The psychology of crowd policing

Le résumé fourni par la source

Traditional psychological explanations of crowd theory have decontextualised events \nand obscured the fact that crowd incidents are typically inter group encounters. This \nhas led to research being rooted in the crowd whilst ignoring the other parties who \nmay be present - including the police - and how events develop as function of the \ninteraction between the two. The studies reported in this thesis attempted to provide \ninsights into the decision making of senior public order officers of the Metropolitan \nPolice utilising a variety of qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Four main \nstudies are reported. In the first study (of police training) a grounded theory analysis \nrevealed that the police have a fear of the crowd which is seen in a concern with \nprovoking violence by being too harsh or permitting violence by being too lenient. The \nbalance of harshness and leniency is informed by accountability considerations arising \nfrom internal and external sources and the phase of violence the officers perceived \nthemselves to be in. In the second study, the relationship of accountability and phase \nwas manipulated in a controlled experimental setting providing supportive evidence for \nthe grounded theory model. The third was a series of pilot participant observation \nstudies which looked at the policing of the Muslim festivals of Eid al Fitr and the Sikh \nfestivals of Vaisakhi. These studies raised practical issues and was used in designing \nthe fourth study which looked at the 'in vivo' processes of decision making during the \nbiggest public order event in London of 1999. This confirmed and extended the focus \non the importance of accountability concerns in senior officer decision making; firstly \nby showing them to be more complex than was originally thought, secondly by \nshowing how those in different positions within the police had different accountability \nconcerns, and thirdly by showing that such different concerns could lead to conflict \nbetween different sections of the police. The implications of this research and the \nfoundations of future research are also discussed.

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