Doug and I exchange as follows: _______________________
>There were,
>unquestionably, PLENTY of police on the streets of Seattle
No there weren't. Their ranks looked pretty thin to me, even supplemented with state cops and national guard - nothing compared to what you see in NYC or DC. And it was remarkably easy to move around the streets - they hadn't blocked much. The NYPD would have limited access to all of downtown with multiple layers of barriers reinforced by multiple layers of cops. Have you ever seen how they control Times Square on a New Year's Eve? _________________________
Doug, you are contrasting apples and oranges. The New York City police are among the best in the nation at crowd control and the Seattle police were (and probably still are) completely incompetent. The Seattle cops didn't even deploy proper crowd control barriers during WTO. They didn't man key crowd control points at all. They concentrated their forces in lines and projected no "presence". By the time the reinforcements arrived, the police were in total chaos. You could be stopped by packs of soldiers with rifles at one intersection and go right around them a block away. The cops made fools of themselves but there were more than enough fools to go around.
I grew up in New Jersey and I have been to several St. Patrick's Day parades as well as Puerto Rican Day parades (the two biggest and most dispersed regular events in NYC). I know, as you do, how effective the cops are. They are effective exactly because they know that they cannot manhandle a large crowd into being orderly.
Once I learned something about crowd control, I began to see the differences between good tactics and bad. Note, for example, that the NYPD are almost always in their standard uniforms, not riot gear (This has changed a bit in NYC, unfortunately. Smaller police departments use uniforms that are even less military than standard when dealing with crowds). Note that their mounted officers are spread in ones and twos and move with the crowd, observing and entering if necessary. In contrast, the Seattle police bunched their mounted officers in a completely useless and tightly-packed riot line. Note how quickly the New York cops enter the crowd when there's trouble and how they focus on controlling all the edges of a crowd where trouble often starts.
On the numbers: While it's true that the New York City police have a huge officer pool to use if they want to, take a look at the size of, for example, the Daytona Beach police department. They control huge, rowdy events with few cops. I already mentioned Sturgis, SD. You can also look on the London Metropolitan Police web site see some stuff on their crowd control tactics.
I really got into this issue more deeply than will probably interest people on the list but let me just say that I think it's both wrong and dangerous in political terms to accept the argument that police need massive forces to insure order during demonstrations. Naturally, police love big demonstrations of military force but that is exactly the wrong way to deal with large crowds.
peace,
boddi