“When you see riot gear, it absolutely changes the mood: it takes away any perception the officers could be empathetic.
“If I went up to speak with a police officer and I’m covered in armor and holding a shield and a stick, don’t you think they would regard me as a threat?
“When we see riot gear, as black people it takes us back 400 years.”
– Ron Moten, a longtime community organizer in the nation’s capital
who was out demonstrating this weekend.
I found a recent article in the Portsmouth Daily Times to be very informative. The article was titled “Injuries at Protests Draw Scrutiny To Use of Police Weaponry.” It posed the idea that equipping police officers “in a manner more appropriate for a battlefield may put them in the mindset that confrontation and conflict are inevitable.”
Rubber bullets and similar projectiles have damaged eyes or blinded at least 20 individuals from ages 16 to 59, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, since protests began over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Other tactics were on display at Lafayette Park, where police used chemical agents to break up a peaceful protest minutes before President Donald Trump posed for pictures outside a nearby church this month. In Buffalo, an officer used a baton to shove a 75-year-old man to the ground before that officer and others marched past as blood collected beneath the man’s head.
Protesters in Denver have arrived at the hospital with injuries from police projectiles that caused one person to lose an eye and left three other people with permanent eye damage, said Prem Subramanian, a physician who operated on some victims following demonstrations late last month. Subramanian said ..
Other tactics were on display at Lafayette Park, where police used chemical agents to break up a peaceful protest minutes before President Donald Trump posed for pictures outside a nearby church this month. In Buffalo, an officer used a baton to shove a 75-year-old man to the ground before that officer and others marched past as blood collected beneath the man’s head.
Protesters in Denver have arrived at the hospital with injuries from police projectiles that caused one person to lose an eye and left three other people with permanent eye damage, said Prem Subramanian, a physician who operated on some victims following demonstrations late last month. Subramanian said ..
“They weren’t accused of any crime, and they came in with devastating eye injuries. We’re learning the consequences of using these weapons.”
(Larry Neumeister and Tom Hays. “Injuries at Protests Draw Scrutiny To Use of Police Weaponry.” Associated Press. June 22, 2020.)
The physician added that he was so upset about it that he complained to city officials, who promised to investigate any abuses. He said the injuries rivaled what he saw treating shrapnel damage to eyes of soldiers at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center who were injured by explosives in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Edward Maguire, a Arizona State University School of Criminology and Criminal Justice professor, in a 2018 Police Executive Research Forum report on police response to mass demonstrations, gave guidance from police officials and academics from around the country who echo the sentiment that dressing for a confrontation escalates the tension between officers and protesters.
Former Chicago Police Deputy Chief Kevin Ryan said in the research report …
“If police show up at a demonstration in full riot gear right away, you are projecting conflict and escalation. We have the capability to increase our level of response and use a higher level if necessary, but normally we can handle everything in normal field gear.”
(Chuck Wexler, Executive Director. “The Police Response to Mass Demonstrations: Promising Practices and Lessons Learned.” Police Executive Research Forum. 2018.)
The report used well-known history to illustrate past mistakes. Boston Police Superintendent Bernard O’Rourke said at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, police had five days of protests with bicycle patrols. They started with the soft approach. We had public order platoons on standby all week long. But then, things changed. O'Rourke explained …
“We made one big mistake. On the last day, we got a request from the commander of those public order platoons. They felt that they weren’t taking part in the situation, so they wanted to come out to the street. The mistake they made was coming out in full turtle gear. They didn’t walk out and mingle; they marched out. And as soon as that happened, the crowd started throwing things at them, and we had to make several arrests. We learned from that. Since then, unless we need the public order platoons, they stay out of sight.”
(Chuck Wexler, Executive Director. “The Police Response to Mass Demonstrations: Promising Practices and Lessons Learned.” Police Executive Research Forum. 2018.)
Measured models for protest-policing all center on a few key ideas:
Communication,
Facilitation, and
Differentiation.
One such model, called “Negotiated Management,” amounts essentially to talking it out: police and protesters cooperate and set out rules of engagement before an event. The Madison Method aims to facilitate protests – which, after all, are protected by the First Amendment – with communication and restraints on police action. The elaborated social identity model (aka ESIM) emphasizes differences among members of a group, so that looters are arrested as criminals while protesters are allowed to continue.
Ed Maguire believes treating protesters like looters will cause a riot. Maguire said …
“Much of what we’re seeing go wrong in my country right now is a failure on the part of police to do this piece of differentiation. We’ve seen police firing tear gas or less-lethal munitions on the crowd, most of which hasn’t done anything wrong and certainly hasn’t broken any laws. Instead, police should make targeted arrests against those causing violence, starting fires, and looting shops, but take no enforcement action against the rest of the crowd.”
(Nicole Kobie. How US police used military tactics to turn peaceful protests violent.”
Wired. June 4, 2020.)
Ronald Davis, a former California police officer and the former head of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, concludes …
“More community policing is needed, and is something that all agencies should adopt. What I’d like to see is police not just taking a knee but standing in support of systemic, sustainable police reform. Instead of being against police, this can be a movement to change policing. It doesn’t have to be us versus them.”
Leshia Evans, protesting the shooting death of Alton Sterling. She is meeting police
in full riot gear in Baton Rouge, Louisiana (2016).
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