Discourses of Force and Failure: The Construction of Crisis in the Policing of UK Climate Change Protests

This chapter analyses the ways in which police are represented in British newspapers. The analysis takes place against the backdrop of three contemporaneous crises, which together constitute a polycrisis: the overarching crisis of climate change, and the local crises of so-called anti-democratic legislation in the UK and increased public scrutiny and lack of confidence in policing in the UK. The two local crises represent a conflicting relationship that currently divides the UK’s socio-political landscape. While legislation which increases the police’s ability to impose conditions on peaceful protests is being passed through Parliament, there are arguments that the police abuse the statutory powers they already have when policing protests. We investigate the extent to which these two opposing positions are (re)produced by mainstream UK newspapers in their coverage of protest policing. In doing so, we take a corpus-assisted approach to critical discourse analysis to investigate the representations of police action, finding that coverage largely depicts the police to be constrained by current laws that restrict their ability to effectively respond to climate change protests. We argue that such coverage legitimises the introduction of increasingly restrictive legislation, which grants the police further powers to impose restrictions on peaceful protests and conclude by considering what effects this legitimisation has on all three elements of the polycrisis we address.