On Tue, 10 Jul 2001, petro wrote:
The only logical conclusion I can see to skirmishes between black-clad anarchists, going on "street operations", and governmental riot control forces, is that the police are eventually given the right to just gun the protestors down, irregardless of whether they have *done* anything. Unless
Maybe in Finland, but here in the US, the government official that gave the orders to shoot a crowd of protestors would *not* be working much longer.
(Actually the police here have far more stringent requirements for even drawing a gun than they do over there in the States. But that's not really the issue.) The issue is escalation, and we know entirely well that there's been a lot of that in the last twenty or thirty years. We already have riot control measures (such as promiscuous use of OC dispensers, barricading entire city centres, and watercannons) which couldn't have been applied a few decades ago. It also seems that some of those measures are now beginning to be applied to peaceful protestors, a worrysome and relatively new development probably motivated by tough-on-crime attitudes. The police are already given broad discretion in their use of force. (For instance, to stop a fleeing suspect.) I fear that the mechanisms which brought us dedicated riot control forces could very well grant the police a catch-all licence to kill when "threatened" by a group of protestors. The Bloc attire and their interest in direct action constitute a highly plausible threat. So could any larger crowd of angry people who refuse to disband, if people ever start to think of protestors merely as "anarchists" or "hooligans". Of course I'm fully aware that this has nothing to do with the way US law enforcement is supposed to work. But it seems that people care increasingly little about the Bill of Rights. At least the trend has certainly been for the worse, with bigger protests, lots of cops around, force being used more often, and intense, largely unfavorable media attention towards the protestors. Extrapolating from this to wider police powers is no great feat of the intellect. Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy, mailto:decoy@iki.fi, gsm: +358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front