The role of police forces’ visible and invisible surveillance in controlling violent behaviorfrom the football fans’ point of view

  The police forces’ visible and invisible surveillance plays an important role in controlling football fans’ violent behavior. The present research aims to investigate the role of police surveillance in controlling the occurrence of violent behavior in football matches from the perspective of the Foulad Mobarake Sepahan fans.

  The research is of survey type and data collection tool was a self-made questionnaire to measure the level of fans’ violent behavior and to measure the level of police surveillance. Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was used to evaluate its validity and reliability. The research population was all the fans of Foulad Mobarake Sepahan Club, 331 of whom were selected via simple random sampling. The theoretical framework of the research was based on the theories of Bandura, Foucault and Latour.

  The research findings indicated that there is a positive and significant relationship between violent behavior and general surveillance and the police forces’ visible surveillance, and there is a negative and significant relationship between violent behavior and invisible surveillance. The examination of linear and curvilinear relationships in the regression analysis also indicated that there is a significant linear relationship between police visible surveillance and spectators’ violent behavior; and there is significant non-linear relationship between police forces’ invisible surveillance and spectators’ violent behavior. Based on this, it could be argued that the more is visible surveillance of the police force, the more will be the spectators’ violent behavior. However, due to the rise in the invisible surveillance, initially the violent behavior enhances, but with the more is this type of surveillance, the less would be violence among spectators.It could be concluded that the invisible surveillance of the police forces based on the community-oriented policing approach is significant and is recommended for controlling the football spectators’ violent behavior.