Protest-Watching
Sometimes I do research for my own edification and my amateur attempts at writing. Recently I've been trying to learn about riot control tactics and techniques for large-scale protests.
This is surprisingly difficult. The United States has changed a lot of its crowd control doctrine since the Battle for Seattle to focus on either riots or demonstration protests, and in both cases the doctrine is mostly defensive. If a riot gets too large to be dispersed, contain it, and let it burn itself out. If a demonstration protest becomes large, you intercept its march route, or you contain it, preventing it from entering the area where a meeting is being held for instance. In either case it's the police who stand on the defensive, mostly utilizing the power of barricades to defend themselves, confining the crowd to a restricted area until the event is over and people disperse. The concept of having to disperse a crowd that is itself on the defensive, having barred itself into a large area of the city and showing no sign of dispersing, similar to the "Revolution" protests that swept the world, doesn't appear to have engendered serious thought in the US. The implication is that solving that problem is a political job, and the police shouldn't be coming up with specialized plans for dealing with it.
This is probably good for the US, because it indicates that people are finding easier ways to solve problems then starting urban civil wars. But it's bad for me, because I can't find anything to indicate what they would do when confronted with such a situation.
So now that both Kyrgyzstan and Thailand are swamped with protests, I'll be watching how the police there respond. Although given the possibility of brutality, I doubt that they'll be letting many people take pictures. And it just feels weird (not to mention immoral) conducting research by watching what could be an atrocity in progress.
This is surprisingly difficult. The United States has changed a lot of its crowd control doctrine since the Battle for Seattle to focus on either riots or demonstration protests, and in both cases the doctrine is mostly defensive. If a riot gets too large to be dispersed, contain it, and let it burn itself out. If a demonstration protest becomes large, you intercept its march route, or you contain it, preventing it from entering the area where a meeting is being held for instance. In either case it's the police who stand on the defensive, mostly utilizing the power of barricades to defend themselves, confining the crowd to a restricted area until the event is over and people disperse. The concept of having to disperse a crowd that is itself on the defensive, having barred itself into a large area of the city and showing no sign of dispersing, similar to the "Revolution" protests that swept the world, doesn't appear to have engendered serious thought in the US. The implication is that solving that problem is a political job, and the police shouldn't be coming up with specialized plans for dealing with it.
This is probably good for the US, because it indicates that people are finding easier ways to solve problems then starting urban civil wars. But it's bad for me, because I can't find anything to indicate what they would do when confronted with such a situation.
So now that both Kyrgyzstan and Thailand are swamped with protests, I'll be watching how the police there respond. Although given the possibility of brutality, I doubt that they'll be letting many people take pictures. And it just feels weird (not to mention immoral) conducting research by watching what could be an atrocity in progress.