Peter Waddington
Academic who developed ‘kettling’ as a way of keeping large crowds of protesters under control
PETER WADDINGTON, who has died aged 71, was a police officer-turned-academic credited with developing “kettling” as means for controlling protesters during lawful demonstrations that threaten to get out of control.
Kettling, also known as containment, involves cordons of police surrounding a crowd, confining them in a limited area and denying them access to food, water and lavatory facilities. In the past two decades it has largely replaced “dispersal”, the use of horses or lines of baton-wielding police officers charging into a crowd, which had been in use since at least the Peterloo massacre of 1819.
Waddington argued that kettling succeeds in restoring public order “by using boredom as its principal weapon, rather than fear as people flee from onrushing police wielding batons”.
It was introduced after the Poll Tax riot of 1990, when police tactics in Trafalgar Square led to disorder spreading throughout the West End and officers racing from one disturbance to the next.
At the time Waddington had just started a three-year research project on public-order policing in London that involved attending police strategy meetings. He felt that he could not simply be an observer and instead put his thoughts in writing to the Commissioner. “I argued that it would have been better to have contained the protesters in Trafalgar Square until they calmed down and then allowed to disperse under controlled conditions,” he wrote.
Kettling was first used in Britain during a disability rights demonstration in Parliament Square in October 1995. Less than four years later a May Day protest in Parliament Square threatened to turn ugly, as the statue of Churchill was defaced and obscene graffiti was daubed on the Cenotaph in Whitehall. Soon the protesters were encircled by police in riot gear. Despite various attempts to breach the cordon, none of the protesters was able to escape. Eventually three of them approached the senior police commander and offered to negotiate an orderly dispersal – “Exactly what the police wanted,” noted Waddington approvingly.
The tactic has not been without controversy and during the G20 protests in London in 2009 Ian Tomlinson, a newspaper vendor unwittingly caught up in the kettling, died after being pushed over by a police officer.
Critics have claimed that kettling amounts to unlawful detention and deprivation of human rights, alleging that it is often used for indiscriminate intelligence gathering because anyone caught up in a kettle is not allowed to go free without giving their personal details and being searched and photographed. The European Court of Human Rights, however, found in 2012 that, providing there are good grounds for taking such action, it is lawful.
Waddington, a sociologist, was also an advocate of using CS spray and water cannon as a means for controlling crowds, arguing that they were more in keeping with the principle of minimum force than officers on horseback or behind riot shields lashing out arbitrarily. He was cautious about calls to equip police officers with firearms, pointing to studies in other countries which demonstrate that “arming the police has little effect on their safety or on crime level generally”.
Peter Anthony James Waddington was born in Birmingham on March 6 1947. He left school at 16 to become a police cadet and later a constable with Birmingham City Police, making up for his lost education at evening classes. He went on to study Sociology at the University of London before taking an MA and a PHD at the University of Leeds, his thesis being about how prison governors are “socialised” into their roles.
He joined the University of Reading in 1977, gradually rising to become Professor of Political Sociology. In 2005 he moved to the University of Wolverhampton, where he set up the first degree course in policing.
As part of his research Waddington – known as “Tank” because of his height and build – trained as a firearms officer with the Metropolitan Police. He was also involved in remodelling policing overseas, giving testimony to the Goldstone Commission in South Africa.
Waddington also sought to strip away the mythology that surrounds the police, demonstrating how “bobbies on the beat” make no difference to crime rates – only to public confidence; how the commercialisation of fairs in the 19th century transformed them from occasions for social mayhem to orderly forms of entertainment; and how – even in 1996, when he wrote a piece entitled “Finding a real job for Bobby” for The Independent
– the police are increasingly being used by society as a “secret social service”.
The problem, he wrote, is distinguishing clearly between what is and is not police work: “A missing child may tragically turn out to be a murder; a collapsed elderly person may have been the victim of crime; a crashed car might be stolen. The division between crime and non-crime is a permeable one indeed.”
Peter Waddington married Diane Atherley in 1968. They had a son and a daughter.
Peter Waddington, born March 6 1947, died March 21 2018