “use authoritarian liberal rationales” and methods, targeting coercion at those who do are not deemed ready or capable of governing themselves in accordance with the content of those liberal norms (pp. 45–47). As O’Malley and Palmer (1996) and others argue, the measure of policing under neoliberalism is not as it was under classic liberalism, nor as it was under welfare liberalism. The pacification model appears at first blush to answer the necessity of providing an explanation that does justice to both material and ideological factors. It allows us to account for placement of public order police action on the continuum of intensity and extent by reference to the adaptation of the state to security threats (whether based internally or externally) that continuously “fabricate the international and domestic bourgeois order.” (Neocleous 2011: 155)

However, the pluralist account and the post-Marxist critique make insufficient reference to actor attraction to a meta-frame or ordering principle. By ordering principle I mean the ideological basis on which regions, societies, and various other collectivities are said to be in step with collective security arrangements so that, for instance, practices to make orderly arrangements are more or less aligned with the spread of (a certain kind of) growth, development, and democratization. As Buzan (2000,) states it, liberal economic values “stand without serious challengers as the main organizing principle for the international political economy” (p. 12). The extent and intensity of ordering practices, including public order policing, varies with an interpretation of existential threat, which is always an expression of the constituent ideological force. In the policing of mega-events, such as meetings of the G-20, local-, regional-, or national-level authorities are more or less aligned or harmonized with transnational and supranational ordering authorities and arrangements with which they interlock through the common discourse and practices of neoliberalism.

With due regard to the post-Marxist critique there will be incongruous or competing interests where an ordering principle is presumably maintained as public police and domestic/private/foreign security and intelligence agencies seek to harmonize public order arrangements in such mega-operations. The misalignment between liberal consent and authoritarian neoliberalism confronts police agents or actors with such contradictions (cf. O’Malley and Palmer 1996). But where I would part company with that critique is in its fixing of police in the firm grasp of the practices and interests that compel authoritarian neoliberalism. Neoliberalism depends on the (at least notional) viability of negative freedoms, and the entrepreneurial capacity of the individual requires a continuous review of liberty against authoritarian intrusions (Donzelot 2008).

Under authoritarian neoliberalism, the widening gulf between the (growth requirements of) financial and economic elites and the (stability demands of a) political community of modern representative democracies is increasingly parlous (Arendt 1973, p. 12). In Europe, austerity measures are the object of mass public demonstrations, and in the United States, two decades of aggressive policing has sparked “police riots” and placed police legitimacy back into public focus (President’s Task Force 2015). Where authoritarian policing supplants liberal consent policing, the liberal democratic basis of order unravels, beginning at sites of mass protest. Public police are expected to predict, distinguish, and sort the noncompliant in intelligent control or strategic incapacitation and in the meantime redirect focus from the social structural and ideological, but this task sweeps up staunch advocates of liberal democratic ideals. The administration of the minimal ordering that is expected stretches police to breaking in minding that gap.

In light of the this and to turn the argument back in favor of the pluralist account, during the intensity and extensiveness of “waves of protest” it is precisely the vulnerability of liberal police to reinstitutionalization into authoritarian, militarizing or securitizing forces that, in turn, are insufficiently representative of common and public interests that forces police back into a wider dialogue (de Lint 2014; Smith 2012). Public order under liberal police (Dean 2002) depends on a view of freedom that references the dependency of the political order on the viability of common origin and vitality of individual freedom. The common origin of politics and law (Ewick and Silbey 1998) places limits on the covert and visible coercive technologies, particularly in public, common, or contested space.³ Although senior police officer commitments are guided by government philosophy, they do so confronting the growing inequality gap. This is why Smith (2012) recommends a “presumptive case against the adoption of measures to prevent civil disobedience from occurring or impacting on the public realm” (p. 827). Since, as Mansley (2014) notes, the “depth of democracy” may be measured by the intensity or “level of violence in society” (p. 3), and, as Smith argues “negotiated accommodation”—defined as a commitment to dialogical trust relations with protest groups—is the clearest means of avoiding escalating violence, police will be compelled to expand protest group accommodations.

The pluralist account, despite its faults, does not for the most part oversimplify the police function: it does not relegate or downgrade it to the mere instrumental preservation of the status quo ante and/or its authorities. It supports the more nuanced view that liberal police continue to occupy a dynamic and vital position between plural authorities; police are sometimes driven to defend the relative autonomy that liberal democratic structures and institutions demand they occupy. Given the necessity that democratic liberalism modifies police, protester, and audience expectations, it is illiberal police practice (often in an understanding of the proper quantity and place of violence [Elias 1994]) against which public order policing is reviewed. The extent and intensity of police and protester action (including violence), as noted, is associated with type of regime. Regimes, as per Lichbach and Gurr (1981, p. 10), cannot for long periods sustain high-intensity responses to protest and rebellion. While public audiences everywhere have been treated to an image here or there of widespread disorder in the countering of public protests by police or other security actors, the lengthy duration of noncompliance in sustained violent disorders and conflicts is a marker of regime disarray. In agreement with Smith (2012), I would argue that police must and will pull away from the ritual subservience to the ordering regime to save that precious institutional autonomy. Where they do not they will be among the very first of the regime’s casualties. It is inevitable that new reforms and new reformers call for a resuscitation of “human rights policing.” For example, Adu Colau, a former activist (cofounder of the anti-eviction group Platform for People Affected by Mortgages and now mayor of Barcelona), called for police “to be at the service of human rights, and not of the banks” (Colau 2015).

In sum, police in liberal democracies have made several adaptations, and there is an emergent recognition in the shifts from a historical model of ordering arrangements in “escalated force” to a number of current models, including “negotiated management” (della Porta and Reiter 1998), “liaison” (Hall and de Lint 2003), “strategic incapacitation” (Gillham 2011; Gillham et al. 2013), “command and control” (Vitale 2005), “intelligent control” (de Lint and Hall 2009), and “pacification” (Neocleous 2011; Kienscherf 2014). In accounting for the relative agency of public police in the contest over order, I would add that public order policing is developed iteratively or in dialogue with the development of a vision of proper order against the unfolding of social movement dynamics, professional and technical expertise, and regime demands.

In addressing the question of how public order policing must express the character or nature of a regime or political system, I have suggested the argument that the relative independence of liberal police is a two-way street: although police will strive to align, as discussed, with emergent ideological and structural practices (e.g., authoritarian neoliberalism), such a concordance is at odds with liberal police’s more fundamental attachment to liberal democratic political authority. Since the right to protest and disagree publicly with government policy is built into the definition of liberal democracy, the extent and intensity by which authorities succeed in suppressing that protest and dissent is a measure of the absence of an essential constituent, constitutional property. In this regard, strategic incapacitation or intelligent control is a signal that police are stretched to breaking in minding the gap between the ideals of democracy and the material appetite of a regime.

Let us briefly consider the question from the point of view of transitory or weak states. Thin or weak states by definition possess neither the civil society institutions and instruments nor the soft police and security means to withstand radical government transitions. Even were police up to the task, thin civil society and government authorities means that there are arguably insufficiently robust parties with which police and security may engage in prodemocracy dialogue. The most likely consequence when there is an intensive and extensive antigovernment protest is that police will amalgamate with security forces in support of either violent repression or a military-security coup. In such a context, police independence is least likely to express itself in support of liberal democratic political community values.

Although there are numerous instances in which US and British leaders have expressed almost instantaneous support for insurgents who have, with the aid of police and security forces, toppled elected governments (e.g., in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Ukraine), it should not be assumed that such support is due to these leaders’ attachment to liberal democratic governance. Protests against austerity measures in Greece, Spain, and even Great Britain, although triggered by equivalent experience of economic and political disenfranchisement, see those same leaders advocating tough controls by police on protests.

This most basic threat, weakness, or contradiction goes back to the alignment of government and police authority itself. This may be put as follows: where there is a longstanding grievance culminating in extensive and intensive protest and rebellion against government structures and authorities, there will be a tipping point at which police will (and possibly must) switch sides. Given the multiplicity of police authorities and roles, including keeping the public peace, a multiplicity that is intended to provide some distance from executive command, police reliance on law enforcement will reach a breaking point. In the West, we can readily perceive this when it comes to the interaction of police in non-Western regimes. It is much more difficult to perceive “at home.”