The Militarization of Crowd Control
The Group of 20 (G-20) Summit protests in Pittsburgh this past September were a threshold event. Not only were protestors detained and beaten by the police, but they were also subjected to new military-grade technologies that have pushed the boundaries of what kinds of actions are permissible for controlling large crowds of protestors, unruly or not. This fact, however, has been largely ignored by the mainstream media for several reasons. First of all, the commercial media ignores stories it can’t spin into easy and familiar narratives of good and bad, right and wrong. The story of the G-20 protests and the subsequent police brutality that took place during those protests does not match the facile optimism of political campaign speeches, upbeat advertising, and entertainment spectacles. Instead, the
se corporate media outlets spin simplistic stories that redefine disorders as isolated disruptions or exceptional “tragedies.” Another alternative interpretation of these national “tragedies” and disruptions is possible by connecting together what they have in common. The actions of security forces in Pittsburgh in 2009, New Orleans in 2005, and the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004 all reveal the increasingly militant policies of the homeland security state since September 11. By tracing police actions back to those policies it’s possible to more substantively interpret the meaning of the Pittsburgh protests and what they mean for the future of crowd control.
The policies of the new homeland security state reflect a consensus between law enforcement officials and the military about the use of new technological weapons against citizens and non-citizens. The Pittsburgh security forces used non-lethal weapons to disperse crowds, including the Long Range Acoustic Device, or the LRAD. This large sonic gun radiates short bursts of sound waves that are audible over very long distances. Firing it up-close creates a very loud and powerful noise that is capable of causing hearing loss and great levels of pain. These LRAD devices have previously been used in Iraq for similar purposes. It was also used as a defensive weapon on the cruise ship Seabourn Spirit in 20
A protestor at the Group of 20 Meeting in Pittsburgh, September 24, 2009. The Police Vehicle seen here is equipped with a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD)
05 off the coast of Somalia to fend off a group of pirates. The pirates were repelled despite having rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns. And now the use of the weapon domestically against non-violent crowds of American citizens is taking place, arguably not only a violation of their civil liberties but also a violation of basic human rights.
The device is meant to inflict “non-lethal injury.” In this sense it echoes the “enhanced interrogation” techniques that the military uses to torture enemy combatants in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and the US prison at Guantanamo Bay. Like the Taser gun, which has become popular with local police departments, the LRAD is yet another law enforcement weapon that’s supposedly non-lethal but also relatively unstable in live trials. Like Predator spy planes that shoot Hellfire missiles at suspected targets in Pakistan, the Taser and the LRAD are weapons that fundamentally change the new laws of security powers. These weapons modulate wide ranges of before unheard of force in order to subdue individuals and crowds.
Equally problematic is the increase in the use of the 1968 Riot Act to criminalize the use of social networking technologies such as Facebook and Twitter. Local authorities in New York took major steps to circumscribing the effects of public protests in 2004 through mass arrests, but they went a step further in Pittsburgh by targeting the use of communications devices by protesters. Elliot Madison’s arrest by the Pennsylvania State Police in Pittsburgh for Tweeting the location of police to protesters is symptomatic of a campaign to prevent crowds from intelligently organizing. The subsequent search of Madison’s apartment by an FBI counter-terrorism unit confiscated pictures of Marx and Lenin as evidence. A grand jury trial is still open. The police are using the Riot Act as legal precedent. This is an orchestrated attack on legitimate forms of political dissent.
These actions send a chilling message to potential political activists and everyday citizen protesters, that public authority will use any means necessary to control individuals and crowds. This includes authorizing the use of violent new instruments of control. Each new tool reflects a unique technological breakthrough in the science of controlling human bodies efficiently. These on-going assaults are tolerated because of little compromises that individuals make about the social contract and the ethical responsibilities one has toward the suffering of others. Each little compromise has required a denial that returns as a form of fear and anxiety in much of the American public. Not coincidently, the American public has reacted passively against these new technologies of immobilizing bodies. Anxiety paralyzes one’s ability to think clearly about the real movements in American politics.
These movements reflect essential changes in the technology of crowd control. Companies that provide emergency training for local authorities use computer simulations that construct scenarios of natural disasters, fires, terrorism, and civil disturbances. A simulation video advertised on YouTube boasts that every block in New York has been digitally reproduced for that training. The expression of these policies in physical confrontations reveals an organized, methodical, and potentially dehumanizing approach toward all bodies present in declared “emergency” and “disaster” zones. In much of the military literature, for instance, protests are also classified as civil disturbances. Civil disturbances are, in turn, defined as man-made disasters. As a result, strategic responses to natural disasters and protest disasters are very similar. They involve suspending civil liberties for the purposes of protecting public order and private property. Crowds are “managed,” whether they have gathered to loot, commit violence, or just to protest.
They are also managed if they become displaced by climate catastrophes or economic incentives. In 2006, the Halliburton subsidiary KBR received a $385 million contract for temporary detention and processing centers. At the time, this contract reminded some independent journalists of the REX-84 “readiness exercise” that Oliver North spearheaded during the Reagan administration. The exercise imagined that 400,000 migrants from Mexico entered the US and became an uncontrollable population. The plan called for all 400,000 to be detained. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) would be responsible for storing them. As immigrants, they would not be subject to constitutional protection.
Like the KBR centers contracted in 2006, the camps would detain, house, and process bodies. The United States has powers to create domestic internment camps just as all other state governments do. The World War II Japanese internment camps provide evidence that the United States can detain tens of thousands of bodies after declaring an emergency.
In 1982, former FEMA head Louis Giuffrida drafted an executive order for continuity of government planning in the event of nation-wide insurgency of African-American militants. The order called for “martial law” and “suspension of the Constitution.” The REX-84 camps and the Japanese interment camps are large-scale precedents for Guantanamo Bay. State authority rests on emergency powers in all three cases. They are large-scale precedents for the 2,000 protesters detained at Pier 57 during the 2004 New York Republican Convention.
Populations often express themselves through specific, collective identities. One such form of identity is crowds. Crowds are inherently unstable and very powerful. They thus make the state vulnerable. Protests and protesters acquire disproportionate power when they form crowds. Crowds can make demands that elections cannot. Crowds can use force that cannot be undone. Crowds can shift political sentiment for authority by exposing the erosion of power, by embarrassing authorities, or by being subjected to police brutality. Crowds can visually demonstrate the violence of the state against certain ideas. As crowds, they have the power to draw emotions and media to ideas and bodies possibly subject to censorship or derision.
The collective power of assembled bodies can overwhelm repellent police technologies, including lethal weapons. Crowds can overwhelm state forces through the sheer power of numbers. A group as organized and energized as an Ohio State Buckeye football crowd could easily occupy the state capitol building in Columbus. This is why crowd control was essential for the protection of President Barack Obama in Pittsburgh. This is also why movements that encourage various kinds of crowds have successful records against state forces. An example might be the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-56 and the Berlin Wall crowds in 1989.
In response to the power of these crowds, states can declare and enforce martial law. During martial law, executive authority resides under the direction of local civil authorities. This is the single most important aspect of understanding martial law. Elements of the military maintain “liaisons” with federal, state, and municipal authorities. The 2005 Department of Defense “Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support” explicitly refers to the military support the Pentagon may lend local police authorities. Since the executive who declares emergency powers is local, to understand martial law one must not focus on Presidential executive powers. The Homeland Security press release by the Secret Service during the Pittsburgh G-20 Summit described the participating security bodies as a combination of “local, state, and federal security,” along with “public safety and military partners.”
In the context of American constitutional law and Department of Defense policy, martial law emergency powers always reside with local civil authorities. Martial law is not about negotiating checks and balances of federal powers, however. Martial law emergency powers are part of a capillary, distributive system of emergency powers in the United States and can be called into being wherever crowds form. Senator David Vitter acted as a liaison between Karl Rove and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco following Hurricane Katrina, for instance, and told Blanco the George W. Bush administration wanted her to declare martial law or “as close as we can get.” This exchange lays bare where the powers reside.
This is the case because presidential authority is legally limited. The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act withdrew northern troops from the south by limiting the powers of the executive to command military troops within US borders. The president could nonetheless still declare a state of national emergency and declare nationwide martial law. Doing so, however, would draw a great deal of negative attention and media. Martial law powers are much more flexible—and thus more tactically useful—because they rely on local authorities. Department of Defense military forces, when used domestically, would be renamed Defense Support of Civilian Authorities (DSCA). These forces are also referred to as Civil Support, which would engage “riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, or other disorders prejudicial to public law and order.” These unlawful assemblages—crowds—might be dispersed through the simple act of a local authority. Crowds trigger these authorities to invoke emergency powers that are inseparable from the powers of martial law.
In the last two decades many of the laws surrounding crowd control came to define the actual apparatuses of federal emergency powers. Crowd control laws are important because they address how security forces can interact with real bodies. This then clarifies the real expressions and fears that motivate state power. The REX-84 exercise is an example of state policies that envisage large-scale responses to massive population control problems. It is no accident that new crowd control methods were included in the new civil liberties policies following September 11. Airport security grew. Bridge security grew. Vast detention centers opened in Afghanistan and Iraq. A special torture camp opened in Cuba. The CIA “black sites” prison system continued to expand.
These are all human rights crimes. In the United States, human rights and civil rights are two separate discourses. It may be effective to wind them together more. Since 9/11 civil liberties have come under intense assault. Political dissent in the United States has essentially been effectively criminalized, becoming in the eyes of the law just one more form of emergency that must be met with controlling force. Civil disturbance manuals used by the army claim that disturbances arise from “highly emotional social and economic issues,” where “economically deprived” residents are ready to release frustrations. This link between civil disturbance, economic conditions, and emergency powers received some surprising attention last October, when California representative Brad Sherman claimed some legislators were threatened with the specter of martial law unless the bailout bill passed.
It is here that crowds, the forces of crowd control, and our Constitution clash. The civil liberties that have come under the most assault are freedom of speech and assembly. These liberties conflict with policies about crowds and civil disturbance. Since crowds threaten public order because of their power, the response of security forces reverts back to policies and laws that govern civil disturbances. Civil disturbances are emergencies, and, as such, emergency powers are in effect. Defining protests as emergencies allows police conduct that should be understood as unacceptable violations of the constitutional rights of free speech and public assembly. When all protests and spontaneous mass gatherings are seen as emergencies, then the ability to actually practice any reasonably effective form of mass political action becomes nearly impossible, limited only to police and city authorized marches and rallies.
The permanent state of emergency, like the permanent war on terror that the Bush administration envisioned, is here, stretching from Kabul to Pittsburgh. It is meant to test the boundaries of what kinds of abuse a population will tolerate against its fellow humans and fellow citizens. This represents a new fashion of policing undisciplined and unpopular ideologies. It seems to make no difference whether one is a Muslim, a terrorist, an anarchist, a communist or just a protester—one’s body is inevitably subject to all kinds of forms of temporary state control. For radical Muslims this state control can last for years of indefinite detention; it can also include torture. For illegal immigrants it might last months and sometimes years. Judging by Pittsburgh and the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York, it can last for a few days against American citizens.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to direct public attention to these policies. The police commit routine violations of the law without punishment because they have acquired a patriotic armor. The same is true for American soldiers. The police and the military elicit intense forms of devotion from wide intersections of classes and ethnicities. Focusing on the individual actions of police officers is not important anyway. One need not fear criticizing any individual police officer or soldier. This only mystifies the problem. The problem is one of policy.
The fact is that under both the American Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights citizens have the right to assembly. Any new security policy must reflect these rights. Crowd formation is inevitable. No government can ultimately control collected human bodies and organized crowds. Policies must reflect this reality. Crowds too control the terms of “consent” inherent in all representative government. Recognizing this will make it easier to evolve the political systems in new ecological and economic eras.
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