Strategic incapacitation and the policing of Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City, 2011

Policing unacceptable protest in England and Wales: A case study of the policing of anti-fracking protests

“…There is an acceptance that dialogue policing may not be capable of overcoming the fact that so-called 'transgressive protesters' see the police as 'part of the system'. Work on transgressive protest -by those that 'articulate more abstract demands, use unpredictable and often illegal tactics, do not negotiate with police, and are generally younger' (Tilly in Gillham 2011: 640) -in the US has suggested that the tactics, organisational structure, and decision-making processes employed by some protest groups has posed a significant challenge to police (Gillham 2011;Gillham and Noakes 2007;Gillham, Edwards and Noakes 2013). In the US, police have responded with what Patrick Gillham and colleagues have referred to as a 'strategic incapacitation' approach, a selective use of repressive techniques through which 'bad' transgressive protesters are isolated or neutralised as threats to security to prevent disruption (Gillham 2011).…”

Socialist Studies, Volume 9, Number 2 (Full Issue)

“…The focus on the police use of "strategic incapacitation" (Gillham 2013) for example reveals much about the immediate relationship between police and protestors but not about the broader function of police power in this context. The use of what Gilmore describes as an "increasingly authoritarian style of protest policing" (2010,21) is not simply useful to hinder each individual protest event but to reinforce the idea, to existing and moreover to prospective protestors, that protest itself is extremist.…”

Watershed events and changes in public order management systems: organizational adaptation as a social movement outcome

“…The "protest as threat" discourse is also evident in the federally coordinated monitoring of the Occupy protests in 2011 (The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, 2012). Although these protests were actually met with a relatively tolerant police approach in some cities, they were harshly repressed in other locations (Gillham, Edwards, & Noakes, 2013;Vitale, 2012). (1) the complexity of having three different domestic police organizations which are not perfectly co-ordinated, as well as (2) the Italian policing philosophy that emphasizes protection of the state from the people (della Porta, 1998;della Porta & Reiter, 2006a).…”