The police won't make your point

Notes on a 20-year revolution in police handling of protests. Spoiler: you probably won't like it.

The death of Ian Tomlinson, London 2009

In the early 2000s mass demonstrations against global trade were all the rage, and the broad rule was that police forces would give protesters as good as they got. I remember the 2001 Summit of the Americas in Quebec City as three days of tear-gas smoke. In Washington, D.C., not long after, thousands of people gathered to protest against the meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. On Sept. 27, 2002, the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department and the U.S. Park Police surrounded Pershing Park, across 15th Street from the White House South Lawn, and arrested hundreds of protesters. Of course many weren’t protesters: they included journalists, tourists, just people. Many were bound hand and foot and kept on a gymnasium floor overnight. Their class-action suit lasted for years and led to over $13 million in settlements.

The District police chief in those days was Charles H. Ramsey. By 2005 he had published a public letter of apology for the mass arrests. It wasn’t a narrow technical mea culpa over procedure, but the announcement of a sea change in Ramsey’s personal attitude, from enforcing order to safeguarding peaceful protest. In a city like Washington, “there will be more demonstrations, and undoubtedly arrests may occur,” he wrote. “But I promise that I will do everything in my power to ensure that people can come to our city to peacefully protest and enjoy the constitutional freedoms that generations of Americans have fought and died for.”

Ramsey’s journey didn’t stop there. By 2011 he was the chief of police in Philadelphia and president of a national law-enforcement think tank, the Police Executive Research Forum. His best advice on handling demonstrations was as follows:

My advice is to avoid arrests if at all possible. You have to make up your mind in the beginning that there are certain behaviours you just have to tolerate. You can’t lock people up for everything they do. … Protesters will often send out groups who try to get arrested. They’ll do all kinds of things to provoke you into making an arrest. Maybe they’ll block an interesction, but so what? Just direct traffic around them and let them sit there.”

I raise this anecdote because we are once again in a debate over police behaviour in Canada. Protests from Palestine sympathizers in Toronto have led to a cross-party consensus that police aren’t being tough enough on the protesters — and that, in choosing to give the protesters an easy time of things, they’re essentially punishing the residents of largely Jewish neighbourhoods for being Jewish.

The Toronto Sun front page on the police bringing protesters coffee was a little short of a classic, but still a solid effort:

I should note that I almost certainly have more friends living near Avenue Road than I do among the protesters. I believe Israel has a clear right in international law to defend itself against heinous attack. I’m not fussed if you disagree, because unlike some of my colleagues, I actually expect there will be a range of deeply held opinions about such a terrible conflict. What has fascinated me since the Freedom Convoy occupation of downtown Ottawa in 2022 is what guides police thinking about these big protests.

In other words: If an entire demonstration is clearly illegal — or if some of the behaviour within an otherwise legitimate protest is clearly illegal — why don’t police simply move in and start making arrests? Why not simply enforce the law?

I have written a lot about these questions in the last two years. I’m fascinated by a growing consensus in Western policing that the job of police isn’t always to rush to make arrests when there’s a protest. The quotation that became the headline for my interview last year with Eric Stubbs, the new chief of the Ottawa Police Service, could hardly have been more clear:

Stubbs’s attitude is hardly unique. Charles Ramsey’s change from hard enforcement to reluctant enforcement isn’t one cop’s eccentricity, or an overreaction to getting sued. Since police don’t get a lot of admirers when they facilitate rather than punishing protest, I thought I’d try once again to explain what they’re thinking.

What follows is adapted from some remarks I delivered to a police audience a month ago. So almost everything that follows was written before the Avenue Road protests became contentious.

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Ed Maguire, a criminologist at Arizona State University, has written that the main model for public-order policing used to be the escalated force model. We’re talking about the 1950s and 1960s here; the term “escalated force” comes from a 1967 paper Maguire cites. It was based on the assumption that “a sufficiently dominant show of force by police would encourage protesters to back down and comply with their directives. This assumption led police to continue escalating the level of force until they achieved compliance with their demands.” Basically, the role of the police was to take the fight out of a crowd. Perhaps not surprisingly, this often backfired horribly, and when it did, Maguire writes, you got outcomes like Selma and the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention.

In the 1970s, a completely different model arose, the negotiated management model. This is based on the belated realization that in a democracy, people are going to protest. “Under the negotiated management model, police respect and even help facilitate the First Amendment rights of protesters,” Maguire wrote. “The police have a greater level of tolerance for disruption, often communicating ahead of time what they will tolerate and what they won’t. Using the negotiated management style, the police recognize that communication with protesters is necessary to achieve mutually agreeable outcomes.” Studies showed the shift from repressing to facilitating protest led to a sharp decline in the number of open clashes between police and protesters.

But by the 1990s, American policing started to return to a more confrontational model reminiscent of the 1960s. This was largely because the anti-globalization protests in Seattle and elsewhere saw the rise of more radical groups within protests — the “Black Bloc” and others, more violent and less inclined to discuss anything with the police. Partly it was because police forces, often poorly trained had access to a growing range of military-style equipment designed to get unruly crowds back under control. This brings us back to where I started, with Charles Ramsey hogtying anti-globalization protesters in Pershing Park.

The continent-wide wave of unrest following the police murder of George Floyd put renewed urgency on these questions in the U.S. A series of reports from the Police Executive Research Forum put a renewed emphasis on trying to de-escalate rather than escalating.

Similar trends have been going on in the UK, for similar reasons. The pivotal event in changing British police attitudes toward protest control was the death of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests in London in 2009. I really encourage readers to watch the video embedded in this Guardian article, which tells one of the saddest stories I ever heard.

Tomlinson was a working-class merchant. He wasn’t involved in the protests, may not even have known they were going on. He’d been drinking at a friend’s house. Stumbling home, he walked into the lines of police whose job was to contain the protests. Clearly confused, he couldn’t find a route home.

Meanwhile the police constable who ended up killing him, Simon Harwood, was having a bad day. He was assigned to drive a police van, but he got out to arrest a protester who was spray-painting graffiti on other vans. The constable grabbed the protester, who squirmed out of his jacket and broke free. Harwood then wandered around, expressing his frustration: jamming the empty jacket into the face of another protester, pulling a TV cameraman down on his back onto the ground.

Then Ian Tomlinson walked in front of him and wouldn’t clear a path. Video cameras captured Harwood’s baton hitting Tomlinson hard in the back. He fell on the groud, ruptured an internal organ, and was dead several minutes later.

Look, sometimes police have to put on the heavy equipment and move in to enforce public safety. But the death of Ian Tomlinson is a reminder that these operations almost never look like an increase in precision and efficiency. They look like more chaos. What’s more, aggressive police tactics almost always unite a crowd and make it more desperate, rather than calming it. Have you ever been surrounded by police?

The importance of differentiation — of making sure you don’t treat everyone in a protest crowd the same — is one of the lessons learned from GODIAC, a 10-country field study of police techniques in the European Union from 2010 to 2013. The ungainly acronym stands for Good Practice for Dialogue and Communication. It involved police forces from Austria, Germany, Sweden, UK, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus and Romania. One of the conclusions they reached is the importance of “the acknowledgement of variety in a crowd (different identities, ways of acting and of reacting). Specifically in conflict situations, when action must be taken against part of the crowd, ‘it becomes important to treat the generality of crowd members in a friendly way.’”

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There is a country that didn’t participate in GODIAC. After years of brutal escalation between French police and protesters in several French cities, Le Monde has began closely covering the difference in police tactics in France versus most of the rest of Europe.

In France it’s as though the sharp escalation of police tactics that we saw in Seattle, Quebec City and Washington’s Pershing Park never stopped. As factions within protest groups grew more unpredictable, French police kept escalating. With these results. French police kill more people in public-order settings than any other European police force: in Southern France in 2014, in Marseille in 2018, Nantes in 2019, an extended stretch of chaos last summer in Marseille.

Part of the problem is the fondness among French police for what are delicately labelled “less-lethal weapons” — Flash balls, rubber pellets, stun grenades. Since 2019, Paris police have made frequent use of BRAV-M, which stands for Motorized Brigade for Repression of Violent Action. Police travel on motorbikes, two on each vehicle, several motorbikes to a pack. It allows the police to hit protesters and looters without warning, to escalate rapidly, to carry heavy weaponry deep behind barricades. The first few minutes of this video are spectacular:

Perhaps you’ll be more surprised than I was to learn that, when the police show up as masked motorized brigades straight out of Rollerball, one of the first things they sometimes do is threaten anyone in their path.

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I know some of this will seem quite distant from the situation in Toronto this year, or in Ottawa two years ago, when all anyone wanted was a few quick arrests. And indeed there are going to be occasions when arrests have to happen. But the preference of police forces in Canada and elsewhere for a less interventionist approach — extending up to coffee delivery — clearly leaves some observers upset and unsettled.

All I can say is that Canadian police have learned their own tragic lessons, much like their counterparts elsewhere and along a similar timeline. I started thinking about these issues when the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest became an open fight over crowd-control doctrine within the Ottawa Police Service. It was a focus of Trish Ferguson’s Rouleau Commission testimony as deputy chief of the OPS. Later, in my book about the commission, I wrote about OPP Inspector Marcel Beaudin’s testimony; that part became an excerpt in the Globe.

The OPP started to change its approach to demonstrations after they went in heavy at Ipperwash in 1995 and Dudley George ended up getting killed. Beaudin is a member of Henvey Inlet First Nation, a tiny Ojibwe community north of Parry Sound on Georgian Bay, and his entire career has taken place in the aftermath of the Ipperwash disaster. He was the guy who wandered around Ottawa during the Convoy, wondering why the Ottawa police were trying ineptly to play tough and why nobody in the federal government was communicating with the protesters.

Most of the literature survey I just gave you, from the US, UK, EU and France, is adapted from remarks I made to members of the Ontario Provincial Police’s Provincial Liaison Team in Kingston a month ago. Beaudin invited me to speak to his colleagues after reading my earlier coverage. So I spoke to the PLT before the current controversy over protests related to Gaza and Israel, although I told the OPP team I expected that police decisions over handling Gaza-related protests would soon become controversial. I should emphasize that the OPP is not the force involved in the Avenue Road closures; that’s the Toronto Police Service. Finally, though I was pleased to be invited to speak to people who deal with these kinds of decisions every day, of course every interpretation I offer here is mine alone.

As I’ve said repeatedly — especially in this analysis of some polling on reaction to police response to protests in BC in 2020 and Ottawa in 2022 — different situations will upset different people. To me it’s highly contradictory to argue the police were too rough on the Freedom Convoy protesters, who had the run of downtown Ottawa for most of a month, and too gentle on the pro-Palestine protesters who’ve rather thuggishly decided to make their point in a Toronto neighbourhood whose only distinguishing feature is that a bunch of Jews live there. But I know people who can navigate that contradiction without difficulty.

What I hope we can all agree is that police forces are not better equipped than the rest of us to make fine distinctions between protest groups based on values, but quite the contrary. Police forces are not precision instruments. They have learned, through long experience over three turbulent decades, that they have a broad choice to make: repress protests through implied or real force and escalation, or help protesters make their point and, at some point, go home. The latter strategy is no fun to watch. The former is often way worse.