A Disruptive Influence? “Prevent‐ing” Problems and Countering Violent Extremism Policy in Practice

• Published date: 01 June 2017
• Date: 01 June 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12267

A Disruptive Influence? “Prevent-ing” Problems

and Countering Violent Extremism Policy in

Practice

Martin Innes

Colin Roberts

Trudy Lowe

This article describes how disrupting the activities of suspected violent

extremists has become an increasingly significant construct in the policy and

practice of the Prevent strand of UK Counter-Terrorism. Informedby empiri-

cal data collected during semi-structured interviews with police officers

involved in conducting disruptions and members of the communities where

these occurred, blended with a limited amount of field observation, the analy-

sis documents how and why a logic of disruption has assumed increasing

prominence in counter terrorism work. In respect of police interventions in

particular, implementing disruptions, rather than pursuing fully-fledged

prosecutions, represents a pragmatic way of reconciling increasing demand

with limited resources, as well as managing some of the difficulties of translat-

ing intelligence into legal evidence. Conceptualized in this way, the analysis

positions disruption as a distinctive mode of crime prevention; one premised

upon logics of near-event interdiction. As such, it is understood as rather dif-

ferent in its operations and functions to other forms of “early intervention”

that are increasingly prominent in much contemporary crime prevention pol-

icy. By focusing upon how specific Prevent interventions are implemented and

performed this analysis makes a particular contribution to our knowledge of

counter terrorism work. This reflects the fact that most previous studies of

Prevent and other countering violent extremism programs have provided

analyses of community perceptions and reactions to policing and the policy

frame, rather than the configuration of the interventions themselves.

On the evening of January 19, 2012, officers from the South

Wales Police and the Wales Extremism and Counter-Terrorism

Unit entered the Canton Community Centre in Cardiff with the

intent of disrupting a meeting being hosted by Al Ghurabaa. This

group, closely allied with the organization Muslims Against Cru-

sades that had been proscribed by the Home Secretary two

months previously as an affiliate of Al-Muhajiroun, had taken to

Please direct all correspondenceto Martin Innes, Crime and Security Research Institute,

Cardiff University, Cardiff CF10 3WT, United Kingdom;e-mail: InnesM@cardiff.ac.uk.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution

License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the

original work is properly cited.

Law & Society Review, Volume 51, Number 2 (2017)

V

C2017 The Authors Law & Society Review published by Wiley Periodicals,

Inc. on behalf of Law and Society Association

252

holding private meetings in venues in the local area.

1

Their pub-

lic and private activities were starting to generate considerable

concern among members of the local Muslim community.

In part this reflected several recent events, including the

arrest in December 2010 of five men from Cardiff for their part

in an alleged plot to blow up the London Stock Exchange, and a

second case where two local men had been traced to Kenya

where they were trying to join a terrorist group. Set against this

backdrop, the increasing public visibility of some of the key indi-

viduals involved with the Al Ghurabaa group and their seeming

ability to act with impunity were proving troubling. These com-

munity concerns had been relayed to the police at a senior level

through well established channels of engagement.

The police action was therefore designed to overtly disrupt

the group with the aim of sending a message both to those allied

to Al Ghurabaa and the wider community. The formal aims set

out in the police operational order were to:

Engage in overt disruption;

Dismantle the Al Ghurabaa infrastructure;

Divert individuals from radicalization;

Respond to legitimate public concern.

It was, according to the Association of Chief Police Officer’s

Prevent Delivery Unit, who have a national view of such issues

“...the first direct disruption of this kind to take place

nationally.”

2

Operation Alton as the police intervention was labelled

sought to combine “Pursue” and “Prevent” activities. These are

strands of the United Kingdom’s overarching cross-governmental

CONTEST strategy. Pursue covers the traditional arena of

counter terrorism work in that it is focused upon identifying and

securing those known or suspected of engaging in terrorist activi-

ties (H.M. Government 2009). Prevent is more innovative and is,

as its name implies, concerned with stopping people from acquir-

ing the motivations to engage in violent activities. While the

meeting was in progress officers interrupted proceedings and

informed those present that the meeting was being stopped, and

that any further meetings were prohibited from taking place on

venues owned by Cardiff Council. One man was arrested at the

scene for attacking an officer and threatening to “cut your head

off and machine gun the lot of you.” Several others who were

known by police to be heavily involved in the group were given

1

For more detail on the background of this group see Wiktorowicz (2005) and Ken-

ney et al. (2016).

2

ACPO Prevent Delivery Unit Update, 22 September 2012 p. 4.

Innes, Roberts, & Lowe 253