From Seattle to Ferguson: The Problem with ‘Crowd Control’

The news from Ferguson keeps giving me a feeling of deja vu. A
decade and a half ago, before there was a Department of Homeland
Security to
amp up the militarization of local police departments, I was
writing articles for Reason
and Salon
about militarized police trampling people’s rights in the name of
crowd control. On the first day of the Seattle WTO demos of 1999, I
noted,

police ignored several calls for assistance
from around the city, so focused were they on the events downtown.
One woman, discovering someone had broken into her house, called
911—and was told to call back once the trade meeting was over. With
the police unwilling to stop the vandalism, other protesters filled
the breach, blocking shops and trying to restrain the window
breakers.

The next day, of course, the cops were a lot more active: They
gassed whole blocks, fired rubber bullets, and beat bystanders and
peaceful protesters. This did not, however, stop the looting:
Indeed, far from being more secure, some business owners were
gassed in front of their own stores, according to their testimony
at a post-WTO city council meeting. The police arrested people
almost indiscriminately, with several journalists getting caught in
the dragnets. In the evening, they chased a bunch of demonstrators
out of the no-protest zone—then kept chasing, crossing Interstate 5
and entering Capitol Hill, a hip neighborhood and shopping
district. The result was chaos, with police attacking locals
outside their homes and on their way home from work….

It seems strange that the police would beat bystanders, lock up
journalists, and gas whole neighborhoods, while leaving it to
ordinary citizens to prevent vandalism and looting. But it actually
makes a perverse sort of sense. The officers were told to guard the
convention center and control the crowd, not to protect people and
property. They were given virtually no flexibility to respond to
other events: On the first day of the conference, some police
reportedly explained that they could not cross the street to stop
some vandals because that would mean leaving their posts. On day
two, the officers may have behaved differently, but they continued
to treat civilians as little more than a crowd to be
contained.

On day one, no one could get arrested. On day two, anyone could get
arrested. The crowd was collectively innocent or collectively
guilty; individual wrongdoing was virtually irrelevant. This is the
logic of a police state.

In Ferguson, similarly, the cops haven’t confined their
crackdown to people who were actually looting stores or acting
violently. Whether they’re tear-gassing
an eight-year-old or
threatening a reporter at gunpoint, the police have stepped far
outside the behavior most people would accept as a reasonable
response to unrest. The curfew itself has meant the authorities can
arrest people without regard for why they’re outside, a policy that
has surely done more to ramp up tensions than to defuse them. At
the same time, many store owners feel so poorly protected that
they’ve taken to guarding
their shops themselves. The protesters have also interceded to

protect local businesses from looters. For all the clear
differences between Seattle in 1999 and Ferguson in 2014, there are
obvious echoes as well.

This goes deeper than the
rise of the warrior cop. It speaks to some longstanding ideas
about crowds, which are sometimes imagined as feral beasts that
must be contained even if that means diverting resources from
normal crime-fighting business. In that Salon story, I mentioned
an incident that didn’t involve military-style policing at all:

I was an undergraduate when the University of Michigan
won the NCAA basketball championship in 1989, and along with
hundreds of other students, I ran into the streets to celebrate.
The crowd was rowdy that night, but most of us were well behaved:
There was cheering, hugging, hand-slapping, and, at worst, a
willingness to climb onto other people’s cars. Then a few
celebrants turned vandalistic, destroying store awnings, breaking
windows and in at least one case attempting to steal from a store.
The would-be looter was captured by a security guard, who dragged
him to one of the many lawmen lining the streets. Here, said the
guard, I caught this guy trying to rob a shop. Arrest him.

“I can’t,” the officer replied, and gestured toward the revelers.
“I have to keep this crowd under control.”

Maybe all that crowd control is making it harder, not easier, to
keep citizens safe from criminals. It certainly isn’t keeping them
safe from the police.

Bonus link: Sociologists who study crowd behavior have
rejected a lot of the ideas at the root of that approach to law
enforcement—and some cops, such as the ones who police soccer
matches in Western Europe, have benefited from their advice. Read
more about that
here.