Canadian Cops analyse how to contain and destroy protests

national | miscellaneous | news report

Thursday May 15, 2003 17:29

by Phuq Hedd

Infoshop article

A good piece on Infoshop analyses a senior Canadian cop's story in some sort of law-enforcement journal. The story is about the major lessons that have been drawn by law enforcement in terms of countering the large and often militant protests that have occurred in the last decade.

Central points include the breakdown of succesful containment strategies into:

* Soft hat approach: keep the riot police hidden until needed so that protestors feel less aggressive in response to visual threat

* Centralised and co-ordinated intelligence gathering between different agencies nationally and internationally

* Community liasing pre-protest (helps with information gathering and reducing aggression levels)

* Isolation of potential "troublemakers"

All this is analysed specifically in the "succesful" Canadian context of the G8 summit which was moved from Calgary to Kananaskis ( i.e. they ran like rats into a remote area and put armed troops in the woods around them).

It is to be assumed that the Gardai will be trying the same stuff (if not then I provide the link as a courtesy service -- we'll be one step ahead!).

Comments (2 of 2)

Sounds reasonable.

by Sparks

Thu May 15, 2003 18:41

The job of the police force is to maintain order during these protests without preventing them - those measures sound like a reasonable way to achieve that. And it sure sounds better than the RTS protest last year or the Oakland police's take on policing.
So what's the problem?

Ah, I see you didn't read the article or follow the news over the last decade

Thu May 15, 2003 19:28

However, your question provides a good jumping off point for listing the police atrocities that this strategy is designed to facilitate.

1. The murder of Carlo Giuliani in Genoa
2. The seizing of activists like Jaggi Singh from the street by special snatch squads
3. Setting dogs on protestors during Ottawa's snake march
4. The herding of protestors into either special "pens" (NY) or into small limited areas where their protest is not visible
5. The gathering of data on private citizens who have committed no crimes by the police/security agencies (akin to the "Red Squads" of recent political repression history)
6. The pre-emptive arrests of activists and setting of punitive bail

Finally and more importantly, the article makes the point that Direct Actions (whether that's sitting down in an intersection or whatever) are what they're trying to prevent because those are effective.

I want to be effective, so I want to ensure that they can't contain my DA.

That's all Sparks. Over and out.