D.C. Police Brace for Next Month’s IMF Protests
Bah!
That’s all the intellectual effort that the DC police deserve.
Of all the ignorant, power-tripping, bull-headed people in the world, why them?
I’m still noticing distinct efforts to rewrite history to exploit. When the IMF protests took place last year in DC, the Post was stating the number of participants as over 30,000. This article in today’s post declared that there were only 20,000 protesters.
Doesn’t seem like much of a difference at first. But imagine 10,000 people, all actively working for the same thing at the exact same moment. It probably took less people than that to build the Great Pyramid, at any one time.
And this is just the DIFFERENCE between the 2 numbers reported by the same media outlet.
(Should I mention that i was in the thick of the protests throughout the day, and I doubt there was 10,000 people there altogether?)
I don’t blame the Post… too much. They are most likely reporting the number given them by the DC Police department. But come on! It’s called fact checking people.
I am blatently ignoring references to the other IMF protests throughout the world. I have never experienced them first hand, and they have thus far borne no resemblance to the protests locally.
I lay down a bet now, for everything I own (total value: $3.14), that if something tragic happens at the Washington IMF protests this Fall, it will have been instigated by, or massively aggravated by the police involved in the event. I’m not too worried about loseing my shirt. If anyone remembers correctly, the DC Police were sued multiple times last year for the way they behaved during the IMF protests, citing illegal arrests, no due process, and outright hazardous treatment of people already under arrest.
Since I moved here it has gotten to be standard procedure. The police respond the any large gathering with an overwhelming show of force, blatently placed where it will be most visable to the protestors/attendees.
There is a fine line between deterance and antagonism. A line that each time has disappeared beneath the boot-heel of the shocktroops that the DC police become. I have had shotguns cocked in my face. I’ve watched police and secret service agents lie and attempt to intimidate people. I’ve seen hidden preparations designed to prevent and/or disrupt government sanctioned protests. I was nearly brought to patriotic ecstacy watching a squad of shock troop officers in full riot gear defend me and my city from a group of 40 year old women in their old-fashion Sunday best.
So we’re going to erect a big fence to keep people away. First of all, who said you had the right to keep people away. Why don’t protesters have the right to protest where they can actually be seen by the people they wish to influence. But doesn’t anyone on the police force remember that last year, the only violent action that occured on the part of the protesters was when they ripped down a fence and assaulted the police with it.
My math skills are getting rusty. Otherwise I would be able to figure out why 30,000 protesters last year required 7 million dollars in security and 2 to 3 times that many protestors this year require 5 times as much money for security?
Protests in this city could bore a cat to sleep. If anything is ever going to push these protesters to behave as they have in Europe and Seattle, it is going to be the antagonization of the city police.
Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t imagine Martin Luther King, Jr standing on the steps of the National Women in the Arts museum (because the Lincoln Memorial was barricaded), waiting for hours while the crowds found their way around detours set up to delay them, to give a speech to a crowd where the police outnumbered the activists, with a row of mounted officers carrying automatic weapons sitting in the background.