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!).