Why the Cops Turn Protests into War Zones
Police departments have embraced militarized responses to protests in the past two decades. How did we get here?
This is the first-ever edition of What Went Wrong?, a newsletter about the failures, inefficiencies, and screw-ups that define 21st-century American life written by Harry Cheadle. Above photo of a police officer in Minneapolis during the George Floyd protests by Flickr user Jenny Salita.
The last several days of police brutality, protests, and riots was a reminder that the United States is a flammable country, built on a foundation of dry, brittle kindling. When a spark catches, the resulting blaze is impossible to control and difficult to even comprehend. Fires follow a logic all their own. But all too often, police pour gasoline on the flames.
Voices far more important and knowledgable than mine have discussed America's long history of racism, police violence that disproportionately targets Black men, and the failures of major cities to control corrupt or cruel police officers. This newsletter focuses on failures, particularly failures by powerful people and institutions, and there have been plenty of those on display from the cops lately. During the protests of George Floyd’s killing, many police officers did things that looked both incompetent and dangerous.
Brutality doesn’t work
Officers outfitted in riot gear deployed pepper spray and tear gas liberally, sometimes dosing people who clearly posed no threat. Cops fired rubber bullets that hit both protesters and bystanders; one round hit photographer Linda Tirador in Minneapolis, permanently blinding her in one eye. In some cases police seemed keyed up and eager to fight; in others they had obscured their badge numbers, making it more difficult to identify them. In one of the most shocking viral videos, a New York Police Department vehicle that is being pelted by objects thrown by protesters drives forward into the crowd, using a barricade as a battering ram:
Those who habitually defend everything police officers do will point to videos of non-cops behaving badly during these protests. I'm sure there are people on the far right and the far left instigating violence for ideological reasons and probably some other people who are smashing or looting things for fun. But the police ought to be held to a much higher standard: They are the only people in the country who can legally wield violence, and police departments consume enormous amounts of taxpayer money—the LAPD's budget is nearly $1.2 billion, and the NYPD's is an incredible $6 billion.
It’s also important to say that all of these aggressive tactics don’t “work” in any sense. Scholars who study protests say that when cops use force to control crowds, they increase, not decrease, the potential for mayhem. The world saw this dynamic play out in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and we’re seeing it again in many more cities now. So why do the cops make things so much worse?
How a shaky truce between cops and activists fell apart at the end of the 90s
To learn about the history of how police have managed crowds, I called up John Noakes, an associate professor of sociology at Arcadia University. Until the 1970s, police departments tended to embrace “escalated force,” which means using increasingly aggressive—and brutal—methods on demonstrations until they break up. This gave way to the idea of “negotiated management,” where police departments would talk to the organization doing the protesting and work out where and when they could protest, then grant them a permit. This works well if both sides are willing to cooperate: Protesters can temporarily take over an area and attract media attention, while the police can avoid confrontations.
“I interviewed police officials in DC after the Million Man March [in 1995]. And they were like, ‘That was parade duty,’” said Noakes. “No big deal no matter how many people are there, because when you negotiate, what you agree to is that you're going to police yourself as a protest group.”
Then the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization hit Seattle. Some of these actions resembled other demonstrations in the negotiated management era, with the AFL-CIO union marching along a predetermined route to express its unhappiness at the WTO's trade rules. But there were a lot of anti-WTO activists who belonged to decentralized left-wing groups that refused to negotiate with police and wanted to disrupt business as usual. As described in a 2007 paper from sociologist Patrick Gillham, the Direct Action Network (DAN) set up a series of blockades in downtown Seattle, bringing the whole event to a standstill. The Seattle Police Department (SPD) responded using methods that sound familiar 20 years later. Here's how Gillham, who watched the protests unfold firsthand and spoke with many activists afterward, described it:
As the day continued the demonstrators’ actions became even more unpredictable as protesters were divided from their affinity groups by police actions or the general “organized” chaos of the situation. From mid-morning on, police used baton charges and less-lethal weapons, including beanbag rounds, sting balls, concussion grenades, pepper spray and tear gas to clear the streets of transgressive demonstrators….
The SPD decision to employ a variety of less-lethal weapons to disperse the demonstrators enraged nonviolent activists, making a bad situation worse. Quickly, the police repression became as important to many protesters as global justice, and demonstrators, most of whom had planned for a half-day protest, gained new resolve to hold the blockades and extend the direct action as long as possible.
The debacle led to SPD Chief Norm Stamper's resignation. He later became an advocate for police reform and has admitted he screwed the whole thing up. “The biggest mistake in my 34 years of law enforcement was that we used a military response to a domestic situation—a military tactic that was absolutely unnecessary,” he said in a 2014 interview. “The effect was to heighten tensions, not de-escalate tension.”
Few cops have learned from Seattle's mistakes
The WTO protests began a new dynamic between activists and police. Organizers became less interested in negotiating with police before actions (some cities like New York had begun refusing to issue permits anyway), and police developed new tactics for dealing with protests that focused on “controlling space,” as Noakes put it, avoiding lethal force but still employing military-grade equipment and tactics like flashbang grenades, armored vehicles, and (as seen in DC on Monday) low-flying helicopters.
These methods were pioneered during the later days of the '99 WTO action, when Seattle cops kept protesters away from the WTO meetings by force. Protests at the 2000 Republican National Convention and the 2003 negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas were also shut down by sophisticated surveillance, infiltration of protest groups, and military-style responses to demonstrations (the “Miami model” is a term for the extremely aggro measures taken by police during this period). And of course, the 2014 protests in Ferguson saw the police bringing out military-grade equipment as they suppressed protests and harassed journalists.
Police departments have successfully managed protests in the recent past, however. Philadelphia cops earned praise for their relatively hands-off approach during the 2016 Democratic Convention, where police focused on blocking access to the convention itself, effectively controlling the space they wanted to keep off-limits.
“The difference between something like that, and what we've been seeing on the last weekend, is that everyone knew the Democratic Convention was coming. They planned for it for months,” said Noakes. “What's been happening over the last week is relatively spontaneous. And then the police are playing catch-up all the time.”
Some of the brutal police tactics on display in recent days could be seen as a way to try to reassert control over city streets from protesters who have taken them over. But it's pretty clear that not only are these tactics brutal, they often don’t actually reduce the violence of these events. New York Times reporter Ali Watkins wrote on Twitter about how police partitioners divided protesters, making the situation more chaotic. And curfews, another common way to try to control space, can create more tension between cops and civilians—if protesters stay on the streets in defiance of curfew, the police may respond with mass arrests or street-clearing measures that instigate a riot.
Noakes pointed out that not many officers have received specialized crowd control training. Many of them are scared, which can breed aggression. Others have become accustomed to seeing protesters as potentially deadly enemies. One guide to protests in the by-cops-for-cops outlet Police One advised readers to “remember [the 2016 ambush of officers in] Dallas whenever any group with a history of violent rhetoric or action is demonstrating.”
It is true that dealing with spontaneous, almost leaderless protests who are angry specifically at the police is a much more difficult task than monitoring protests that have permits and agreed-upon routes. But if the police are going in with an us-versus-them attitude, it's not surprising that they meet aggression with aggression, that their version of controlling space often amounts to assaults on crowds of mostly nonviolent people. Nearly every city in the country looks like Seattle in 1999 right now because departments are still using the WTO playbook, and sometimes executing those tactics in incompetent, catastrophic ways.
Are there cops who did a good job with the protests?
Amid all the violence were a few bright spots. In Oklahoma (in the above video) and elsewhere, law enforcement officers took a Kaepernick-style knee to demonstrate solidarity with the protesters. A number of reform-minded police officials spoke out about the need for cops to do better.
Camden, New Jersey, stood out for its peaceful protests, during which marchers were joined by police officers. It was a model way of handling a demonstration, but it took the department years to get to that point.
In 2013, Camden—plagued by poverty and a high crime rate—dissolved its entire police force and handed over law enforcement responsibilities to a new department run by the surrounding county. This was at least in part a way to cut costs, but the new chief, longtime Camden cop Scott Thomson, focused on “community policing,” i.e. having cops patrol on foot and get to know people in the neighborhoods. The group Not in Our Town made a laudatory documentary about “Camden's turn” that described how cops were trained in de-escalation tactics and made efforts to get civilians to trust them.
Violent crime has dropped in Camden since Thomson (who retired last year) took over, though it's not 100 percent clear that his reforms are the cause. (Figuring out why crime rises and falls is very difficult.) But that stronger bond between cops and the community paid off this weekend when that city, unlike so many others, did not go up in flames. The peace was kept because the department had invested years of effort in creating a peace. “The time to make friends isn’t when you need them,” Thomson told the Marshall Project and FiveThirtyEight. “You have to be in front of it.”
The police can't stop a riot once it starts, and too often they instigate one, but they can do their part to help make sure one never gets going.
If you are wondering how to help and have money to spare, you can donate to a bail fund, which are providing assistance to protesters who have been arrested and can’t afford to make bail. A list of organizations can be found here; one national organization that does good work is the Bail Project.
Thanks for reading What Went Wrong?, a newsletter by Harry Cheadle that publishes every Tuesday. If you have questions or comments, please email me at harrydcheadle@gmail.com. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe and tell someone about it.