Great article by Michael Hughes, the same guy who wrote the piece on the Hopkins mushroom study, about the epic folly of Baltimore police in breaking up a peaceful gathering with excessive force. An excerpt from Hughes’ article:
My brother came running up the sidewalk. “Some guy just got tasered!” he said. I saw some cops walking back toward us, so I crossed the street to stay out of their way. The first arrestees were being led to the paddy wagon. I pulled out my cell phone and started snapping pictures.
A beefy officer saw me taking photos and approached. I held my hands at my side and said, “I’m a journalist. I’m just taking pictures.”
He slapped my cell phone out of my hand and grabbed my shirt. “Well, write a nice, long story about this,” he said, spinning me around as another officer cuffed me. I was in the paddy wagon before I could even comprehend what was happening. After processing at Northern District I was thrown into a concrete cell, strip-searched, fingerprinted, and subject to the singular degradation of a long night spent in Central Booking.
What most people never consider is that police are trained in scientific tactics to disrupt and break-down crowds. Crowd control is less a matter of random acts committed by rogue cops, and more a matter of behavioral techniques designed to trigger certain kinds of responses in crowds and individuals, and reinforce patterns of dominance and submission. And I don’t mean submission in the spiritual sense, like I’ve talking about it here, but in the we’re going to kick your ass and send you to jail kind of sense.
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