C.Fisken and I exchange as follows: ______________
Thu, 2003-10-02 at 02:26, boddhisatva wrote:
> police incitement. The London Metropolitan Police use about 600 officers
to
> patrol soccer games city-wide and of course they are confronting people
who
> actively plan large brawls for every important game. Daytona Beach hosts
I don't think that's a valid comparison to Seattle. There are probably less than a 100 football hooligans at any given match, and the rest of the crowd are actively interested in _not_ getting into trouble. I don't think that was the case at Seattle, where a large proportion of the crowd was interested in civil disobedience and unauthorised protest. A better comparison from London would be the Mayday protests, where the past couple of years have seen 3000 police to control crowds of around 5000. Indeed, the main crowd-control tactic used by the Met, corralling demonstrators in one place, depends on overwhelming numbers. ________________
Actually the Guardian says that May Day 2001 was patrolled by 4000 officers and the official deployment figures cite 5000 for a crowd of about that number. You're really making my point for me. Unless you have a very high cop/crowd ratio, riot line "corralling" is impossible. Therefore I conclude, from the evidence, that it is a bad technique.
The London metropolitan area had almost 14 million people in it in 2001 and the Metropolitan Police alone have about 18 thousand officers, as I understand it. There are about 6 million people in Washington state and about 13 or 14 thousand full-time sworn law enforcement officers total, at all levels. The Met patrols a reasonably small geographic area and Washington State is about 70,000 square miles (The U.K. is about 95K sq. mi. total) Clearly every law enforcement officer in the State of Washington can't come to Seattle for a protest. Therefore, you have to use a method other than riot line corralling.
The methods used by the Met at football matches are, in fact, a very apt comparison. Your estimate of the numbers of football hooligans are a bit low. Even the small supporters' clubs who cause trouble admit to more members than that. To that you add the people they incite and you clearly have a problem that has, in fact, turned deadly at times. I want to remind everybody that I know of no protesters who even caused serious injuries in Seattle and the number of anarchists and local kids who actually started the rock-throwing was very small indeed. They could easily have been arrested had the police not wasted manpower in useless riot lines.
Once more let me emphasize that the same Seattle police force using the same techniques failed to control a far smaller crowd at Mardi Gras 2001 and a young man was killed.
peace,
boddi