The enactment of the Water Services Bill into Irish law on December 28, 2014, was met with strong opposition from the Irish public, manifesting in local and national demonstrations. This social movement provided an ideal case to examine interactions between protesters and police in different contexts. Ethnographic observations and randomly sampled interviews took place before, and during, seven national demonstrations in Dublin, Ireland. Simultaneously, urban ethnographic research yielded in-depth observational and interview data at local protests in another Irish city. Data from both national and local protests are examined in light of classical and contemporary sociocultural psychological conceptualizations of the crowd. The elaborated social identity model offers most explanatory power to comprehend the observed and reported events between police and protesters in this cultural context during an unprecedented economic recovery following recession. No evidence is found to support classical conceptualizations of the crowd. I describe the consequences of this analysis for conceptualizing police–protester interactions to generate peaceful assembly in liberal democracies.

2014年12月28日颁布的《水服务法案》成为爱尔兰法律，遭到了爱尔兰公众的强烈反对，体现在地方和国家的示威活动中。这项社会运动为考察抗议者和警察在不同背景下的互动提供了理想的案例。在爱尔兰都柏林举行的七次全国示威游行之前和之中，进行了人种学观察和随机抽样采访。同时，城市人种学研究在另一个爱尔兰城市的地方抗议活动中获得了深入的观察和访谈数据。根据人群的古典和当代社会文化心理概念，研究了来自国家和地方抗议活动的数据。详尽的社会身份模型提供了最大的解释力，可以理解在这种文化背景下，在经济衰退后空前的经济复苏期间，警察和抗议者之间观察到的和报道的事件。没有证据支持人群的经典概念化。我描述了这种分析对于概念化警察与抗议者之间的互动以在自由民主国家中产生和平集会的后果。