"This is what democracy looks like" : police, visibility and the right to protest

This thesis explores the police role in shaping the right to protest and in particular the visibility of protest. The thesis sets out an inter-disciplinary theoretical framework drawing on law, criminology, surveillance studies and geography, seeking to go beyond existing models of public order policing, which focus primarily on the prediction of disorder, to consider the protection of human rights. It explores the idea of a ‘right to protest’ and how this can be protected, in practice, in terms of rights to assemble, to freedom of expression, to privacy and to freedom from intrusion. Using ethnographic methods focussed on approximately 50 protests and comprising 150 hours of observation, conversation with participants, print, broadcast and social media analysis, the thesis focuses on a specific location as a unit of comparison: central London, particularly Parliament Square and its surroundings. This location is of special significance to protesters, law makers, and law enforcers and is subject to location specific laws and regulations. The regularity of protest in this area allows for temporal and geographic comparisons to be drawn. The research describes and explains how law and geography shape the policing of protest in a site of symbolic significance to protesters, law enforcers and lawmakers. It shows how the police seek to control protest and examines the reactions of protesters in terms of their use of space. The key finding is that police and other public authorities’ use of legal powers can serve to reduce the visibility of protest, with a potential impact on the right to protest. The thesis explores the intentional and unintentional ways in which this occurs, including the ways that transgressive and non-transgressive protests are treated. Police tactics, legislation and by-laws regulate behaviour in the key sites of Parliament Square and its surroundings so as to reduce the vitality of protest and limit protest and expression. Drawing on the language of Nils Christie, the thesis concludes that the police ‘steal the protest’ from protesters.