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When the Miranda decision was announced, police feared it would inhibit their effectiveness in gaining the cooperation of suspects. This fear has not been borne out; 80 % of suspects waive their Miranda rights, and police have an extensive repertoire of ploys to cause suspects to confess. These include flattery and ingratiation, veiled threats, and deception.

Officers do not use force in a vacuum. It has long been recognized that a use of force is not the result of a single decision, but rather of “a contingent sequence of decisions and resulting behaviors—each increasing or decreasing the probability of an eventual use of … force.” How officers approach a situation, then, can affect whether and how they use force. Tactics are the techniques and procedures that officers use to protect themselves and community members. This chapter provides a framework for assessing police tactics, then offers an in-depth discussion of core tactical concepts. It explains why time is the single most important tactical consideration, details the effects of stress on human decision making, and illustrates how officers use tactical choices to “create time” and how they can use that time to minimize their need to use force. The chapter concludes by exploring the role of police tactics in three very different situations: arrests, crisis interventions, and active-shooter situations.

This introductory chapter gives a brief overview of “misdemeanorland” and how it is studied. “Misdemeanorland” is a colloquialism used by people who work in the courts that receive the large volume of cases generated by New York City's signature policing tactics. The term designates a jurisdictional and physical space where these cases are processed. Within the context of the city's Broken Window enforcement, the expression “misdemeanorland” also signifies the widely shared notion that there is something unique about the operations of justice in the subfelony world. Many social science and media accounts of the U.S. criminal justice system tend to address either the back or front end of the system. In the age of mass incarceration, much public and scholarly focus has been directed at the back end, at what many of us assume to be the end point of most arrests: prison or jail. But between police and jails stands an institution assigned the role of deciding which people identified by police will end up in jail, prison, or elsewhere: the criminal court.

This chapter presents a thorough inventory of protest policing tactics, including and beyond the streetscape. These are organized into five arenas: regulatory and legislative dimensions of policing, intelligence, event policing, criminal prosecution, and transnationalization. Tactics implemented in these areas may overlap, and can also include the maintenance of vigilance over, and the prosecution of, crimes, the militarization of events and interactions, and even public relations activities with the media. All of these activities refer to the violent entitlements of the police and prison system. The chapter also reviews the existing scholarship regarding these operations, noting that, outside of academic scholarship, a great deal of the research conducted to date about social control of the alterglobalization movement has been done by legal collectives, activists, and sympathetic nonacademic observers.

This chapter analyzes the interrelationships among activist bodies, dissenting minds, social spaces that nurture dissent, and policing. It explores the effects of policing tactics on social space, including discourse, and on the social and individual psyche of activists and the wider group of dissenters. Furthermore, the chapter considers the marginalizing and preemptive effects of police action, the accumulative effects of police tactics, the disastrous effects of fear on political consciousness, the vulnerability of collectivity itself to police tactics, and the evisceration of discourse, culture, and history. In the end, the chapter concludes with a strong proposal regarding the meaning of political violence.

This chapter argues that the rationing ministries had little control over the implementation of the enforcement side of their compliance strategies. Ministry inspectors and police did not work well together, with the result that enforcement varied widely across the UK. The realities of policing the regulations distorted enforcement, with the result that it was possible for some to evade the law with impunity while others did do at their peril. Government publicity could not disguise this lack of uniformity in enforcement. This undermined the bluff on which the various compliance strategies rested, and made rational calculation of the probability of being caught impossible.