What annoys me most about the Occupy movement is that they aren't even intellectually active enough to study other contemporary protest movements. I'm staggered at the number of people involved in Occupy who genuinely see police as a bunch of cretinous thugs and don't imagine that they might organise international conferences or share case studies.
Public order policing has been a game of cat-and-mouse for decades, following the movements of European anarchists around the usual circuit of Mayday protests, G8 conferences and arms fairs. It's a highly evolved field and there are extensive playbooks on both sides.
This strategy was devised years ago, in response to police lines being used to control and prevent marching. A core group, usually a Black Bloc, lead other protesters in a fast march, choosing their direction only at the last possible second. The goal is to move faster than police dispatchers can react, preventing the police from establishing organised lines quickly enough. The police response in the UK is pre-emptive kettling[1], in much of the rest of the world a mix of roadblocks and simple brutality. Unless the protesters are angry enough to run into a baton charge or prepared enough to run into CS gas, it's a completely ineffective tactic.
Some commenters seem to believe that kettling would be illegal under US law; It may well be, but that hasn't stopped the extensive use of "free speech zones"[2] to pre-emptively restrict the movement of protesters. Without a Supreme Court ruling, there's nothing to stop Portland PD or anyone else from using kettles.
Public order policing has been a game of cat-and-mouse for decades, following the movements of European anarchists around the usual circuit of Mayday protests, G8 conferences and arms fairs. It's a highly evolved field and there are extensive playbooks on both sides.
This strategy was devised years ago, in response to police lines being used to control and prevent marching. A core group, usually a Black Bloc, lead other protesters in a fast march, choosing their direction only at the last possible second. The goal is to move faster than police dispatchers can react, preventing the police from establishing organised lines quickly enough. The police response in the UK is pre-emptive kettling[1], in much of the rest of the world a mix of roadblocks and simple brutality. Unless the protesters are angry enough to run into a baton charge or prepared enough to run into CS gas, it's a completely ineffective tactic.
Some commenters seem to believe that kettling would be illegal under US law; It may well be, but that hasn't stopped the extensive use of "free speech zones"[2] to pre-emptively restrict the movement of protesters. Without a Supreme Court ruling, there's nothing to stop Portland PD or anyone else from using kettles.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettling [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone