Protesters trying to march across the Manhattan Bridge on June 3 found themselves boxed in by New York City police.
Photo: Frank Franklin II/Associated Press
In an effort to control the ongoing protests against police brutality, law-enforcement officials in some cities have resorted to a controversial practice known as “kettling.” When a crowd of demonstrators is “kettled,” they are boxed in on all sides by police. With the crowd corralled into a confined space, the police charge in to make arrests, sometimes using tear gas and rubber bullets.
The “kettling” tactic has sparked outrage among civil-rights leaders, who say that it can “wrongly trap nonviolent protesters and unintentionally escalate the situation,” as Valerie Bauerlein and Scott Calvert reported in The Wall Street Journal this week. One attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union told the Journal that getting “kettled” feels “like the trash compactor in Star Wars.”
“Kettling” has come into question in other protests in recent years. In Portland, Ore., after the mass detention of 400 counterprotesters opposing an alt-right rally in 2016, a city auditor conducted a policy review. “‘Kettle’ is a term often used to describe the crowd-control tactic when officers surround a group and control access in and out of the area,” said the auditor, adding that the police bureau “generally refers to it as a ‘box-in’ or ‘containment.’”
Indeed, while the noun and verb “kettle” have come into common parlance to describe the police tactic, law enforcement officers themselves have tended to use other terms, such as “trap and detain.” So where did “kettling” come from?
“ While the English counterpart might bring to mind a whistling teakettle letting off steam, the German word more typically refers to a large metal cauldron. ”
Both the practice and the term for it are British imports, first gaining widespread media exposure in the clampdown on protesters in 2009 at the G-20 summit in London. The British, in turn, borrowed the term from German. “The word derives from the German word ‘kessel’—literally a cauldron, or kettle—to describe an encircled army about to be annihilated by a superior force,” the BBC reported in 2010. “For soldiers within the kettle the situation would soon become unbearably hot. For police officers, the kettle has a different end, but the tactic remains the same—containment and control.”
While the source of the English term does appear to be from the German “kessel”—converted through a process that linguists call “loan-translation”—the history of the expression is a complex one. Both “kettle” and “kessel” owe their roots to an old Germanic term that likely came from the Latin “catillus,” a name for a deep pan used for cooking.
In German, however, “kessel” developed on a different track from English “kettle.” While the English counterpart might bring to mind a whistling teakettle letting off steam, the German word more typically refers to a large metal cauldron. “Kessel” also developed a meaning among hunters for a lair of game animals, like foxes or rabbits, which could be closed in on during a hunt.
When “kessel” was brought into military use, that hunting sense carried over, applied to an area where an army is completely surrounded by a larger force. The German army in World War II became known for a battle tactic called “Keil und Kessel,” translated as “wedge and trap” in a 1942 U.S. Army report by an infantry instructor, Carrol A. Edson, who wrote, “the enemy is in the kettle, or as we would say, in the pot, or, more colloquially, ‘in the bag.’” Edson made note of the German hunting usage, deciding on “trap” as the best English rendering.
“Kessel” came to stand on its own for this kind of encircling maneuver (most famously used at the Battle of Stalingrad), and German police would take on the term themselves. A 1986 crackdown on an antinuclear demonstration in Hamburg, for instance, came to be known as the “Hamburger Kessel.”
Brought into English, “kettle” doesn’t quite convey the connotations of the German original. A kettle, after all, typically has a way for steam to escape, but protesters who are “kettled” don’t have an escape valve.
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