Police violence at antifracking protests: pacifying disruptive subjects

In November 2013 at Barton Moss on the outskirts of Salford, IGas, a company specialising in onshore extraction of oil and gas, began exploratory drilling to test for coal bed methane and shale gas.The possibility of extracting the latter via hydraulic fracturing, better known as ‘fracking’, quickly became the focus of a local campaign.

A protest camp was built at the site of the well and remained in place throughout the IGas operation, ending in April 2014. Its residents, referring to themselves in many cases as ‘protectors’ rather than protesters, aimed to raise awareness about the dangers of fracking and to protect the local environment by disrupting the IGas operation, conducting daily slow-marches in front of trucks entering and leaving the site. This elicited a tough response from Greater Manchester Police (GMP), who met the protest with a substantial police presence at almost every march and an increasing number of Tactical Aid Unit officers.

There were more than 200 arrests – including the detention of children, pregnant and elderly protesters, and the violent arrest of women – alongside many additional reports of police misconduct related to GMP’s management of the protest.

Greater Manchester Police’s stated aim had been to balance the rights of protesters with those of IGas; the Chief Constable publicly expressed his frustration at being ‘stuck in the middle’. However, those involved in the protests described violent and intimidating policing tactics that have led many to question the police’s independence.

The use of violence in the policing of protest is nothing new in itself. What is arguably both novel and disturbing is GMP officers’ apparent lack of restraint even in the face of live streaming by camp residents and others involved in the marches, as well as close local media attention, and some national and international coverage.The Barton Moss camp did not attract the same level of media interest or public exposure as the anti-fracking camp at Balcolmbe, West Sussex in the summer of 2013, yet the conduct of GMP officers suggested that even if they had, their ability to act with impunity would have been supported by the conditions of the policing operation.

The GMP’s tactics were met with concern by legal observers, journalists, campaign groups and local residents but continued unabated.Towards the end of the drilling operation the number of arrests and the reports of police brutality increased, leading the solicitor representing most of those arrested to state that theTactical Aid Unit officers appeared ‘out of control’.

While the various reports and videos of police violence at Barton Moss that were shared online suggest there has been a departure from ‘normal’ policing, it is necessary to consider protest policing here and elsewhere in relation to the general function of police.

Keeping the peace

Liberal concepts of policing and the idea of ‘law and order’ suggest that the police are identified with ensuring compliance with the law, both in terms of their role in upholding the rule of law, and in the regulation of their own conduct. But the history of policing (along with the contemporary experience of workingclass, racialised and gendered populations) tells us that police practices are designed to conform to and prioritise, not law, but order (Neocleous, 2000).

Of course, this is not to suggest that appeals to the law aren’t central to the public representation of police and policing operations. At Barton Moss, GMP have continually reiterated their commitment to legal regulation in relation to complaints, while at the same time challenging protesters’ claims of police violence – as well as blaming protesters for provoking and antagonising officers (Greater Manchester Police, 2014).

It should not be surprising that police violence is often directed at populations who are viewed as a threat to order.The policing we usually describe as ‘out of control’ looks very different if we consider the role an ‘in control’ police force plays in a capitalist social order.

Protest policing needs to be seen as a pacification project in which the suppression of a specific protest is not the sole objective. Greater Manchester Police’s response clearly aimed to ensure that IGas got its shipment of trucks on a daily basis, and that the exploratory drilling at Barton Moss continued; the use of arrests and restrictive bail conditions – which in the majority of cases have subsequently resulted in charges being dropped, cases discontinued or defendants found not guilty – had an immediate effect on the camp and its ability to disrupt the fracking operation. But such brazen police violence in the face of media attention (social media or otherwise) also sends a clear signal to those on the peripheries of the opposition – in this case in the local community in Salford or those concerned about fracking elsewhere – that any protest against the operation of fracking is both illegitimate and dangerous.

In this sense the exercise of police power, and its inherent violence, must be understood as having both destructive and productive dimensions.The suppression of a protest march, for example, is not incidental but police violence is, and has always been, integral to the pacification process through which the current social order is (re) produced (Neocleous, 2000, 2011; Rigakos, 2011). In the policing of protest – against fracking, war, austerity, educational policies, etc. – the drive is to produce the ‘responsible’, ‘peaceful’, and ultimately disciplined political subject whose approach to political activism is non-disruptive (Jackson, 2013).The violence is aimed within and beyond the specific protest and the production of the ‘ideal’ protester takes place (and indeed is resisted) within the movement and at its peripheries.

In the words of one of the protesters, the ‘violence, brutality, bullying and general intimidation’ used by GMP have ‘created a climate of fear such that the British people feel unsafe to come forth and air their views’ (Salford Star, 2014). Police violence, helped by its framing in a largely sympathetic media, enforces the compliance of protest movements and fuels the public’s fear of protesters.

In confronting the exploitation of natural resources (and highlighting the dangers involved therein) through direct action, fracking protesters are stepping outside of the incredibly narrow official understanding of legitimate ‘peaceful’ (read: nondisruptive) protest and disrupting the wider social order, in which capitalism, sustained through a dependence on fossil fuels, is sealed off from any real alternatives.

The camp itself at Barton Moss was a clear sign of ‘disorder’, symbolising an opposition to statecorporate collusion in the economic exploitation of the natural environment.Thus the policing operation experienced over those five months of the camp being in place are in line with what the history of policing (including its recent developments) should have us expect.

Broadly speaking, most representations of police violence reduce it to the work of ‘bad apples’, acknowledging only that individual officers may have over-stepped the mark.The institutional and systemic violence that is, and has always been, at the core of the police project remains obscured. Additionally, a growing number of academics in recent years have been willing to celebrate the transformation of protest policing to a new consensus led model in which the police brutality all too familiar in previous decades has been replaced by negotiation and facilitation. Yet at Barton Moss, as well as at numerous other protest events in the UK in recent history, there is still more than enough evidence to suggest that the police response to political protest has changed very little.

Anti-fracking protests are an attempt to confront what Rob Nixon (2011) calls the slow violence of environmental damage; this attempt is in turn being countered by the violence of the state. We must not however be lured into thinking this project is new, that the use of police violence in response to dissent is evidence of a radical shift in the role of police. The policing of protest, of disruptive subjects, is vital to the pacification process that has always defined the role of police in the interests of capital and state.

Instead we need to confront police violence with a broader critical approach to understanding both the destructive and productive effects of the structural and systematic violence through which the current social order is reproduced. Protests that challenge the current social order and try to disrupt it will always be dealt with in this violent way. Calls for police restraint, or for accountability through official channels, will continue to fall on deaf ears. As David Cameron has said, ‘We’re going all out for shale.’

Dr Will Jackson and Dr Helen Monk are both Lecturers in Criminology, Liverpool John Moores University

References

Greater Manchester Police (2014), Chief Constable’s Statement on Barton Moss Protest, Press Release, 7 February.

Jackson, W. (2013), ‘Securitization as Depoliticisation: Depoliticisation as Pacification’, Socialist Studies/Études socialistes, Vol 9, No 2, Summer 2013.

Neocleous, M. (2000), The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power, London: Pluto Press.

Neocleous, M. (2011), ‘A Brighter and Nicer New Life: Security as Pacification’, Social Legal Studies, 20, pp. 191-208.

Nixon, R. (2011), Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Rigakos, G. (2011), ‘”To Extend the Scope of Productive Labour”: Pacification as a Police Project’, in Neocleous, M. and Rigakos, G. (eds.), Anti-Security, Ottawa: Red Quill Press.

Salford Star (2014), ‘Swinton Police Station Siege Against GMP Brutality’, Salford Star, (online), 22 March.