Sorry to disillusion you, but tain’t so, although granted the situation varies from country to country. In certain western countries what happens is that instead of running you get bits of steel, weld them together to form right-angles then sharpen the point and throw them on the roadway. No matter which way they land they stick point up, the horse can’t avoid them. Not nice for the horse (the injuries are frequently irreparable and the animal has to be put down) , but as the police in the western world are symbols of US aggression and oppression, the horses are, sadly, fair game. This is why you now rarely see horses at so-called ‘peaceful’ protests and why the self-same ‘peacefuls’ deny all knowledge of such things. BTW, if the spikes aren’t available then razor blades have been known to mysteriously slice hose withers and flanks if the animal should have the misfortune to find itself surrounded by protesters, while the legs of their policeman rider’s also suffer from the same mysterious ‘malady’. A bit messy admittedly, but in the class war and capitalism’s ‘repression of peaceful protest’ strange things occur….

The horse is, of course, the innocent victim.

Please police, next time, unleash the fury. Wipe them out. Society will be better for it.

Seriously though I saw the footage, it’s the same old same old, just livin’ the dream of peace justice and being a twat

Hmmm! I know about baton rounds, and, in fact, if i turn my head a little as I type, i can look at two baton rounds that I kept as souveniers after a year in Belfast back in the 70s when it was really all on, as they say.

To the point! The use of baton rounds is fraught with risk. When fired they should be directed at the ground in front of a hostile crowd so that – being solid rubber – they can bounce up and inflict a stinging injury on a target.

BUT!! If misused and – say – fired directly at a person, they can inflict a serious hospital-treatment-requiring injury. Subsequent grief/hassle for the firer!!

Just thought i’d mention that!!

Well, there’s more to this than the casual, incensed, anti-protester observer might think.

I am of an age that can recall Ban-the-Bomb and Committee of 100 anti-nuclear protests in Europe in the fifties and sixties. Back then the protestors, the sitter-in and lie-down-in-the-road brigade – (compared with whom yesterdays pathetic central-Auckland crew were of kindergarten standard BTW) – acted as they did with the firm intention to actually achieve being arrested. The idea being to use the subsequent Court appearance – attended by the Press of course – to publicise and champion their ‘Cause’.

So, when I see this sort of publicity-seeking protest now I can understand the Police taking a softly, softly, minimum-arrest stance. Don’t give these people a wider platform.

(There are alternatives of course that obviate any need for arrests. There’s the old ‘Put-them-in-a-vehicle-and-drop-them-twenty miles-out-of-town-for-a-long-walk-home-solution’ – but that is a bit 60s and probably wouldn’t be on in the enlightened 2000s.

The other ripping wheeze – used when the protesting unwashed tried to invade Thor missile sites in process of construction – was to bodily remove the lyers-down and accidentally drop them in the copious wet cement. Hmm!. That’s probably not on these days either. Sigh!)

In terms of physical response, the report talks of barriers and “non traction polymers” – in other words coating surfaces with slippery stuff so the protesters fall in a heap if they try to storm a building.

If protesters breach the “moat” of passive protections then the report recommends using “accurate blunt impact weapons against selected targets” such as “non lethal weapons that fire baton rounds”. It then goes on to say:

In the event a crowd attempts to rush an area, which is regarded as a point of no compromise or a “die in a ditch” area, non-lethal weapons that disperse a large number of blunt projectiles might be used. Such weapons might incluide Modular Crowd Control Munition, which is a non-lethal, Claymore-mine like device

So the report isn’t some liberal, soft approach to protesters, and indeed one wouldn’t expect it to be having been authored not just by academics but by senior officers, or former senior officers, from the Los Angeles Sherrif’s Department and the Springfield Police Department. Even one of the academics is a former cop who’s seen over 100 riots.

But at no point does the report recommend getting into one-on-one fisticuffs with protesters. Indeed with the kind of technologies the report mentions – and things like water cannon, which is successfully deployed in many jurisdictions – there is rarely any need to provided Police are properly trained and disciplined.

While there can be no excuse for stomping on someone’s head, nor can there be an excuse for wildly swinging haymakers as that video shows officers doing. Such events only occur, however, when the situation has gotten totally out of hand, people have lost control of themselves, and Police have lost control of the situation.

Senior Police seem to think it acceptable to array a line of officers armed with nothing more than helmets and batons against protesters often equally protected and armed, and then send them into battle like the Generals of World War I sending troops “over the top”, with no regard to the resultant number of casualties on both sides.

That might have been all we could muster in the 80s but we now have available a range of technologies which are used effectively elsewhere and which significantly minimise (though of course do not entirely eliminate) the chance of protester-on-police violence. The question must be asked why they’re not deployed to protect front-line officers here.

Geez… that Minto fella just protests for every fucking cause known to man. Does he use a secretary or something to keep it all together? Like…. shit, what ten causes am I into today? It must get hard to keep up with all the burning injustices going on at any one time. Trying to keep all of those frickin plates spinning. Poor man.

I’d just call old Dimsim ‘spend a penny’ seeing as she’s constantly taking the piss. What a lovely little fantasy world that must be for her. Wouldn’t it be really really awesome if the next real conspiracy came along, it was right under Spend-a-Penny’s nose and she misses it cluelessly. We can all live in hope.

I’ve been to one sit-in protest… it was about student fee rises… and I went in and stayed because the maintenance bloke at Vic played a mean piano. Then I left when I said the fee rises were only really keeping up with inflation and not that big a deal. Shit that was aaaaages ago now.

Is that the much-loved Barbara Sumner Burstyn filming at 1:15 in that clip?

ive got a way the govt can generate some revenue. charge people like Dime $100 and then let us work the front lines id love to do some hippy bashing.

An organiser (John Minto) confirmed this was the case….

Bwahahahaaaaa…. very good. Comedy Gold.

Police look like they’re under a lot of pressure trying to keep people out at one point. The video shows clearly that a number of protesters are trying to force their way past them.
At 6:10 there’s a Russel Norman impersonator.