Preparing for action: police deployment decisions for demonstrations

ABSTRACT

The objective of this paper is to analyse police decision-making about protest policing. While previous quantitative studies of protest policing rely mainly on newspaper data, this study presents an alternative design to tease out how the police decide irrespective of what protesters do during demonstrations and to study ‘net’ protest policing. We propose to focus on the decisions police officers take before the actual protest event takes place. Drawing on the existing literature of protest policing we test hypotheses about police preparation for protest drawing on two concepts: police knowledge and protest threat. To test our hypotheses, we use a unique dataset of police records of demonstrations in Brussels, Belgium, between 2001 and 2010. The dataset contains full data about the official demonstration permit requests submitted by protest organisers. Our results confirm our expectations and show that police previous experience with protesters and the level of threat are important factors in explaining decision-making prior to protest events.

KEYWORDS:

• Social movements
• protest policing
• Belgium

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Our data do not include last minute changes in police deployment. However, 40% of authorisations are requested in the week prior to the event and are thus filled in very close to the event. We are thus confident that last minute changes are very rare and in case they take place do not affect dramatically decisions about deployment.

Additional information

Funding

Nina Eggert gratefully acknowledges support from the Swiss National Science Foundation Early Postdoc Fellowship [Grant No. P2GEP1_148657].