From Australia, the images are difficult to comprehend. Burning streets. Smashed shopfronts. Police retreating under a barrage of projectiles. People cheering as their own cities suffer damage.
The immediate questions are understandable. Who are these people? What do they hope to achieve? How does destroying a school improve education?
But another question deserves attention: what happened before the first window broke?
By the time the evening news shows flames above a barricade, much of the opportunity to prevent disorder has passed. The critical decisions concern preparation, police deployment, communication with organisers and intervention when violence first appears.
Arresting offenders afterwards is necessary. Preventing the destruction is the more demanding test of government.
France’s October 17 demonstrations exposed serious weaknesses. Le Monde reports that intelligence services struggled to estimate how online mobilisation would translate into attendance. Police units became overstretched as confrontations developed at scattered locations. The interior minister denied underestimating the operation, blaming dispersed groups of rioters and looters. That explanation leaves an obvious question: why was the operation unable to cope with them? Le Monde
A country with France’s experience of public disorder should prepare for more than an orderly march along an agreed route. Contingency planning must cover larger crowds, simultaneous confrontations and attacks away from the main demonstration.
Officers need sufficient numbers, trained support and reserves available before a local confrontation becomes an invitation to wider disorder.
Police weakness can change a crowd’s calculations. Research into England’s 2011 riots found that perceptions of police vulnerability emboldened participants. Shared hostility towards police also helped people identify with one another and join the confrontation. Control and legitimacy both mattered. University of Sussex
That makes the first interventions especially important.
A competent operation must distinguish peaceful demonstrators from those throwing projectiles, attacking people or destroying property. It must protect the former while acting against the latter. Broad interventions that sweep peaceful participants into confrontation risk enlarging the hostile crowd. Allowing violent groups to act unchecked creates opportunities for others to join them.
The objective is clear: stop violence while retaining the cooperation of everyone willing to remain peaceful.
But policing is only part of the story.
Order also depends on people feeling that the streets, schools and businesses around them belong to a society of which they are part. A shop window represents somebody’s livelihood. A school serves somebody’s children. Public property is something neighbours must pay to replace.
The Nordic countries offer a useful comparison. OECD adult-skills survey results show much higher interpersonal trust in Denmark, Norway and Finland than in France. Sweden also employs specialist dialogue police who work with demonstration organisers before events. These are practices and social conditions worth studying. They do not provide complete immunity: Sweden experienced serious riots over Easter 2022. They do, however, direct attention towards the relationships on which public order rests.
A durable sense of belonging requires mutual obligations. Citizens must accept that grievance does not confer a licence to destroy. Institutions must demonstrate that peaceful participation receives a fair hearing. Police must enforce the law consistently and account for their own conduct.
Repeated disorder makes those obligations more urgent. Each episode should produce identifiable changes in preparation, command and practice. Otherwise, the next declaration that authorities were overwhelmed becomes harder to accept.
France needs a credible examination of what failed: attendance estimates, deployment, reserves, communication and the decisions that preceded escalation. Responsibility for arson, assault and looting remains with the offenders. Responsibility for an effective public-order operation rests with those who planned and commanded it.
No police force can prevent every act of violence. Governments can still be judged on whether they anticipated foreseeable dangers and contained them effectively.
For Australia, the lesson reaches beyond police equipment and officer numbers. We should examine the strength of our own shared belonging, and whether our institutions earn the cooperation they depend upon.
The burning barricade is the visible failure.
The work of preventing it begins much earlier—with capable policing, credible institutions and citizens who still see their neighbours’ losses as their own.
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