Kristian Williams - Our Enemies in Blue - Police and Power in America

PLAYING BY THE RULESThe Negotiated Management model has its weaknesses as well. Its success requiresa certain kind of cop and a certain kind of protest. If either is unavailable,Negotiated Management becomes impossible.The Philadelphia police department made a very early attempt at this softerapproach, and failed for lack of the right cop. In 1964, Police Commissioner HowardLeary created a "Civil Disobedience" unit charged with both keeping order andprotecting the civil rights of demonstrators. This unit was to be headed by an officerproven to be calm, patient, and friendly. His job was to build a relationship withprotest leaders and work with them to keep the peace. The unit never functioned asit was intended to. Instead, it quickly degenerated into a domineering red squad.101This quick return to the antagonistic approach was the result of several deeplyrooted features of the police as a group, including the rejection of compromise andconciliatory tactics, an obsession with agitators and conspiracies, and the system ofpolitical sponsorship that guided promotion into the unit 101Police/protester cooperation requires a fundamental adjustment in the attitudeof the authorities. The Negotiated Management approach demands theinstitutionalization of protest. Demonstrations must be granted some degree oflegitimacy so they can be carefully managed rather than simply shoved about.'This approach has, until recently, de-emphasized the radical or antagonisticaspects of protest in favor of a routinized and collaborative approach.Naturally such a relationship brings with it some fairly tight constraints asto the kinds of protest activity available. Rallies, marches, polite picketing, symboliccivil disobedience actions, and even legal direct action-such as strikes orboycotts-are likely to be acceptable, within certain limits. Violence, obviously,would not be tolerated. Neither would property destruction. Nor would anyof the variety of tactics that have been developed to close bllsinpssp"" pn'vt:'ntlogging, disrupt government meetings, or otherwise interfere with the operationof some part of society. That is to say, picketing may be fine, barricadesare not. Rallies are in, riots are out. Taking to the streets-under certain circumstances-maybe acceptable; taking over the factories is not. The danger,for activists, is that they might permanently limit themselves to tactics that arepredictable, non-disruptive, and ultimately ineffective.104On the other side, Negotiated Management opens a pitfall for police whereinthey may come to rely on this cooperative arrangement. If the police assumethat activists will conduct themselves within the bounds set by this approach,they leave themselves open for some nasty surprises.Essentially, this is what happened to the Seattle police in 1999. According tothe SPD's After Action Report, police planners adopted a Negotiated Managementstrategy early on and failed to consider contingencies that would make otheroptions necessary. Despite well-publicized plans to disrupt the WTO conference,the police decided to ''Trust that Seattle's strong historical precedentsof peaceful protest and our on-going negotiations with protest groups wouldgovern the actions of demonstrators."105 On November 30, their mistakemust have been only too obvious. When the institutional framework of protestwas challenged, the cooperative relationship proved fragile and the basis of theNegotiated Management model was undermined. Not only did radicals refuse192