Public Order Policing: Shield and Football
When I wrote my last blog, we were in the middle of a world-wide pandemic. The pandemic has ended (more or less), but the global angst remains. What do I mean by this?
Since the pandemic, Canadians have witnessed three major social movements take to the streets: Black Lives Matter and the Convoy and pro-Palestinian protests. Groups in support of these causes have variously marched, demonstrated, protested, blockaded, encamped, rallied and stormed offices, among other activities. They have done so in cities that are also managing protest and counter-protest activities involving environmental activism, Indigenous rights, pro and anti-Trans Rights, Eritrean politics, the war in Ukraine, affordable housing, tenants’ rights, transportation licensing, labour issues, homelessness, among a spate of other citizen concerns. All this activity occurs, by the way, alongside other demands for policing of public spaces, such as festivals, public fireworks, and parades. I have never been the hugest fan of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, but even I find myself agreeing with them: the current volume of demands on public order policing is not sustainable.
Leaving aside the growing costs of managing all these activities (because ‘free speech’ ain’t exactly free when it involves managing public spaces, protesters and counter-protesters), there is the matter of costs to the health and well-being of individual officers, who are frequently caught in the middle of conflicting claims involving highly contentious political claims. Over the past two and half years, I have been collecting data for three (soon to be four) inter-related projects that deal with public order policing and the impacts on officers.
These are/were:
1. A study of the Convoy protests across Canada
2. A study of the policing of highly contentious events for the Alberta provincial government
3. A study of Incident Command work
4. A study of the policing of pro-Palestinian protests
Thus far, what the data from this work reveals is the fact that police officers – especially those employed by larger municipal police services – are becoming increasingly burnt out. This comes at a time when agencies across Canada are complaining about recruitment and retention issues. Representatives from at least one police service noted in interviews they were having difficulty filling overtime spots for public order deployments because officers were physically and mentally exhausted from difficult assignments that had them spending up to twelve hours being subjected to near-continuous loud noises (klaxons, megaphones and other devices), screamed at, abused, threatened and/or physically assaulted (see Huey and Ferguson 2024b). On top of that, police officers are facing heightened scrutiny, being constantly filmed by protesters and counter-protesters with the intent to create viral video content in support of “agitganda”[1] for Cause X or Cause Y (Huey and Ferguson 2024). And, then there’s the matter of doxxing. As documented in a recent paper, doxxing of police officers through social media is becoming more widely viewed as a legitimate form of protest by ‘agitated’ individuals across the political spectrum (Huey, Ferguson and Towns 2024a).
In the coming months, I intend to continue exploring what I have elsewhere termed ‘harms to policing’, harms arising from repeated demands to place police officers in the middle of what are essentially political debates and controversies. Debates and controversies, I should add, in which politicians ‘want something done’ about closed roadways, but where the federal government doesn’t want to be seen taking actions that might anger any one side. It feels a bit strange to me that some 20 years into my career that – despite shifts in focus over the years – I’m still studying the core of my PhD work: the politics of policing. This time, I want to know what are the individual, social and institutional costs of allowing public order policing to be used as both a shield and a political football.
References
Huey, Laura, Lorna Ferguson and Zachary Towns. Accepted (2024a). “Cops Need Doxxed”:
Releasing Personal Information of Police Officers as a Tool of Political Harassment”.
Crime & Delinquency.
Huey, Laura and Lorna Ferguson. Accepted (2024b). ““All These Crazies”: Right-wing Anti-
Authoritarian Politics and The Targeting of Public Police”. Deviant Behavior. Online at:
Huey, Laura and Lorna Ferguson. 2024. “‘No One Wants to End Up on YouTube’:
Sousveillance and ‘Cop Baiting’ in Canadian Policing”. Policing & Society, 34(7): 674-
691.
[1] The term ‘agitganda’ is a portmanteau of the words ‘agitate’ and ‘propaganda’. I have coined it to describe activist actions aimed at agitating a population into some form of direct action through the creation and sharing of false or misleading information.
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