Pearl Harbor Day in Berkeley, CA
Some critics and historians in the 20th century, notably Lewis Mumford, argued that the real purpose of Baron Haussmann's Paris boulevards was to make it easier for the army to crush popular uprisings. According to these critics, the wide boulevards gave the army greater mobility, a wider range of fire for their cannon, and made it harder to block streets with barricades. They argued that the boulevards built by Haussmann allowed the French army to easily suppress the Paris Commune in 1871
ketlle
Kettle (chiefly British) A small area in which demonstrators or protesters are confined by police seeking to maintain order during a demonstration:
"Policing experts say the procedure dictates that officers move protesters to a pre-designated spot.
As other protesters join the crowd, the police noose draws gradually tighter."
Yeppers, we all can't breathe.
So police militarism is at its base, the means to pacify the 99%
Encirclement is a military term for the situation when a force or target is isolated and surrounded by enemy forces.
This situation is highly dangerous for the encircled force: at the strategic level, because it cannot receive supplies or reinforcements, and on the tactical level, because the units in the force can be subject to an attack from several sides. Lastly, since the force cannot retreat, unless it is relieved or can break out, it must either fight to the death or surrender.
Homey don't play that
Police attempting to control student demonstrators in London have resorted to controversial "kettling" techniques to contain the protest.
Used effectively at the G20 summit in London in April 2009, kettling has developed as the Metropolitan Police's tactic of choice when it comes to controlling large and potentially violent protests.
But how does it work and why is there opposition to it?
The word derives from the German word "kessel" - literally a cauldron, or kettle - to describe an encircled army about to be annihilated by a superior force. For soldiers within the kettle the situation would soon become unbearable hot.
For police officers, the kettle has a different end but the tactic remains the same - containment and control....
"The tactics are "to herd the crowd into a pen, known as 'the kettle'... the police will not want groups splintering away from the main crowd."
Policing experts say the procedure dictates that officers move protesters to a pre-designated spot. As other protesters join the crowd, the police noose draws gradually tighter.
Eventually protesters find themselves surrounded by police specially trained in crowd control. Mounted police can also provide backup.
Police may occasionally relieve some of the pressure on the kettle by allowing people to leave - but officers are constantly seeking to maintain control and this is via a designated route.
However, anyone determined to stay may be held for hours without access to food and water.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/...
A group of young computer geeks is wielding a new weapon in the fight against controversial police tactics at demonstrations
(2011) Police kettle protesters supposedly to quell violence, but protesters arguably only turn to violence out of frustration at being kettled. Most notoriously, police trapped hundreds of teenage schoolchildren inside a tight grid on Whitehall on 24 November – and only subsequently did a few of them smash up a police van abandoned in their midst.
Saturday's non-kettle, then, was a victory in itself. But the real excitement wasn't that it didn't happen – but how it didn't happen. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly why police and protesters behave in a certain way at a certain time, but one explanation for the kettle's failure to form lies with a new communications network, which launched that afternoon: Sukey.
The brainchild of a group of young, recently politicised computer programmers, Sukey's main goal is to stop people getting kettled. On the day of a protest, founders collate information from individual protesters – tweets, texts and GPS positions – about what is happening on the ground. The Sukey team then update an online live-map of the protest, accessible from smartphones. Simultaneously, they tweet and text brief summaries of events to all their subscribers, telling them where other protesters are situated, and – most significantly – where kettles are forming. As the nursery rhyme (from which Sukey takes its name) aptly suggests: "Polly put the kettle on, Sukey take it off again."...
Quite what Sukey will go on to enable is not yet clear. The team plan to make their coding available to protest-minded programmers across the UK, but it remains to be seen what kind of impact it could have in, say, Egypt, where the government recently cut off the two keys to Sukey's London success: mobile and internet access. To stay ahead of the curve, Sukey will have to find ways round these problems. Protesters in Egypt have already improvised by using dial-up connections and new "speak to tweet" technology, which converts voicemail recordings into Twitter messages.
Further afield, international programmers from the Open Mesh Project are developing a system that turns laptops into temporary internet routers, and so allows protesters to communicate even without a conventional internet connection. But Sukey is unlikely to be behind the times for long. The team are tight-lipped about the details, but two of them say they might have found a way of doing without mobile reception. "We've got some ideas," says Gaus Sr, with a grin.