Intelligent Control: Developments in Public Order Policing in Canada (review)

Typically technical, uncritical, and averse to theory, the literature on public order policing seldom receives the analytic attention found in de Lint and Hall’s Intelligent Control. In this book, the authors propose a model to assist in understanding public order policing in Canada. De Lint and Hall suggest that through “intelligent control,” the police impose predictability and stability on demonstrations and strikes, which used to be inherently unpredictable and unstable. They argue that within the neo-liberal context, it is possible to view the policing of strikes and protests as a new mode in which the police distance themselves from politics, manage conflicts through responsibilization, and increasingly rely on intelligence gathering. Liaison strategies for building relationships with labour and community activists have been adopted by virtually all police forces in Canada, and de Lint and Hall seek to understand how this strategy coincides with neo-liberalism and the seeming withdrawal of the public police from the public sphere.

Working within a field that has no shortage of models that attempt to make sense of the varying and evolving strategies of public order policing, de Lint and Hall reject the dichotomy between coercion and cooperation that others adhere to, and, importantly, they introduce a post-9/11 intelligence focus into their analysis. Previous attempts at characterizing public order policing often fall short in accounting for the obvious: where negotiation, cooperation, and consultation are emphasized, the use of force and coercion falls by the wayside, and vice versa. Here the authors tell us that force is used more selectively and is at least partially determined by the willingness of the protest group or union to play by the liaison team’s rules.

De Lint and Hall situate their analysis of public order policing within Canadian political economy and probe the logic of consulting, cooperative police within neo-liberal, post-Fordist governance. They argue that public order policing, especially of labour, was antagonistic and oppositional from the 1850s through the 1950s because of the fear of communist and socialist revolution. However, the crises in Fordism and welfarism that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s gave way to post-Fordist or neo-liberal solutions, dramatically changing the nature of policing as service-based approaches emerged. The emphasis in public order went from forceful repression to neutral professionalism; repressive, hard-line approaches to protests and strikes could not be tolerated under neo-liberal governance schemes. De Lint and Hall’s overview of the policing of labour is well placed and expertly establishes that the police have been overwhelmingly successful in institutionalizing labour movements.

The ability to account for the changing structures of public order policing is thus reason enough for scholars to read this book. The so-called rise of community policing alongside increased militarization is well established within the Canadian policing literature. In Intelligent Control, these phenomena are recast as precursors to the current tactical “liaison” approach for responding to public disorder. While the book provides insights into public order policing that are long overdue, its weakness is actually in the extension of the intelligent control model beyond the labour movement to more radical social movements, where the model is less convincing and tends to conflate labour with these very different movements.

In this sense, the intelligent control model suffers from over-reach. Combining liaison and coercive policing into one model turns intelligent control into an ad hoc category into which all forms of public order policing are heaped. After considering the litany of elements and definitions of intelligent control proposed throughout the book, the question one cannot help but ask is, What doesn’t intelligent control include? Intelligent control is “soft” and it is “hard.” It is lethal and non-lethal. It is intelligent and calculated, and it is impulsive and brutish. Even “close” and “distanced” public order policing are merely variations within the globalizing concept of intelligent control. Giving order to the chaos that is public order policing...