‘That is not facilitating peaceful protest. That is dismantling the protest’: anti-fracking protesters’ experiences of dialogue policing and mass arrest

ABSTRACT

In the wake of the death of Ian Tomlinson at the London G20 protests in 2009, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of the Constabulary proposed a number of reforms aimed at making public order policing strategies more ‘human-rights compliant’. One of the most significant developments has been the introduction of Protest Liaison Officers whose role is to build links between police and protesters through the establishment of dialogue and relationships based on trust. These developments have led to a burgeoning scholarship in public order policing in recent years. Whilst some studies have documented the development of ‘dialogue policing’ strategies, none have yet captured the complex interplay between these practices and the more overt forms of coercion and control experienced by protesters. In this paper, we begin to fill this lacuna. Drawing on unique data on the experiences of anti-fracking protesters – a hard to reach group whose narrative has not been presented in the academic literature to date – we contrast official accounts with the material conditions faced by protesters. Focusing on protesters’ experiences of both dialogue policing and mass arrest, we find little evidence of the progressive ‘shift’ reflected in official public order policing discourses. Rather, we argue that dialogue policing can have a legitimising function, enabling the police to define protest groups as irrational and ‘uncooperative’ and therefore ripe for violent policing.

KEYWORDS:

• Protest
• public order policing
• dialogue
• fracking

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Simon Halliday, Robert Reiner, David Whyte and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. ‘Lock-ons’ and blockades are techniques used by protesters to make it difficult to remove them from their place of protest. Blockades tend to involve protesters linking arms and legs in a line or circle, whereas ‘lock-ons’ often involve the use of equipment such as bicycle locks, padlocks and chains.

2. The offences in this category are: common assault (1 arrest), assaulting a police officer (2 arrests) and threats to kill (2 arrests).

3. Breach of Conditions of Bail is not a criminal offence, but Section 7(3) of the Bail Act 1973 confers power upon a police officer to arrest a person if he or she has reasonable grounds for believing that that person is likely to break any of the conditions of his bail or has reasonable grounds for suspecting that that person has broken any of those conditions.

4. The formal title is the National Special Branch Intelligence System (see Catt v Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis [2015] UKSC 9, para 20, per Lord Sumption).

5. Amendments to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE 1984) under the Criminal Justice Act 2003 extended police bail powers to allow officers to attach conditions of bail prior to any decision to prosecute. These highly discretionary powers require that the officer regards the conditions as being ‘necessary’ to ensure, for example, that the person in question does not commit an offence while on bail (PACE 1984, s. 47).

6. These figures were collated from media reports, court observations and liaison with defence solicitors.

7. The ‘organisers’ of a planned march must give six days written notice to the police which specifies the date, time and proposed route, and the name and address of the organiser (Public Order Act 1986, s. 11).