‘An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will’ – this famous quotation from 19th century French psychologist Gustave Le Bon encapsulates an approach to crowd management that is very familiar to Rene Gaemers.

A former officer with the Royal Dutch Military Police and Amsterdam Police, and co-founder of Netherlands-based protection specialist XION®, Gaemers is also a crowd management and tactical training expert. “Crowd and public order management has changed remarkably little since the days of Le Bon,” he says.

“Much law enforcement training is still based on the idea that when people gather, they turn into one entity with each person shedding their identity and becoming potentially predisposed to violent collective action. The response is invariably a provocative show of force.”

Gaemers cites as an example the recent confrontations between the Mouvement des Gilets Jaunes protesters and French police: “The core principle of public order management is that the majority of crowds that gather are law-abiding citizens exercising their legal right to protest. In Paris, you had the police kitted up and what began as peaceful demonstrations became violent confrontations with a hostile counter-force.”

At the heart of Gaemers’ philosophy of ‘a crowd management system for our times’ is specialist officer training in de-escalating incidents, together with a new approach to protection: “Our research among serving officers shows that conventional personal protective equipment (PPE) is rigid, bulky and restrictive. Officers don’t like wearing it, so they are likely to become irritable when putting it on – creating a mindset that is then less disposed to negotiation and more prone to aggression. We found that 45 percent of officers in one force chose not to wear a full set of PPE because it was so uncomfortable – they chose comfort over protection.”

XION’s blunt trauma impact protective base layers incorporating D3O® technology offer maximum protection for key areas of the body without compromising on freedom of movement. “The flexibility and low profile provided by D3O® protection contributes to a non-aggressive appearance that is central to this new approach,” says XION co-founder Simon van Lammeren.

“One of our biggest challenges has been to influence the tendering processes for PPE among law enforcement agencies,” he adds. “Most tend to copy and paste prior requirements for rigid foam protection, mounted on plastic with straps. Instead, the protective pads in XION® products are CE certified to the EN1621 motorcycle standard, which is
a commercial standard that’s regularly updated. In our view, this standard is more relevant to equipping officers in the future so they are protected but not visually threatening.”

Gaemers has partnered with Neil Pollock, a retired public order and tactical advisor with the Metropolitan Police in London, and the U.S. Government Training Institute (GTI), to address the needs of state and local law enforcement agencies through research-based training. The resulting five-day Public Order Commanders Course from the Public Order Management Academy (POMA) is a direct response to increasing demand from within the law enforcement community for a rethink of approaches to crowd management. “The first of many to come,” says Gaemers.

According to Brian Naillon, vice-president of the GTI, “there is always a need to assess the effectiveness of current tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs). It is simply the nature of effective response management. There is a constant need for adaptation when it comes to rules of engagement as laws, platforms and people are constantly evolving and the industry must continue to morph to match this ever-changing environment.