On Oct 2, 2011, at 11:34 PM, Michael Pollak wrote:
>
> > Nobody there mentioned anything about having felt trapped by the police.
> If anything their feeling that the police had been "very cool," and their
> relating of various conversations with them (including that "we're just cogs
> in the wheel" and one saying he was going to join the demonstrators on this
> day off this coming Friday) kind of beggared belief. It sounded at times
> like the cops were their best friends.
>
> This supports my speculation that the reason there are so many white shirts
> - officers - on the scene, making the arrests, and in the case of
> Bologna-head, pepper-spraying, is that they don't fully trust the rank and
> file.
>
Having been to my share of protests in the city, and played the police liaison at a few of them, including a couple with arrests, I'd be wary of reading that much into it. My experience has been that cops generally want to be your buddy. In fact, if you go to enough protests on a particular issue, you're likely to meet a special cop, in plain clothes, who knows your cause backwards and forwards and is eager to discuss it with you! But obvious intelligence-gathering aside, a lot of the rank-and-file simply have the routine preference for being liked rather than disliked. And the whole Courtesy, Professionalism, and Respect thing may be farcical, but isn't entirely for external consumption. The politicians who rubber-stamp the NYPD budget actually don't want to spend all their time apologizing for belligerent goons to angry constituents, after all. Nothing concerning the police in Michael's post strikes me as particularly new or extraordinary.
-- "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað."