IGP’s press conference -Kayihura needs a refresher course on crowd psychology and crowd control! by Drew Ddembe on Monday, April 4, 2011 at 10:55pm newvision.co.ug/D/8/13/751020 This is a very interesting letter. Interesting in its naivety and ignorance. If Kayihura were just any other person, one would think incompetence but this looks more like a priori justification of police brutality by setting up a self fulfilling prophesy. it also demonstrates an ignorance of crowd psychology that is appalling in a police commander! If one really wants to be cynical then one could say that Kayihura is deliberately setting up a situation that will predictably -predictably because he and his officers will provoke it starting with this letter, decline into a riot and police on demonstrator violence. Kayihura sets the stage by defining demonstrators as the enemy and imputing evil plans and emotions onto them. He goes further by declaring that intelligence received by him clearly shows that the motive of the demonstrators is violence and disruption of the peace. He even throws in just for good measure that oft misused word terrorism making one wonder whether he even understands its meaning. It is often misused by repressive governments to justify cracking down on dissenters and using extrajudicial means! The relationship between the egyptian army and the demonstrating public is a clear demonstration of community policing at its best. For days and nights, demonstrators peacefully stood their ground and the army maintained their positions without seeking to attack or mete violence on the crowds. If anything they sought to engage with the crowd in a non violent manner and reassure them that they were not going to hurt them. It is the kiboko squads on camels that finally caused chaos and threatened to turn the peaceful demonstrators into rioters! In Libya, it was Ghadafi’s goons who shot live rounds into demonstrators killing them that created the headless monster now causing problems -an armed insurrection! Kayihura’s police has a major image problem -one that does not help during such situations. They are known to be corrupt, incompetent and brutal. they are also known to be partisan in their interactions with the public particularly gatherings unfriendly to the government. They have been known to use deadly force even in situations that did not warrant it after they themselves have deliberately or out of incompetence and ignorance of crowd control provoked violence! This kind of image means that Kayihura has got to work much harder to control crowds and prevent the situation from getting out of control. Unfortunately he and his men do not view it as a failure when a member of the public rioter or not gets hurt. They actually view it as a victory and reinforcement of their manhood -they are not weak! A “self-fulfilling prophecy” (SFP) was coined in 1948 by Robert Merton to describe “a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true” (Merton 1968: 477) Kayihura defines demonstrators as a threat to public order. In doing so, he “locates the cause of violence as lying entirely with the crowd as opposed to arising out of the interaction between crowds and the police, it neglects the possibility that police actions may contribute to the production of conflict and hence provides no basis for developing strategies, tactics and technologies that might minimise such a possibility.” (Reicher et al 2007: 403) In their paper on the principles and Practice of Public Order policing published oline by the Oxford Journal of Law, Reichar and his colleagues see two major problems with this approach. “The first is that it runs the risk of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you define people as hostile and if you then act towards them in ways that make it obvious, you think of them as being hostile, then they are very likely to become hostile in response. The first time the chairman of Manchester United described his fans as ‘animals’, the fans responded by chanting ‘we hate humans’ at the next game (Robins, 1984). The second problem is that this approach misses out on a major opportunity. If the police can interact with crowd members in ways that lead to a deteriorating relationship and increase conflict, they can equally interact in other ways that lead to improving relationships and reduce conflict.” Either the IGP is cynical and is deliberately trying to create an incendiary situation, or he needs to go back to school and study crowd control and crowd psychology! Demonstrators are not a threat to public order. They are expressing grievances in a manner they consider lawful and constitutional -and indeed it is. If there are political actors whose primary goal is to create violence then those actors should be isolated but it should not take away peoples right to demonstrate! The theory of crowd psychology however demonstrates to us that when met with violence a peaceful crowd can very easily turn violent. This is the kind of incompetence that led to the death of 30 people during the so called Bugandan riots as well as a further 3 after the fires at Kasubi. Its also the same incompetence that led to the shooting and death of 2 students at Makerere university when Mao was guild president. The recent fracas in Wandegeya just two weeks ago being a case in point as are other sitiuations in the past that have been mishandled in the past by the police which instead of taking responsibility has sought to hide behind imprecise terms like “terrorism”! The use of direct police brutality as well as proxies such as the kiboko squad will predictably result in the chaos that the IGP now “predicts”! I would like to recommend this excellent paper to Kayihura and other readers. Knowledge-Based Public Order Policing: Principles and Practice Stephen Reicher*, Clifford Stott†, John Drury‡, Otto Adang§, Patrick Cronin¶ and Andrew Livingstone** policing.oxfordjournals.org/content/1/4/403.full
Posted on: Sun, 01 Dec 2013 17:04:52 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015