Capturing protest in urban environments: The ‘police kettle’ as a territorial strategy

Abstract

Kettling has emerged in recent decades as an established, if controversial, tactic of public order policing. Departing from a historical emphasis on dispersal, kettling instead acts to contain protesters within a police cordon for sustained periods of time. In this article, we seek to elaborate upon the spatial and temporal logics of kettling by investigating the conditions of is historical emergence. We argue that 'kettling' has to be understood as a territorial strategy that co-evolved in relation to new forms of disruptive protest. Whereas older techniques of crowd dispersal serve to diffuse a unified collective, 'kettling' aims at capturing the highly volatile and 'swarming' movements characteristic of contemporary choreographies of dissent. Drawing on police manuals, media coverage, accounts from activists and expert interviews, we show how the 'kettle' re-territorializes protest by acting on its spatio-temporal and affective constitution. By fabricating an inner outside of the urban milieu, freezing the time of collective mobilization and inducing debilitating affects such as fear and boredom kettling intervenes into the scene of political subjectification that each congregation of protesting bodies seeks to fashion.

Strategic incapacitation, scaled up: National security influence on protest policing for the 2018 Quebec G7 summit

“…The strategic incapacitation model traces the emergence of more spatial approaches to regulation including non-protest zones constructed out of concrete and metal, journalism zones, curfews, disruption of assembly at convergence points, interception of protest organisers based on intelligence reporting including use of pre-emptive arrests, use of more non-lethal weapons, and use of more analytics to monitor flows of people at protests in real-time (Gillham, 2011). In this model there is a focus on intelligence and surveillance, a focus on space and blockades, and on crowd management (also see Neal et al, 2019; Zajko and Béland, 2008).…”

“…Research is needed on the specificities of protest policing and how protest policing changes over time (Molnar et al, 2019; Baker et al, 2017; Gillham et al, 2013). While it is necessary to explore how protest policing entails spatial elements of control (Neal et al, 2019; Wahlström, 2010; Zajko and Béland, 2008), it is also important to examine how policing and security operations are enacted and coordinated according to specific notions of scale (Sage et al, 2015; Kaiser and Nikiforova, 2008; Boykoff, 2007).…”

‘Football fans are not thugs’: communication and the future of fan engagement in the policing of Scottish football

“…Peter Joyce (2016), in his overview of policing of disorder and protest in the UK since 1945, highlights that 'kettling' is simply a term used by the media and protesters to describe the tactic of 'containment'. Elsewhere, Neal et al (2019Neal et al ( , p. 1045, in recognising the emergence of 'kettling' as a spatial strategy in public order policing across jurisdictions, noted how, 'Kettling' has emerged in recent decades as an established, if controversial, tactic of public order policing. Departing from a historical emphasis on dispersal, kettling instead acts to contain protesters within a police cordon for sustained periods of time.…”

The logistics of police power: Armored vehicles, colonial boomerangs, and strategies of circulation

“…As members of the crowd attempt to escape the crushing force imposed upon them, they become easier for police to detain. Within the containment strategy of the kettle, it is “as if highly malleable city walls were erected inside the city on an ad hoc basis” (Neal et al., 2019: 1054). Armored vehicles reinforce these ad hoc walls.…”

“…The presence of armored vehicles in cities offends urbanist and democratic sensibilities not because it represents unprecedented militarization, but because it converts the proximity of encounters offered by the city into a condition of control. 15 Crowd control “intervenes into the bodily-affective formation of collectivities” (Neal et al., 2019: 1053). Rather than acknowledge the crowd as a wellspring of democratic energy, it is contained as threat to the constituted social order.…”