Protesters and Pepper Spray

Recent confrontations between police and Occupy Wall Street protestors have highlighted growing tensions in “occupied” cities throughout the United States. In particular, mayors and city police departments face the struggle of maintaining order in public spaces while allowing protesters to exercise the right to free speech.

Some, including Alasdair Roberts, think that big city protest policing has gone too far.

In his article “Containing Outrage: How Police Power Tames the Occupy Movement,” Roberts argues that overbearing police tactics deployed against Occupy protesters infringe on the public’s right to voice their opinions in an organized, public fashion. Faced with largely peaceful assemblies, the police, Roberts claims, have gone above and beyond the preservation of order.

The difficulty with many cities’ approaches to the protests is that they are preoccupied with the containment and taming of the crowd and are ready to act on the earliest sign of potential difficulty.

Roberts traces the roots of American protest policing tactics to a shift in attitude toward urban protesters in the 19th century. Where crowded streets had been a symbol of American liberty since the nation’s inception, cities in turmoil caused exasperated public officials to fight protesters with force. Over the years, increases in city populations and increasingly militarized police forces continued the trend of overaggressive, hyper-preventative police tactics.

The Occupy Wall Street protests, according to Roberts, have “shown how hostile American politics has become to the very idea of mass, angry protest.” Faced with this hostility, Roberts argues that modern-day protesters must tread delicately, balancing the desire to voice their opinion publicly with the fear of motivating counter-protest police force.

Roberts points to this specific tension as a limiting force within the Occupy movement. While specific violent encounters between police and Occupy protesters have drawn most of the attention, Roberts makes the broader case that the culture of American protest policing has muted the voice of the protesters and weakened considerably the impact of the demonstrations. He asserts that American protesters are becoming increasingly tamer than protesters within Europe and even past protesters in American history.

As a result, Roberts argues that the romanticism of the protest in the crowded city street is gone, and in its place are nightsticks and pepper spray.