Police in riot gear swinging batons. Plumes of tear gas. Protesters on their knees, pepper-sprayed in the face. Rubber bullets shot from moving cars. Such scenes have actually played out in some 75 cities throughout the US after the death of George Floyd in authorities custody in Minneapolis on Might25
United States president Donald Trump has called for authorities to shut down demonstrations with tougher policing, but he’s incorrect. Decades of research reveal the right way to police a protest is to prevent excess force, remain calm, interact transparently, and constantly work out.
WIRED UK
This story originally appeared on WIRED UK
For the most part, that’s not what’s occurring in the United States. In New York City City, patrol car were shot driving into protesters; in Atlanta, six officers are facing charges for using extreme force while jailing two students; in Louisville, Kentucky, two policemans were fired after they fatally shot a man while their body video cameras were turned off. “They’re counting on escalated usage of force to try to police the protests,” says Jennifer Cobbina, associate teacher in criminal justice at Michigan State University, indicating tear gas, rubber bullets, and flash grenades. “All of these are escalated usage of force. That is extremely heavy handed, it’s militarized methods– and it’s used on protesters who are in fact objecting police violence.”
If we assume the objective of authorities is to lower damage and destruction, then these tactics are meaningless. “The research study suggests quite routinely that when cops over-respond to these occasions, they tend to escalate rebellion and defiance, instead of de-escalating it,” says Ed Maguire, professor of criminology at Arizona State University. “So we advise a more measured technique.”
There are a lot of more measured designs for protest-policing, but they fixate a few essential concepts: interaction, facilitation, and differentiation. One such design, called worked out management, amounts essentially to talking it out: police and protesters cooperate and set out rules of engagement before an event. The Madison Method aims to assist in protests– which, after all, are secured by the First Modification– with communication and restraints on police action. The elaborated social identity model (aka ESIM) emphasizes distinctions among members of a group, so that looters are arrested as crooks while protesters are permitted to continue.
At their core, each model argues that dealing with protesters like looters will cause a riot. “Much of what we’re seeing fail in my nation today is a failure on the part of cops to do this piece of differentiation,” states Maguire. “We’ve seen authorities shooting tear gas or less-lethal munitions on the crowd, the majority of which hasn’t done anything incorrect and certainly hasn’t broken any laws.” Instead, police must make targeted arrests versus those triggering violence,
