How do governments use curfews and emergency policing powers during riots?

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1. 1

   How Misuse of Emergency Powers Dismantled the Rule of Law in Hungary

   Israel Law Review (Mészáros)Published Apr 29, 2024Checked Oct 20, 2026

   “The Hungarian government has been utilising emergencies to expand its political power instead of upholding constitutionalism and the rule of law. This strategy has given the government almost unlimited power to enact emergency decrees, even when the state and the population are not in immediate danger. The ninth amendment to the Fundamental Law of Hungary has raised concerns about the government's use of emergency powers, granting the executive branch even more authority during exceptional times by allowing the government to prolong the ‘state of exception’ indefinitely and maintain pandemic-related emergency measures to respond to potential consequences of the war in Ukraine. As a result, the executive body has been able to exert significant political control without proper parliamentary oversight.”

2. 2

   How Riots Spread Between Cities: Introducing the Police Pathway

   Political Psychology (Drury et al.)Published Oct 12, 2021Checked Oct 20, 2026

   “Waves of riots are politically and psychologically significant national events. The role of police perceptions and practices in spreading unrest between cities has been neglected in previous research, even though the police are significant actors in these events. We examined the role of police interventions in the spread of rioting to one English city in August 2011 by triangulating multiple data sources and analyzing police accounts and community‐participant interviews. Rioting in other cities had relatively little direct influence in the community, but it led to heightened vigilance in the police. The resultant police mobilization inadvertently created a large gathering in a local community with a history of hostile relations with police. Police attempts to disperse the crowd affected many more people than those originally intending to riot, leading to collective conflict. These findings support a new theoretical account of the role of policing in riot spread. Complementing existing accounts of diffusion, our study helps explain how self‐fulfilling prophecy can operate to spread conflict between cities.”

3. 3

   Curfew imposed in parts of central Paris and other cities after rioting across France

   BBC NewsPublished Oct 19, 2026Checked Oct 20, 2026

   “The country's interior minister admits that police "lost control" in some cities following a weekend of riots.”

4. 4

   Police Powers and Accountability

   Routledge eBooks (Lambert)Published Feb 13, 2023Checked Oct 20, 2026

   “The traditional view of the role of the police had come under increasing attacks in the early 1980s. The riots of 1981 and the Scarman Inquiry stimulated a widespread public debate about policing, police powers and accountability. It had become clear that the police did not simply enforce the law. They also made policy about what law to enforce, when to enforce it and against whom to enforce it. It was the control of this discretionary power which was at the heart of the debate at the time. Originally published in 1986, this book considers these critical issues in contemporary policing. It concentrates on those aspects of policing that were usually covered in law and law related courses. It deals with the constitutional framework within which the police operates. It examines the police complaints procedure and the full range of police powers against the background of the political debate at the time. Throughout the book the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act is discussed in detail and its impact upon police and public alike is analysed.”

5. 5

   Crowd psychology and the politics of co-production: Social control, democratic order and the consequences of theory.

   The British journal of social psychology (Stott)Published Apr 1, 2026Checked Oct 20, 2026

   “Against this background, the article repositions the Social Identity Approach and the Elaborated Social Identity Model (ESIM) not merely as theoretical corrections, but as a reorientation of how psychological knowledge is produced, authorized and used. Drawing on ethnographic participatory action research and sustained engagement with policing institutions in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States, it conceptualizes collective behaviour as interactional and normatively organized, with policing practices constitutive of crowd dynamics rather than external to them. The article argues that co-production is not a methodological innovation but a historically persistent condition of social psychology and that the ESIM represents a distinctive attempt to govern this condition reflexively by redirecting psychological knowledge towards legitimacy, restraint and the facilitation of democratic rights. The broader implication is that social psychology cannot plausibly claim political neutrality: its concepts travel into institutions and practices, shaping how collective action is anticipated, governed and policed.”