Disruption is Not Permitted: The Policing and Social Control of Occupy Oakland

Abstract

Negotiated management—various forms of communication, collaboration and cooperation between police and protest organizers, often taking the form of protest permits—has been mainly theorized as a means to mitigate police violence while respecting protesters’ 1st Amendment rights. A few theorists have problematized this view, suggesting that negotiated management is a form of social control that puts various restrictions on dissent. Drawing from my research on Occupy Oakland, I build upon these critiques to illustrate how negotiated management was used as a tool of repression in two key ways, and how newer forms of repression (strategic incapacitation) are still enmeshed in its logic. First, by criminalizing legal activity among protesters, through the use of a permit, who were then subjected to police repression. Second, I show how negotiated management as a normative structure of protest was used as a form of repression, even when communication and cooperation with police were clearly rejected by the movement. I illustrate how the refusal of negotiated management was used to discredit the movement and subject it to physical repression. Rather than seeing negotiated management as an alternative to police repression and strategic incapacitation, I argue that they are two sides of the same policing project, the primary aim of which is to prevent disruptive protest.