From the earliest known formulations of political thought, there has been a fear, a

fascination as well as an impetus to govern the Hoi Polloi; where Plato sought to expel the poets

because of their potential for demagoguery,1 Marinetti attempted to refine the poets and join the

crowd; producing a way to direct the mass which was both acceptable and controllable.2 This

imperative to control and govern the unpredictability of crowds, possibly stemming from an

anxiety of the unknown especially with regards to their capability for violence, sees its modern

formulation in terms of the strategies employed for policing political demonstrations.

This paper seeks to survey a broad array of literary resources created by and for state policing

institutions with a view to finding any possible relationships they may have with social and

political theory; in other words, the paper seeks to characterize whether, how and to what extent

the conceptualizations of crowds found in policing literature correspond to the

conceptualizations found in academia.

Considering the possible political impacts of social theory, how conceptual models may

be picked up and utilized by interested parties and how, eventually, these models may develop

a life of their own, it is apt to point out that the interpretation of facts is contingent upon a variety

of variables including politics. In addition, it is possible that theories which permeate into the

‘non-academic’ world may be utilized without the extensive and specific criterion that the

authors of these theories might have proposed. The integrity of content may shift quite easily

when traversing through various fields of study.3 The question of how prevalent the social theory

of crowds, policing, protest is within modern policing literature and crowd control strategy

becomes more pressing if we are to acknowledge the ‘dissent always increases repressive

behavior’ thesis found in a large majority of the literature.4

However, there are several qualifications that need to be addressed before we continue.

In the first place, we need to distinguish between actual police action, or their actual behavior,

and the more fluid, amorphous and relatively generalized doctrine found in policing literature;

the influence that manuals, police reports and police training has, and how they reflect on the

field is something that can be contested and problematized.5 In a similar vein, we must

1 See Plato & Bloom, 1991.2 Poggi, 2009.3 See Bourdieu, 1999.4 Davenport, Christian, and Cyanne Loyle. "The States Must Be Crazy: Dissent and the Puzzle of Repressive Persistence." International Journal of Conflict and Violence 6.1 (2012): 75-95. Web.5 “...there is no causal link between the guidelines presented in police literature and training programmes, on the one hand, and actual police behaviour, on the other. This is not to deny any relation between the two, but simply to emphasize that other factors may be no less important than what is stated in various

recognize that even if this said doctrine is explicitly stated, it is often a result of a formalized,

systematic and products of a highly institutionalized process. This may be helpful, for explicit

links to academic resources become easier to make, but it may also be hindrance, for it

becomes slightly more difficult to fully characterize the sets of beliefs and thoughts that such

institutions retain. More simply, we cannot fully characterize ‘doctrine’ because there is a limit to

what policing literature the public may actually be able to access. Given this inevitable veil, we

must have an expanded view of policing literature that includes such things as police guides and

training manuals regarding crowds and protest, publicized police reports , visual analysis of

tactics employed, publicized, declassified and classified police and government reports

regarding specific events.

In a world characterized more and more by movements that utilize ‘uncivil’ disobedience,

generated by the 1960’s counterculture as well as resistance movements against neoliberal

globalization,6 it becomes increasingly necessary to build efficient apparatus of securitization

against anarchic crowd formation.

and in turn, how this affects police operations with regards to their susceptibility towards

the use of violence. The hypothesis is that police literature which is influenced by classical

theories of crowds, like the work of Gabriel Tarde, Gustave Le Bon and Raymond Momboisse

which characterize crowds as, in brief, being amoral, unthinking and having a high propensity

towards violence, would reflect upon policing procedures on the field.

Our methodology would require three parts. First, browsing and reviewing a wide variety

of modern police literature, specifically with regards to field training manuals for controlling riots /

mass disobedience, that are open to the public. Next, an exegetical analysis would be required

to expound and find connections and similarities between the police literature and classical

theories regarding of crowds and riots. Lastly, and this would be the most difficult part, a

quantitative analysis which would compare our literary findings with working police tactics within

associated times and locations wherein which the texts were used. Of course, a couple of

barriers present themselves: first, localized literature will be difficult to find compared to region

based literature; second, it will be difficult to try and assess to what degree particular police

literature coincides with more classical understandings of crowds, compared to other police

manuals… contents of police training materials should not be overstated. ” (Borch, 596)6 Laudani, Raffaele. Disobedience in Western Political Thought: A Genealogy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. Print.

literature; third, it will also be difficult to fully test the hypothesis, because even if we were able

to find diverging ‘modern’ (‘negotiated accommodation’) and ‘classical’ police literature in

different regions, whether they actually experienced a protest situation and were able to utilize

the strategies proposed is another issue, which is why a time-analysis would be particularly

useful; lastly, although the relationship between academic work, police literature and proper

police implementation of the literature seems intuitively appropriate, whether the links actually

exist will be another possible barrier.

Possible Sources:

Borch, Christian. "Crowd Theory and the Management of Crowds: A Controversial Relationship." Current Sociology 61

(2013): 584-601. Print.

Cronin, Patrick, and Stephen Reicher. "A Study of the Factors That Influence How Senior Officers Police Crowd Events:

On SIDE outside the Laboratory." British Journal of Social Psychology 45.1 (2006): 175-96. Print.

Le, Bon Gustave. The Crowd: Study of the Popular Mind. New York, NY: Classic International, 2009. Print.

Moscovici, Serge. The Age of the Crowd: A Historical Treatise on Mass Psychology. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire:

Cambridge UP, 1985. Print.

Plotz, John. "The Return of the Blob or How Sociology Decided to Stop Worrying and Love the Crowd." Crowds. By

Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Matthew Tiews. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2006. N. pag. Print.

Schweingruber, David. "Mob Sociology and Escalated Force: Sociology's Contribution to Repressive Police Tactics."

The Sociological Quarterly 41.3 (2000): 371-89. Print.

Smith, William. "Policing Civil Disobedience." Political Studies Association 60 (2012): 826-42. Print.

Stott, Clifford, and Stephen Reicher. "Crowd Action as Intergroup Process: Introducing the Police Perspective."

European Journal of Social Psychology 28 (1998): 509-29. Print.

Vider, Stephen. "Rethinking Crowd Violence: Self-Categorization Theory and the Woodstock 1999 Riot." Journal for

the Theory of Social Behaviour 34.2 (2004): 141-66. Print.

Waddington, David. "The Madness of the Mob? Explaining the ‘Irrationality’ and Destructiveness of Crowd Violence."

Sociology Compass 2.2 (2008): 675-87. Print.