Public Disorder and Globalization by Sophie Body-Gendrot

Author:Sophie Body-Gendrot [Body-Gendrot, Sophie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Globalization, Criminology, Social Science, Political Science, Urban, Sociology
ISBN: 9781317407126
Google: fzQlDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-12-01T12:57:14+00:00

Divergences

The divergences in the handling of public disorder are probably more important than the common features in the three cases.

In Istanbul, as in Hong Kong, it is likely that some police officers resisted protest in favour of democratic rights because they found them illegitimate. Police forces defended the regimes’ concept of order, and their traditional views oppose street-level politics. For them, those who get involved do it at their own risk (Della Porta & Atak, 2016). In all the studied cases, police chiefs neither talked nor negotiated with protest organizers.

While the occupiers’ strategies were highly innovative, including artistic expression, the repression exerted by the Turkish and Hong Kong police forces was brutally traditional. Escalated force characterized their routine incapacitation strategy. Their repertoire of tactics included massive arrests, beatings, and the use of pepper and tear gas to intimidate protesters and quell protests. Metal barricades were used in Hong Kong in an ongoing attrition battle opposing police and protesters that lasted several weeks. In the densely populated area of Mongkok, hooded and masked thugs, allegedly affiliated with local triads, as well as paid peasants, molested students and journalists, provoking them and seeking their violent reactions in order to legitimate repression (The Guardian, Oct. 4, 2014).

In Istanbul, at dawn on May 28, the riot police fired tear-gas canisters on the occupiers, and two days later, they set their tents on fire. The crackdown was brutal. About one hundred protesters were injured, and two journalists had to be hospitalized. In the panic, the park’s concrete banisters collapsed. On June 1, a protester was shot in the head by a police officer.

The zero tolerance stance against threats to public order appears to be the dominant philosophy of the Turkish police, a militarized police that fight domestic wars against the state’s enemies and operate under military codes of procedure. Roché (2012: 15) defines the Turkish jandarma as the fourth army of the country.1 Amnesty International observers report that police officers, including plain clothes officers and civilians acting in partnership with police, were seen beating suspected protesters, as well as journalists, doctors, and lawyers. Detained women complained of sexual harassment. The pattern of abuse was widespread and systematic, according to the report (Amnesty International, 2016: 18). Water cannons were used as a principal means of dispersing protesters. Vehicles known as TOMAT and ‘scorpions’ dispensed water, chemical gas, dye, or foam. They also targeted people inside buildings and hotels, through doors and windows, as well as makeshift clinics – namely, the German hospital near Taksim Square. On June 15, 2013, a violent clearing of the Gezi Park by the riot police and jandarma caused numerous casualties. It was reported by the media that 150,000 tear-gas cartridges and 3,000 tonnes of water were used by police cannons during those three weeks.

Popular uprisings in Turkey 2013 were emblematic of police escalation and culpability conducive to public outrage and eventual mass revolts. Unwarranted coercion against a small group of peaceful activists worked as a flashpoint and backfired to an unprecedented level as it transformed a minor protests into a countrywide mass uprising.

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