The Metropolitan Police and the politics of public order, 1968-1981

Abstract

This thesis explores the development of public order policing between the late 1960s and early 1980s, situating it within the broader ‘politics of public order’ of the time. Using newly- released archival material – including significant tranches of documents secured through Freedom of Information requests – it explains how the Metropolitan Police developed its aims, methods, and capacity for maintaining public order and containing public disorder during this period, examining the shift from ‘traditional methods’ towards a paramilitary-style approach. It shows how this was developed through the adoption of new crowd control equipment, developments in training and tactics, and new methods of intelligence gathering and command and control. While these practices were developed within the Metropolitan Police, they were gradually exported to other police forces in an effort to strengthen national public order capacity, a process encouraged by the Home Office and gradually taken on by the Association of Chief Police Officers.

This thesis also shows how these changes in policing were influenced by a welter of competing cultural and political forms, many of which existed within, outside, and on the peripheries of policing institutions. In this sense, it pays attention to the contours of the politics of public order: an uneven and highly-fraught series of political contestations regarding the limits of police power, the limits of civil liberties, and the role of police in maintaining public order; contestations which played out within the Metropolitan Police, but which were shaped by a number of wider political and social contexts which provided the backdrop to these debates. As such, this thesis provides a deeper understanding of the politics of public order during the transformative period, joining recent scholarship in the field of criminal justice history in placing policing institutions within their broader social, cultural, and political context.