Introducing Policing the Crowd

This chapter introduces the central themes and arguments of Policing the Crowd. It highlights that crowds are a routine yet politically charged feature of public life, serving as both engines of social change and flashpoints of conflict. How police respond to them – whether with facilitation or repression – acts as a litmus test for democracy, revealing the balance between order, safety, and rights. This chapter situates crowd policing as a uniquely complex domain of policing, where officers must make rapid and consequential decisions in environments shaped by risk, competing identities, and political pressures. It outlines the persistence of outdated myths of ‘mob psychology’ in shaping public and professional perceptions, despite decades of research showing crowd behaviour to be structured, meaningful, and socially embedded. It also maps the practical, legal, and cultural challenges faced by police in the UK and the US, from the operational dilemmas of escalation and legitimacy to the comparative differences in institutions and traditions. Finally, this chapter provides a roadmap for this book: moving from historical and legal foundations, through classical and contemporary crowd psychology, to the development of evidence-based policing models and their application in Europe and the United States.