> There were very few cops, and as the ones I talked to told me, they were
> in way over their heads. At the end of the protest week, I walked up to
> a gaggle of 'em and said "This wouldn't have happened in New York. The
> NYPD would have surrounded the meeting site with 20,000 cops and no one
> would have gotten close." One answered, "The NYPD knows crowd control.
> We don't have that kind of experience in the west."
The NYPD would be the main exeption, since they have long-standing experience with crowds. It could be argued that the DC police are the same way, but I would argue against this, because before Seattle they didn't take activists very seriously. Activism in DC prior to Seattle was pretty tame and predictable. For example, if you stood in front of the White House between the two poles, that was a signal to the police that you wanted to be arrested.
The key to understanding the police reaction in Seattle is to look at the existing attitude of police towards activists. They didn't deploy many police in Seattle because they didn't take activists seriously. After Seattle, police departments starting asking for outside help to police the big summit protests.
Chuck0