Patrick Hayes considers the “kettling” technique beloved of modern metropolitan police forces in the face of protest:
This is not in any way to defend kettling, which restricts basic freedoms of movement and protest. Being kettled is a deeply frustrating experience. You are penned into a small area with thousands of other protesters for hours on end, with no access to toilets or provisions and little to no knowledge of when the police will let you go. This repressive police technique should be abolished.
However, the emergence of kettling does not reflect a new era of police ‘barbarism’ or ‘gross police brutality’, as some have claimed. Rather, the logic behind kettling seems to be an attempt by the authorities to adapt to a new kind of aimless protesting.
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The rise of kettling speaks to changes within the authorities too. This tactic reveals a new desire amongst the police to avoid engaging with protesters directly, to avoid beating and controlling them as they might have tried to do in the past. Instead, the police have developed mostly risk-averse, hands-off tactics for demos, of which kettling is a prime example.
Kettling is really a damage-limitation exercise. The hope is that in pinning protesters into one small area they will eventually become sedate or fall asleep after they have let off enough steam. In a bizarre turn of events, the police now even hand out glossy brochures explaining to protesters what kettling is all about and why the police do it. Kettling is analogous to parents sending children to the ‘naughty step’ to get them to calm down.
Indeed, in the absence of any clear collective ideas, protesters have in many ways become reliant on kettling as a focal point for their radicalism. Protests have turned into games of cat-and-mouse, as youths try to avoid being penned in by the police, using Twitter to organise flash mobs and effectively playing peek-a-boo with the police. The protesters achieve a semblance of collectivity through the experience of being trapped together in a kettle.
