This chapter constitutes a case study of South Yorkshire Police’s (SYP’s) handling of a protest outside the Sheffield City Hall venue of a Liberal Democrat party conference on 11-12 March 2011. The demonstration occurred in the wake of a number of high-profile official reports advocating a more permissive approach to protest policing. The chapter describes and analyses two particular aspects of SYP’s ‘Operation Obelisk’: the use of social media (such as Twitter and Facebook) to keep the general public informed of ongoing or impending police activities as part of a ‘no surprises’ approach; and the deployment of a Police Liaison Team, part of whose responsibility was to complement CCTV surveillance by feeding information on the mood and activities of the crowd to a remote command cell. The study concludes that such technological innovations have a vital role to play in complementing – and moderating the negative impact of – more established methods of policing political protest.
CITATION STYLE
McSeveny, K., & Waddington, D. (2011). Up close and personal – the interplay between information technology and human agency in the policing of the 2011 sheffield Anti-Lib dem protest. In Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing (pp. 199–212). Springer London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2140-4_13
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