Crowds and public order policing: An analysis of crowds and interpretations of their behaviour based on observational studies in Turkey and England and Wales.

Between February 1992 and February 1995, observations were made of 33 heavily-policed crowd events occurring both in Turkey and England & Wales. Informal interviews were conducted with prominent Turkish and British police public order training instructors and practitioners. These interviews often occurred in the context of visits to specialist public order training locations where training exercises and drills were witnessed first hand. Finally, the researcher attended three major public order courses for senior British police officers. These data formed the bedrock of a comparative approach to understanding crowd behaviour and critically evaluating police crowd control techniques.This research analyses the underlying assumptions contained within the existing theories in the field and attempts to adjudicate on the validity of both classical and modern contributions to the understanding of the field. Two hypotheses are considered, first; 'Crowd phenomena like other social issues cannot be examined within the boundaries of a single discipline'. This has led to development of a theory, the 'Combined Factors Approach' (CFA) which attempts to examine the behaviour of crowd using a multitude of factors. The second hypothesis is; 'In terms of exercising their function in so-called public order events, the police, far from being a neutral institution serve and protect the interest of its political masters and the ruling classes rather than serving the entire community'. Observations of existing public order policing practices suggest the validity of a radical and Marxist argument, that the police are an apparatus of the state and therefore of the ruling classes. The thesis concludes that any public order policing regardless of the political system it serves, will tend to be relatively paramilitary and oppressive.