Clifford Stott
Biographic Data
| ID | 83609 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Clifford Stott |
| GIVEN NAMES | Clifford |
| FAMILY NAME | Stott |
| SIGNATURE | STOTT C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Liverpool |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5399-3294 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 294 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 46 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Exploring the dynamics of identity, procedural justice and police legitimacy in the context of anti-war demonstrations in the UK
This study explores the role of social identity and group-level processes in shaping public perceptions of police legitimacy and procedural justice during anti-war demonstrations in the United Kingdom. Building on procedural justice theory and extending the findings of Radburn and colleagues, we conducted two studies to examine how social context and identification with protestors influenced evaluations of protest policing. Study 1 investigates t…
Understanding the 2024 Summer Riots in the UK: Three Case Studies
The wave of riots in England in summer 2024 constituted the biggest wave of disorder in the country for more than a decade. These were followed by swift policy responses, based on assumptions about the events and the participants, before any detailed empirical investigation had been carried out. There is a need for detailed description of events as a solid basis for both social psychological theory and policy. This article therefore presents case…
The Columbus model: Crowd psychology, dialogue policing and protest management in the U.S.A
Police discretion and the role of the ‘spotter’ within football crowd policing: Risk assessment, engagement, legitimacy and de-escalation
Discretion is a key feature of policing, yet its surrounding research has historically been heavily reliant upon exploring interpersonal or dyadic encounters between individual officers and members of the public. More recently, studies have explored how discretionary decisions by police officers impact upon and interact with group-level and organisational processes but few studies have explored the relevance of discretion to debates in the litera…
New Agenda for Football Crowd Management: Reforming Legal and Policing Responses to Risk
Relational and instrumental perspectives on compliance with the law among people experiencing homelessness
OBJECTIVE: We conducted an exploratory study testing procedural justice theory with a novel population. We assessed the extent to which police procedural justice, effectiveness, legitimacy, and perceived risk of sanction predict compliance with the law among people experiencing homelessness. HYPOTHESES: We did not develop formal a priori hypotheses but examined five general research questions. First, are there positive associations between police…
A New Agenda For Football Crowd Management: Reforming Legal and Policing Responses to Risk
How Riots Spread Between Cities: Introducing the Police Pathway
Waves of riots are politically and psychologically significant national events. The role of police perceptions and practices in spreading unrest between cities has been neglected in previous research, even though the police are significant actors in these events. We examined the role of police interventions in the spread of rioting to one English city in August 2011 by triangulating multiple data sources and analyzing police accounts and communit…
Policing the Covid-19 pandemic: Police officer well-being and commitment to democratic modes of policing
Police organisations have a wealth of experience in responding to emergencies, but COVID-19 is unprecedented in terms of the speed, scale and complexity of developing doctrine and its implementation by officers. The crisis also threw into sharp relief the fact that police policy and, crucially, practice are always implemented within wider social, political and economic contexts. Using online survey data collected from 325 police officers based at…
Procedural justice as a reward to the compliant: An ethnography of police–citizen interaction in police custody
This paper contributes to the literature on Procedural Justice Theory (PJT) by exploring its capacity to explain the dynamic interactions between police and citizens within the context of police detention. Analysis is based on observation and interviews in police custody suites (i.e. locations where arrested citizens are formally processed and held) within one of the larger metropolitan police forces in the UK. The qualitative thematic analysis h…
Playing the Game’: Power, Authority and Procedural Justice in Interactions Between Police and Homeless People in London
We explore the relevance of procedural justice theory for understanding the relationship between police and marginalized groups and individuals. Analysis is based on ethnographic research into the policing of the street population in an inner London borough through shadowing policing patrols and embedding observation within the homeless community. Police–street population relationships appear characterized by: (1) a structural context of extreme …
Identity, legitimacy and cooperation with police: Comparing general-population and street-population samples from London
Social identity is a core aspect of procedural justice theory, which predicts that fair treatment at the hands of power holders such as police expresses, communicates, and generates feelings of inclusion, status, and belonging within salient social categories. In turn, a sense of shared group membership with power holders, with police officers as powerful symbolic representatives of “law-abiding society,” engenders trust, legitimacy, and cooperat…
Mass meets mosh: Exploring healthcare professionals' perspectives on social identity processes and health risks at a religious pilgrimage and music festivals
Taken together, the research highlights avenues for future research and collaboration aimed at developing healthcare practices and interventions informed by the social identity approach for the management of health risks in mass gatherings
How crowd violence arises and how it spreads
This chapter reviews theory and research on the emergence and spread of crowd violence. It focuses on violence within crowd events, and deals with the spread of conflict between events. Shared social identity and collective empowerment in relation to out-groups are also argued to be mechanisms through which violence spreads between events. The “violent crowd” was the social problem that prompted the first wave of crowd psychology in late nineteen…
How do police officers talk about their encounters with ‘the public’? Group interaction, procedural justice and officer constructions of policing identities
Despite widespread empirical support for Procedural Justice Theory, understanding the role of police psychology in shaping encounters with ‘citizens’ is relatively opaque. This article seeks to address this gap in the literature by exploring how officers talk about themselves and their colleagues and deploy social categories to understand their interactions with ‘the public’. The qualitative thematic analysis draws upon 22 semi-structured intervi…
A social identity model of riot diffusion: From injustice to empowerment in the 2011 London riots
Previous research has shown that riots spread across multiple locations, but has not explained underlying psychological processes. We examined rioting in three locations during the August 2011 disorders in England to test a social identity model of riot diffusion. We triangulated multiple sources to construct a narrative of events; and we analysed interviews with 68 participants to examine experiences. In line with the model, we found evidence fo…
Who controls the city: A micro-historical case study of the spread of rioting across North London in August 2011
In August 2011, over four days, rioting spread across several cities in England. Previous accounts of these riots have indicated the roles of police racism, class disadvantage, and spatial affordance. However, what remains unclear is how these structural factors interacted with crowd processes spatially over time to govern the precise patterns of spread. The present paper provides a micro-historical analysis of the patterns and sequences of colle…
The social psychological processes of ‘procedural justice’: Concepts, critiques and opportunities
Contemporary research on policing and procedural justice theory (PJT) emphasizes large-scale survey data to link a series of interlocking concepts, namely perceptions of procedural fairness, police legitimacy and normative compliance. In this article we contend that as such, contemporary research is in danger of conveying a misreading of PJT by portraying a reified social world divorced from the social psychological dynamics of encounters between…
The value of Supporter Liaison Officers (SLOs) in fan dialogue, conflict, governance and football crowd management in Sweden
Evidence of the value of increased supporter involvement in football governance is limited and existing work focuses primarily on the boardroom, rather than on managing problems associated with fan behaviour. This paper addresses these limitations by documenting and analysing the role of the Supporter Liaison Officers (SLOs) in Sweden, a country that has salient concerns and difficulties associated with football fan behaviour and policing. We arg…
The evolving normative dimensions of ‘riot’: Towards an elaborated social identity explanation
The question of how normative form changes during a riot, and thus how collective behaviour spreads to different targets and locations, has been neglected in previous research, despite its theoretical and practical importance. We begin to address this limitation through a detailed analysis of the rioting in the London borough of Haringey in 2011. A triangulated analysis of multiple sources of data (including police reports, media accounts, and vi…
Contemporary understanding of riots: Classical crowd psychology, ideology and the social identity approach
This article explores the origins and ideology of classical crowd psychology, a body of theory reflected in contemporary popularised understandings such as of the 2011 English ‘riots’. This article argues that during the nineteenth century, the crowd came to symbolise a fear of ‘mass society’ and that ‘classical’ crowd psychology was a product of these fears. Classical crowd psychology pathologised, reified and decontextualised the crowd, offerin…
Public disorder and globalisation
Tim Newburn provides a forward for this book in which he describes its author as one of the most important academic figures within the field of social scientific enquiry into urban social control a
On the Role of a Social Identity Analysis in Articulating Structure and Collective Action: The 2011 Riots in Tottenham and Hackney
Theoretical perspectives that give primacy to ideological or structural determinism have dominated criminological analysis of the 2011 English ‘riots’. This paper provides an alternative social psychological perspective through detailed empirical analysis of two of these riots. We utilize novel forms of data to build triangulated accounts of the nature of the events and explore the perspectives of participants. We assert these riots cannot be ade…
Revisiting the Classics: Policing coercion and liberty: a review of P.A.J. Waddington's Liberty and Order (1994) and Policing Citizens (1999)
As a field of social science research, policing has been fortunate to have a number of influential academic researchers and a rich history of significant writing. This is something to be celebrated. Our Revisiting the Classics series aims to bring together leading commentators to review books that contribute to the core of police studies. There will always be debate about which books are seminal and which authors have had the greatest influence o…
When is policing fair? Groups, identity and judgements of the procedural justice of coercive crowd policing
Procedural justice theory (PJT) is now a widely utilised theoretical perspective in policing research that acknowledges the centrality of police ‘fairness’. Despite its widespread acceptance this paper asserts that there are conceptual limitations that emerge when applying the theory to the policing of crowd events. This paper contends that this problem with PJT is a result of specific assumptions that are highlighted by two studies using a novel…
Crowds, context and identity: Dynamic categorization processes in the 'poll tax riot
Reicher has recently developed the social identity model of crowd behaviour based on self-categorization theory (SCT). This model begins to tackle the thorny theoretical problems posed by the dynamic nature of crowd action (Reicher, 1996b). The present paper describes an ethnographic study of a crowd event in which there were changes in the inter-group relationships over time. It is suggested that the laboratory evidence in support of SCT is comp…
How Conflict Escalates: The Inter-Group Dynamics of Collective Football Crowd 'Violence
In recent years, the debate on football crowd violence has concentrated on the violent dispositions of participants - and particularly on the nature and origins of conflictual norms held by 'hooligan' fans. In this paper, we challenge this tendency. We argue that the 'hooligan' perspective is limited in its ability to explain how conflict generalises during crowd events, the precise conditions under which it originates, and the form that it takes…
When is policing fair? Groups, identity and judgements of the procedural justice of coercive crowd policing
Procedural justice theory (PJT) is now a widely utilised theoretical perspective in policing research that acknowledges the centrality of police ‘fairness’. Despite its widespread acceptance this paper asserts that there are conceptual limitations that emerge when applying the theory to the policing of crowd events. This paper contends that this problem with PJT is a result of specific assumptions that are highlighted by two studies using a novel…
Transforming the boundaries of collective identity: From the ‘Local’ Anti-Road Campaign to ‘Global’ Resistance
This paper is concerned with how people involved in ‘local’ protest might come to see themselves as part of wider social groupings and even global forces of resistance. An ethnographic study of the No M11 Link Road Campaign in London examines participants' definitions of their collective identity boundaries at different stages of involvement. Cross-sectional material from the beginning and later in the campaign shows that there was a transformati…
The role of crowd theory in determining the use of force in public order policing
Social psychological research suggests that where police hold a theoretical view of the crowd in line with the ‘classic’ crowd psychology of Gustav Le Bon this can lead to police practices that inadvertently escalate public disorder. This research reflects debates within the criminology literature which suggests that a primary factor governing police tactics is police knowledge. However, the existing research on the specific relationships between…
Variability in the collective behaviour of England fans at Euro2004: ‘Hooliganism’, public order policing and social change
This paper presents an analysis of collective behaviour among England football fans attending the European football championships in Portugal (Euro2004). Given this category's violent reputation, a key goal was to explore the processes underlying their apparent shift away from conflict in match cities. Drawing from the elaborated social identity model of crowd behaviour (ESIM) data were obtained using semi‐structured observations and interviews b…
Beyond Prejudice: Extending the Social Psychology of Conflict, Inequality and Social Change
The concept of prejudice has profoundly influenced how we have investigated, explained and tried to change intergroup relations of discrimination and inequality. But what has this concept contributed to our knowledge of relations between groups and what has it obscured or misrepresented? How has it expanded or narrowed the horizons of psychological inquiry? How effective or ineffective has it been in guiding our attempts to transform social relat…
The importance of social structure and social interaction in stereotype consensus and content: Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts
This paper addresses the hypothesis derived from self‐categorization theory (SCT) that the relationship between groups and stereotyping will be affected by the social structural conditions within which group interaction occurs. A mixed design experiment (n=56) measured low‐status groups' stereotypes and preferences for conflict with a high‐status outgroup prior to and after within‐group discussion across varying social structural conditions. Over…
The evolving normative dimensions of ‘riot’: Towards an elaborated social identity explanation
The question of how normative form changes during a riot, and thus how collective behaviour spreads to different targets and locations, has been neglected in previous research, despite its theoretical and practical importance. We begin to address this limitation through a detailed analysis of the rioting in the London borough of Haringey in 2011. A triangulated analysis of multiple sources of data (including police reports, media accounts, and vi…
On the Role of a Social Identity Analysis in Articulating Structure and Collective Action: The 2011 Riots in Tottenham and Hackney
Theoretical perspectives that give primacy to ideological or structural determinism have dominated criminological analysis of the 2011 English ‘riots’. This paper provides an alternative social psychological perspective through detailed empirical analysis of two of these riots. We utilize novel forms of data to build triangulated accounts of the nature of the events and explore the perspectives of participants. We assert these riots cannot be ade…
Identity, legitimacy and cooperation with police: Comparing general-population and street-population samples from London
Social identity is a core aspect of procedural justice theory, which predicts that fair treatment at the hands of power holders such as police expresses, communicates, and generates feelings of inclusion, status, and belonging within salient social categories. In turn, a sense of shared group membership with power holders, with police officers as powerful symbolic representatives of “law-abiding society,” engenders trust, legitimacy, and cooperat…
A social identity model of riot diffusion: From injustice to empowerment in the 2011 London riots
Previous research has shown that riots spread across multiple locations, but has not explained underlying psychological processes. We examined rioting in three locations during the August 2011 disorders in England to test a social identity model of riot diffusion. We triangulated multiple sources to construct a narrative of events; and we analysed interviews with 68 participants to examine experiences. In line with the model, we found evidence fo…
The social psychological processes of ‘procedural justice’: Concepts, critiques and opportunities
Contemporary research on policing and procedural justice theory (PJT) emphasizes large-scale survey data to link a series of interlocking concepts, namely perceptions of procedural fairness, police legitimacy and normative compliance. In this article we contend that as such, contemporary research is in danger of conveying a misreading of PJT by portraying a reified social world divorced from the social psychological dynamics of encounters between…
Managing to avert disaster: Explaining collective resilience at an outdoor music event
There is considerable evidence that psychological membership of crowds can protect people in dangerous events, although the underlying social–psychological processes have not been fully investigated. There is also evidence that those responsible for managing crowd safety view crowds as a source of psychological danger, views that may themselves impact upon crowd safety; yet, there has been little examination of how such ‘disaster myths’ operate i…
Bias as a Research Strategy in Participant Observation: The Case of Intergroup Conflict
Participant observation (PO) is one of the more fruitful methodological approaches to studying crowd behavior. This article argues that, since crowd behavior characteristically takes place in a context of intergroup conflict, PO may involve having to take sides to gather data. Possible sources of bias within a partisan PO framework are examined, including bias in access, in observation, and in analysis. Two examples vof partisan research on crowd…
Policing football ‘risk’? A participant action research case study of a liaison-based approach to ‘public order’
This paper reports upon the first formal academic analysis of the deployment of a dialogue based and explicitly non-coercive ‘Police Liaison Team’ (PLT) within the public order policing operation surrounding a football fixture. The study uses an approach based upon Participant Action Research to first generate changes to operational practices and then to analyse the consequences of these changes upon the dynamics of the event and of the public or…
Contextualising the crowd in contemporary social science
This paper situates contemporary social scientific studies of crowd events and crowd behaviour in their historical and ideological context. The original ‘crowd science’ developed from definitions of ‘social problems’ that emerged in the late nineteenth century – in particular the concerns among the French establishment about the threat of the ‘mass’ to ‘civilization’. This, and the surrounding intellectual context, encouraged the development of t…
Tackling football hooliganism: A quantitative study of public order, policing and crowd psychology
University of Liverpool andPolice Academy of the NetherlandsThis paper contributes to the science of crowd dynamics and psychology byexamining the social psychological processes related to the relative absence of hooliganism at the Finals of the 2004 Union Europe ́enne de Football Association(UEFA) Football (Soccer) Championships in Portugal. Quantitative data from astructured observational study is integrated with data from a questionnaire surve…
Keeping the Peace: Social Identity, Procedural Justice and the Policing of Football Crowds
This paper explores the relevance of the Elaborated Social Identity Model of Crowd Behaviour and Procedural Justice Theory to an understanding of both the presence and absence of collective conflict during football (soccer) crowd events. It provides an analysis of data gathered during longitudinal ethnographic study of fans of Cardiff City Football Club-a group of supporters with a notorious history of involvement in 'hooliganism' within the Engl…
Policing football crowds in England and Wales: A model of ‘good practice’
There have been important developments in psychological theory of crowd dynamics (Reicher 2001 Reicher, S. 2001. “Crowds and social movements”. In Blackwell handbook of social psychology: group processes, Edited by: Hogg, M. and Tindale, S. 232–258. Oxford: Blackwell. [Google Scholar]). When this body of knowledge has been combined with operational policing it has been associated with conflict reduction in the context of high risk football matche…
How Riots Spread Between Cities: Introducing the Police Pathway
Waves of riots are politically and psychologically significant national events. The role of police perceptions and practices in spreading unrest between cities has been neglected in previous research, even though the police are significant actors in these events. We examined the role of police interventions in the spread of rioting to one English city in August 2011 by triangulating multiple data sources and analyzing police accounts and communit…
The value of Supporter Liaison Officers (SLOs) in fan dialogue, conflict, governance and football crowd management in Sweden
Evidence of the value of increased supporter involvement in football governance is limited and existing work focuses primarily on the boardroom, rather than on managing problems associated with fan behaviour. This paper addresses these limitations by documenting and analysing the role of the Supporter Liaison Officers (SLOs) in Sweden, a country that has salient concerns and difficulties associated with football fan behaviour and policing. We arg…
Policing the Covid-19 pandemic: Police officer well-being and commitment to democratic modes of policing
Police organisations have a wealth of experience in responding to emergencies, but COVID-19 is unprecedented in terms of the speed, scale and complexity of developing doctrine and its implementation by officers. The crisis also threw into sharp relief the fact that police policy and, crucially, practice are always implemented within wider social, political and economic contexts. Using online survey data collected from 325 police officers based at…
Playing the Game’: Power, Authority and Procedural Justice in Interactions Between Police and Homeless People in London
We explore the relevance of procedural justice theory for understanding the relationship between police and marginalized groups and individuals. Analysis is based on ethnographic research into the policing of the street population in an inner London borough through shadowing policing patrols and embedding observation within the homeless community. Police–street population relationships appear characterized by: (1) a structural context of extreme …
Who controls the city: A micro-historical case study of the spread of rioting across North London in August 2011
In August 2011, over four days, rioting spread across several cities in England. Previous accounts of these riots have indicated the roles of police racism, class disadvantage, and spatial affordance. However, what remains unclear is how these structural factors interacted with crowd processes spatially over time to govern the precise patterns of spread. The present paper provides a micro-historical analysis of the patterns and sequences of colle…
Crowd action as intergroup process: Introducing the police perspective
Traditional crowd theory decontextualizes crowd incidents and explains behaviour entirely in terms of processes internal to the crowd itself. This ignores the fact that such incidents are characteristically intergroup encounters and draws attention away from the role of groups such as the police in the development of events. This paper begins to rectify this omission through an analysis of interviews with 26 Public Order trained police concerning…
How Conflict Escalates: The Inter-Group Dynamics of Collective Football Crowd 'Violence
In recent years, the debate on football crowd violence has concentrated on the violent dispositions of participants - and particularly on the nature and origins of conflictual norms held by 'hooligan' fans. In this paper, we challenge this tendency. We argue that the 'hooligan' perspective is limited in its ability to explain how conflict generalises during crowd events, the precise conditions under which it originates, and the form that it takes…
Crowds, context and identity: Dynamic categorization processes in the 'poll tax riot
Reicher has recently developed the social identity model of crowd behaviour based on self-categorization theory (SCT). This model begins to tackle the thorny theoretical problems posed by the dynamic nature of crowd action (Reicher, 1996b). The present paper describes an ethnographic study of a crowd event in which there were changes in the inter-group relationships over time. It is suggested that the laboratory evidence in support of SCT is comp…
‘Hooligans’ abroad? Inter‐group dynamics, social identity and participation in collective ‘disorder’ at the 1998 World Cup Finals
During the 1998 Football World Cup Finals in France, English supporters were, once again, involved in major incidents of collective ‘disorder’. Explanations for these incidents concentrated on the conflictual norms held by ‘hooligans’. In contrast, Scottish supporters attending the tournament displayed norms of non‐violence, explained by the popular press in terms of the absence of ‘hooligans’. This study challenges this tendency to explain the p…
Bias as a Research Strategy in Participant Observation: The Case of Intergroup Conflict
Participant observation (PO) is one of the more fruitful methodological approaches to studying crowd behavior. This article argues that, since crowd behavior characteristically takes place in a context of intergroup conflict, PO may involve having to take sides to gather data. Possible sources of bias within a partisan PO framework are examined, including bias in access, in observation, and in analysis. Two examples vof partisan research on crowd…
Transforming the boundaries of collective identity: From the ‘Local’ Anti-Road Campaign to ‘Global’ Resistance
This paper is concerned with how people involved in ‘local’ protest might come to see themselves as part of wider social groupings and even global forces of resistance. An ethnographic study of the No M11 Link Road Campaign in London examines participants' definitions of their collective identity boundaries at different stages of involvement. Cross-sectional material from the beginning and later in the campaign shows that there was a transformati…
An integrated approach to crowd psychology and public order policing
This paper uses recent developments in crowd psychology as the basis for developing new guidelines for public order policing. Argues that the classical view of all crowd members as being inherently irrational and suggestible, and therefore potentially violent, is both wrong and potentially dangerous. It can lead to policing strategies that respond to the violence of some in the crowd by clamping down on all members, and therefore lead all members…
The importance of social structure and social interaction in stereotype consensus and content: Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts
This paper addresses the hypothesis derived from self‐categorization theory (SCT) that the relationship between groups and stereotyping will be affected by the social structural conditions within which group interaction occurs. A mixed design experiment (n=56) measured low‐status groups' stereotypes and preferences for conflict with a high‐status outgroup prior to and after within‐group discussion across varying social structural conditions. Over…
Football Banning Orders, Proportionality, and Public Order Policing
This article provides a critical analysis of the UK legislation on football banning orders. The historical development of this legislation is outlined and concerns are raised about its impact upon civil liberties and human rights, particularly with respect to Section 14B of the Football (Disorder) Act 2000. The article then outlines a body of research on crowd psychology, public order policing and football ‘disorder’ that questions the determinin…
Variability in the collective behaviour of England fans at Euro2004: ‘Hooliganism’, public order policing and social change
This paper presents an analysis of collective behaviour among England football fans attending the European football championships in Portugal (Euro2004). Given this category's violent reputation, a key goal was to explore the processes underlying their apparent shift away from conflict in match cities. Drawing from the elaborated social identity model of crowd behaviour (ESIM) data were obtained using semi‐structured observations and interviews b…
Policing football crowds in England and Wales: A model of ‘good practice’
There have been important developments in psychological theory of crowd dynamics (Reicher 2001 Reicher, S. 2001. “Crowds and social movements”. In Blackwell handbook of social psychology: group processes, Edited by: Hogg, M. and Tindale, S. 232–258. Oxford: Blackwell. [Google Scholar]). When this body of knowledge has been combined with operational policing it has been associated with conflict reduction in the context of high risk football matche…
Tackling football hooliganism: A quantitative study of public order, policing and crowd psychology
University of Liverpool andPolice Academy of the NetherlandsThis paper contributes to the science of crowd dynamics and psychology byexamining the social psychological processes related to the relative absence of hooliganism at the Finals of the 2004 Union Europe ́enne de Football Association(UEFA) Football (Soccer) Championships in Portugal. Quantitative data from astructured observational study is integrated with data from a questionnaire surve…
The role of crowd theory in determining the use of force in public order policing
Social psychological research suggests that where police hold a theoretical view of the crowd in line with the ‘classic’ crowd psychology of Gustav Le Bon this can lead to police practices that inadvertently escalate public disorder. This research reflects debates within the criminology literature which suggests that a primary factor governing police tactics is police knowledge. However, the existing research on the specific relationships between…
Preventing Crowd Violence
From jubilant sports fans celebrating a victory to angry political protestors, crowds create volatile situations that can all too often result in violence or property destruction. Preventing Crowd Violence offers a lucid examination of crowd behavior and of law enforcement tactics designed to deescalate tensions and promote cooperative interactions
Contextualising the crowd in contemporary social science
This paper situates contemporary social scientific studies of crowd events and crowd behaviour in their historical and ideological context. The original ‘crowd science’ developed from definitions of ‘social problems’ that emerged in the late nineteenth century – in particular the concerns among the French establishment about the threat of the ‘mass’ to ‘civilization’. This, and the surrounding intellectual context, encouraged the development of t…
Beyond Prejudice: Extending the Social Psychology of Conflict, Inequality and Social Change
The concept of prejudice has profoundly influenced how we have investigated, explained and tried to change intergroup relations of discrimination and inequality. But what has this concept contributed to our knowledge of relations between groups and what has it obscured or misrepresented? How has it expanded or narrowed the horizons of psychological inquiry? How effective or ineffective has it been in guiding our attempts to transform social relat…
Policing international football tournaments and the cross-cultural relevance of the social identity approach to crowd behaviour
Despite a history of violent incidents, the crowd events surrounding the fixture between Germany and the Netherlands at the 2004 European Championships in Portugal remained very peaceful. This paper provides an analysis of the social psychological processes among German football fans in relation to the policing carried out by the Portuguese Security Police. Data was collected drawing on qualitative observational methods. Findings support the cont…
Keeping the Peace: Social Identity, Procedural Justice and the Policing of Football Crowds
This paper explores the relevance of the Elaborated Social Identity Model of Crowd Behaviour and Procedural Justice Theory to an understanding of both the presence and absence of collective conflict during football (soccer) crowd events. It provides an analysis of data gathered during longitudinal ethnographic study of fans of Cardiff City Football Club-a group of supporters with a notorious history of involvement in 'hooliganism' within the Engl…
Managing to avert disaster: Explaining collective resilience at an outdoor music event
There is considerable evidence that psychological membership of crowds can protect people in dangerous events, although the underlying social–psychological processes have not been fully investigated. There is also evidence that those responsible for managing crowd safety view crowds as a source of psychological danger, views that may themselves impact upon crowd safety; yet, there has been little examination of how such ‘disaster myths’ operate i…
Crowds in the 21st Century: Perspectives from Contemporary Social Science
Revisiting the Classics: Policing coercion and liberty: a review of P.A.J. Waddington's Liberty and Order (1994) and Policing Citizens (1999)
As a field of social science research, policing has been fortunate to have a number of influential academic researchers and a rich history of significant writing. This is something to be celebrated. Our Revisiting the Classics series aims to bring together leading commentators to review books that contribute to the core of police studies. There will always be debate about which books are seminal and which authors have had the greatest influence o…
When is policing fair? Groups, identity and judgements of the procedural justice of coercive crowd policing
Procedural justice theory (PJT) is now a widely utilised theoretical perspective in policing research that acknowledges the centrality of police ‘fairness’. Despite its widespread acceptance this paper asserts that there are conceptual limitations that emerge when applying the theory to the policing of crowd events. This paper contends that this problem with PJT is a result of specific assumptions that are highlighted by two studies using a novel…
Policing football ‘risk’? A participant action research case study of a liaison-based approach to ‘public order’
This paper reports upon the first formal academic analysis of the deployment of a dialogue based and explicitly non-coercive ‘Police Liaison Team’ (PLT) within the public order policing operation surrounding a football fixture. The study uses an approach based upon Participant Action Research to first generate changes to operational practices and then to analyse the consequences of these changes upon the dynamics of the event and of the public or…
Contemporary understanding of riots: Classical crowd psychology, ideology and the social identity approach
This article explores the origins and ideology of classical crowd psychology, a body of theory reflected in contemporary popularised understandings such as of the 2011 English ‘riots’. This article argues that during the nineteenth century, the crowd came to symbolise a fear of ‘mass society’ and that ‘classical’ crowd psychology was a product of these fears. Classical crowd psychology pathologised, reified and decontextualised the crowd, offerin…
Public disorder and globalisation
Tim Newburn provides a forward for this book in which he describes its author as one of the most important academic figures within the field of social scientific enquiry into urban social control a
Political science (39 works) · Psychology (36 works) · Sociology (34 works) · Law (32 works) · Social Psychology (28 works) · Criminology (27 works) · Policing Practices and Perceptions (21 works) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (20 works) · Social identity theory (20 works) · Social group (19 works)