Police kettle protestors at the Bishopsgate Climate Camp, London, 1 April 2009
8 June 2020 (Updated, 3 pm, 8 June)
Kettling is a police tactic for controlling and shutting down demonstrations. The name arises from a German hunting and World War II army tactic.
The Guardian, on 2 April 2009, defined kettling:
Kettling is the word used to describe the police tactic of corralling demonstrators into a space for several hours. Public order officers say it is used to contain and close down marches when they get violent. But its legality has been challenged over claims that it restricts an individual's human rights and stops the right to peacefully protest. So far, legal challenges have resulted in the use of kettling being upheld by the courts.
The name comes from the metaphor of a kettle being a container where boiling liquids can be safely handled. The word kettle, meaning the cooking vessel, goes back to the Old English cytel and has cognates in several Germanic languages, including Kessel in German.
The police jargon term appears to have originated as a hunting term in Germany. Kesseltrieben, literally kettle-driving, refers to the practice of driving game into an enclosed circle where they can be killed. That term is attested to by 1870. Kesseljagen, literally kettle-hunting, is even older, dating to at least 1682.
The hunting tactic was applied by the Germany military in World War II, and then, in the post-war period, spread to police forces in Germany and then throughout Europe and North America. Time magazine recorded the Wehrmacht tactic of Keil und Kessel on 6 October 1941:
The German Army's favorite tactic is called Keil und Kessel. Keil means wedge: the Army drives tanks and armored vehicles into the enemy mass. Kessel means kettle: infantry units encircle the cut mass, drive it into a kettle-shaped trap. Last week on the Ukraine front the Germans put the heat under the biggest pot o' Russians ever, and had the chock nearly set for a new drive into the apparently endless Red mass beyond.
Kettle. In the deepest encirclement it ever attempted, the German Army had taken in not only Kiev but some 11,000 square miles to the east. Inside that kettle it claimed it had isolated no less than 50 divisions (more than the U.S. Army, two-thirds of the British Army, one-fifth of the German Army).
The police tactic dates to the late 1980s in Germany, although I haven’t yet found the words kettle or Kessel applied to it as a label until the 2000s. There are, however, several uses of the kettle metaphor in describing the tactic. For instance, there is this 7 October 1994 article in Die Zeit detailing a demonstration in East Germany that had occurred on 9 October 1989:
Wir haben Steffi natürlich nicht gefunden. Sie war irgendwo anders im Kessel und ihr blieb erspart, geschlagen oder verhaftet zu werden. [...] Es gibt eine Photographie im stern, auf der man die jungen Leute (zufällig auch unsere Tochter) mit weit aufgerissenen Augen und Kerzen in der Hand direkt vor einer dichten Reihe Polizei und Sperrautos stehen sieht.
(Of course, we didn't find Steffi. She was somewhere else in the kettle and was spared being beaten or arrested. [...] There is a photograph in Der Stern on which you can see the young people (coincidentally also our daughter) standing with wide open eyes and candles in front of a dense line of police and blocking cars.)
And there is this from Die Zeit on 25 February 1999 that doesn’t describe the police tactic but does use the metaphor of a boiling kettle to describe a demonstration:
Recht behalten haben aber auch die Hamburger und Stuttgarter Behörden. Sie genehmigten Demonstrationen, um Dampf aus dem Kessel zu lassen und den Protest besser kontrollieren zu können. Anders als in Berlin blieb es dort friedlich.
(The Hamburg and Stuttgart authorities have also been right. They approved demonstrations to let steam out of the kettle and better control the protest. Unlike in Berlin, it remained peaceful there.)
The earliest uses of kettling as a label for the police tactic that I have been able to find are in reference to the protests at the G20 summit in London on 1 April 2009. The term is undoubtedly older in police jargon but doesn’t appear to have caught the notice of journalists until this date. In addition to the definition quoted above, there is this from a different Guardian article on 2 April 2009:
They used familiar tactics to trap 4,000 people into streets outside the Bank of England in a practice known as "kettling", tightening the cordon when violence flared in one part of Threadneedle Street and a group of protesters, whose faces were covered, broke into the Royal Bank of Scotland.
Commander Bob Broadhurst, in charge of the operation, said his aim was to facilitate peaceful protest. But those peaceful demonstrators caught inside the cordon with no toilet facilities, and little water, questioned the idea that they were being allowed to exercise their right to march.
"The police should let us dribble out when we need to," said June Rogers, a gardener from south London. "We've just come on a peaceful protest. We've got fire in our belly and we want to say something and be heard, we are just ordinary people but they made the situation worse."
Jeannie Mackie, a barrister who had attended the climate camp as an observer, was penned in for two hours after police cordoned off both ends of Bishopsgate.
"I thought it was completely unnecessary," she said.
"I was kept for two hours. Lines of police lined up with their batons and they were completely pumped up and looking to have a go. My feeling was everyone in there was peaceful but they wanted to clear them out." Responding to the police use of the kettling technique she said that although the courts had ruled that it was legal, there had to be a good reason. "I asked one officer could I go and he said no—I might go and cause trouble. I giggled and said that wasn't very likely and he said, 'you can never tell with these people'."
Since 2009, the term appears numerous times in news articles from around the world. But perhaps using the name of a hunting term turned into a Nazi military maneuver as a label for a twenty-first century police tactic isn’t the best public relations move.
[I’ve updated the original with the references to the older German hunting practice.]
Sources:
Brewer, W. “Kettling.” ADS-L ,8 June 2020.
“Chock and Pot.” Time, 6 October 1941, 28.
Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. cytel.
“G20: Protestors: In the Kettle.” The Guardian, 2 April 2009, 3. ProQuest.
Klingst, Martin. “Maß halten!” Zeit Online, 25 February 1999.
Kluge, Friedrich, et al. Etymologisches Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache, seventeenth edition. Berlin: W. de Grruyter, 1957, 364–65. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Meikle, James and Sandra Laville. “‘Bottles Thrown’ as Man Lay Dying.” The Guardian, 2 April 2009, 1, ProQuest.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. kettle, n.
Reich, Jens. “Ohne Furcht vor den Herrschenden.” Zeit Online, 7 October 1994.
Photo credit: Charlotte Gilhooly, 2009, Wikimedia, used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Thanks to Susan Conklin Akbari for discovering the 1941 Time article.