> Many G-8 protesters were undercover cops
> Jul 31, 2004, 20:41
>
>
> SAVANNAH — The paltry number of protesters at the G-8 summit last month
> was even smaller than originally estimated — because as many as one in
> nine were actually undercover cops.
> During a speech Monday to Georgia police chiefs in Savannah, a state
> official revealed that as many as 40 undercover narcotics officers
> dressed as demonstrators to keep tabs on summit protests.
It looks like the cops have a long-standing practice of using narcotics officers to infiltrate protest groups. Which means that any activist community can take proactive action against local red squads by documenting who the local narcs are.
> Hitchens showed slides of cops in ballcaps, T-shirts and shorts carrying
> handheld camcorders and said the officers took classes on how to pass as
> protesters before the June 8-10 world leaders summit.
One the cops don't seem to understand is that many protesters can quickly figure out who the undercover cops are. Most of them just don't fit in, mainly because they refuse to ditch their middle class frat boy wear. I've been in numerous protest situation where we've made jokes about the undercovers. I've even been known to find a person with a camcorder to take pictures of the undercvoer narcs.
You know the old saying about keeping your enamy close to yoU?
> "Everybody in this country that was involved in anarchist movements, the
> leadership and anybody who had been tagged for being involved in violent
> demonstrations before, they had pictures of every one of them," he said.
This is incredibly funny, because it is so untrue! The cops play this game of being omniscient and they have techniques to intimidate activists. But even when the FBI came knocking around here last week they were operating on information on activists that was years old.
Don't believe the police hype.
And many anarchists don't even go to protests!
> Carol Bass of the Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition, one of the G-8
> protest organizers, said protesters suspected police would try to
> infiltrate their demonstrations. Keeping photographic records of
> demonstrators is more troubling, she said.
>
> "Anybody who wants to change the policies of their government is
> basically turned into a very bad person in a database where all the
> police have is their pictures," Bass said.
The primary activity of undercover cops is to gather information. Many activists erroneously believe that cops infiltrate to disrupt, but this rarely happens.
> The undercover officers were among 11,056 police and security forces,
> including 4,800 National Guard troops, sent by state and local agencies
> to the summit, Hitchens said.
> Congress budgeted $35 million to pay for mobilizing the National Guard
> as well as police overtime, meals, lodging and equipment.
When we start throwing some real riots at them in coming years, they are going to run out of money pretty quickly.
> "A lot of people including the Secret Service and State Patrol assumed
> ... that the causeway was closed to pedestrians," Doering said. "Even
> though signs were actually posted, well, legally it wasn't."
Which just goes to confirm what some of us savvy anarchists discovered long ago: these much vaunted security perimeters are as porous as swiss cheese.
Chuck0