From the earliest known formulations of political thought, there has been a fear, a

fascination as well as an impetus to govern the Hoi Polloi; where Plato sought to expel the poets
because of their potential for demagoguery,1 Marinetti attempted to refine the poets and join the
crowd; producing a way to direct the mass which was both acceptable and controllable.2 This
imperative to control and govern the unpredictability of crowds, possibly stemming from an
anxiety of the unknown especially with regards to their capability for violence, sees its modern
formulation in terms of the strategies employed for policing political demonstrations.
This paper seeks to survey a broad array of literary resources created by and for state policing
institutions with a view to finding any possible relationships they may have with social and
political theory; in other words, the paper seeks to characterize whether, how and to what extent
the conceptualizations of crowds found in policing literature correspond to the
conceptualizations found in academia.
Considering the possible political impacts of social theory, how conceptual models may
be picked up and utilized by interested parties and how, eventually, these models may develop
a life of their own, it is apt to point out that the interpretation of facts is contingent upon a variety
of variables including politics. In addition, it is possible that theories which permeate into the
non-academic world may be utilized without the extensive and specific criterion that the authors
of these theories might have proposed. The integrity of content may shift quite easily when
traversing through various fields of study.3 The question of how prevalent the social theory of
crowds, policing, protest is within modern policing literature and crowd control strategy becomes
more pressing if we are to acknowledge the dissent always increases repressive behavior
thesis found in a large majority of the literature.4
However, there are several qualifications that need to be addressed before we continue.
In the first place, we need to distinguish between actual police action, or their actual behavior,
and the more fluid, amorphous and relatively generalized doctrine found in policing literature;
1 See Plato & Bloom, 1991.
2 Poggi, 2009.
3 See Bourdieu, 1999.
4 Davenport, Christian, and Cyanne Loyle. "The States Must Be Crazy: Dissent and the Puzzle of
Repressive Persistence." International Journal of Conflict and Violence 6.1 (2012): 75-95. Web.

the influence that manuals, police reports and police training has, and how they reflect on the
field is something that can be contested and problematized.5 In a similar vein, we must
recognize that even if this said doctrine is explicitly stated, it is often a result of a formalized,
systematic and products of a highly institutionalized process. This may be helpful, for explicit
links to academic resources become easier to make, but it may also be hindrance, for it
becomes slightly more difficult to fully characterize the sets of beliefs and thoughts that such
institutions retain. More simply, we cannot fully characterize doctrine because there is a limit to
what policing literature the public may actually be able to access. Given this inevitable veil, we
must have an expanded view of policing literature that includes such things as police guides and
training manuals regarding crowds and protest, publicized police reports , visual analysis of
tactics employed, publicized, declassified and classified police and government reports
regarding specific events.
In a world characterized more and more by movements that utilize uncivil disobedience,
generated by the 1960s counterculture as well as resistance movements against neoliberal
globalization,6 it becomes increasingly necessary to build efficient apparatus of securitization
against anarchic crowd formation.
and in turn, how this affects police operations with regards to their susceptibility towards
the use of violence. The hypothesis is that police literature which is influenced by classical
theories of crowds, like the work of Gabriel Tarde, Gustave Le Bon and Raymond Momboisse
which characterize crowds as, in brief, being amoral, unthinking and having a high propensity
towards violence, would reflect upon policing procedures on the field.
Our methodology would require three parts. First, browsing and reviewing a wide variety
of modern police literature, specifically with regards to field training manuals for controlling riots /
mass disobedience, that are open to the public. Next, an exegetical analysis would be required
to expound and find connections and similarities between the police literature and classical
theories regarding of crowds and riots. Lastly, and this would be the most difficult part, a
5 ...there is no causal link between the guidelines presented in police literature and training programmes,
on the one hand, and actual police behaviour, on the other. This is not to deny any relation between the
two, but simply to emphasize that other factors may be no less important than what is stated in various
manuals contents of police training materials should not be overstated. (Borch, 596)

6 Laudani, Raffaele. Disobedience in Western Political Thought: A Genealogy. Cambridge: Cambridge

UP, 2013. Print.

quantitative analysis which would compare our literary findings with working police tactics within
associated times and locations wherein which the texts were used. Of course, a couple of
barriers present themselves: first, localized literature will be difficult to find compared to region
based literature; second, it will be difficult to try and assess to what degree particular police
literature coincides with more classical understandings of crowds, compared to other police
literature; third, it will also be difficult to fully test the hypothesis, because even if we were able
to find diverging modern (negotiated accommodation) and classical police literature in
different regions, whether they actually experienced a protest situation and were able to utilize
the strategies proposed is another issue, which is why a time-analysis would be particularly
useful; lastly, although the relationship between academic work, police literature and proper
police implementation of the literature seems intuitively appropriate, whether the links actually
exist will be another possible barrier.
Possible Sources:
Borch, Christian. "Crowd Theory and the Management of Crowds: A Controversial Relationship."
Current Sociology 61 (2013): 584-601. Print.
Cronin, Patrick, and Stephen Reicher. "A Study of the Factors That Influence How Senior
Officers Police Crowd Events: On SIDE outside the Laboratory." British Journal of Social
Psychology 45.1 (2006): 175-96. Print.
Le, Bon Gustave. The Crowd: Study of the Popular Mind. New York, NY: Classic International,
2009. Print.
Moscovici, Serge. The Age of the Crowd: A Historical Treatise on Mass Psychology. Cambridge
[Cambridgeshire: Cambridge UP, 1985. Print.
Plotz, John. "The Return of the Blob or How Sociology Decided to Stop Worrying and Love the
Crowd." Crowds. By Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Matthew Tiews. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2006. N.
pag. Print.
Schweingruber, David. "Mob Sociology and Escalated Force: Sociology's Contribution to
Repressive Police Tactics." The Sociological Quarterly 41.3 (2000): 371-89. Print.
Smith, William. "Policing Civil Disobedience." Political Studies Association 60 (2012): 826-42.
Print.
Stott, Clifford, and Stephen Reicher. "Crowd Action as Intergroup Process: Introducing the Police
Perspective." European Journal of Social Psychology 28 (1998): 509-29. Print.
Vider, Stephen. "Rethinking Crowd Violence: Self-Categorization Theory and the Woodstock
1999 Riot." Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 34.2 (2004): 141-66. Print.
Waddington, David. "The Madness of the Mob? Explaining the Irrationality and
Destructiveness of Crowd Violence." Sociology Compass 2.2 (2008): 675-87. Print.