Helicopter Footage Reveals State Trooper Surveillance Capabilities

The police were so incredibly violent after that, they had total control and very little restraint. And there was local news or police media team ready to catch every act of desperation from the protestors. But very little of the state violence made it to the news. They were singling out people filming, smashing phones, arresting anyone nearby. I remember stumbling into a corner and falling to the street and seeing it already covered in blood and mucus and teeth, and thinking "that's more teeth than one person has in their head wtf happened here."

And then having to come on the internet every day since and hear about the "rioters" and looters and lawlessness and shit.

They do have horses though which are scary AF. Once you got a panicked horse playing rodeo with it's rider while chasing you through an alley, you know what immediate panic feels like.

Edit: I found horses worse than the crowd panic, breathing and eye issues after CS gas was released. And despite water cannons engaging is a very dramatic moment, I cannot imagine how it must feel when police give warning shots or even fire live ammo into the crowd (even you don't get hurt). Musst be a completely different level. Luckily I have never been in a situation on which police was even near such an escalation.

So yes, suddenly being trapped inside and facing riot police can be scary. That's by design.

But when you know the details, you can say quite easily, if there is any real danger of violence, or not. Usually it isn't.

But violence can sometimes erupt spontaneously though, so be aware (and fast) if you are close. Also, if you are good with words and kettled in, usually you can convince the police that you are just a tourist passing through (don't ask those, who face the heat, go to the quiet corners and ask someone in charge who does not look stressed out, the low ranks won't let you through, if they have the order to block everyone and their superiors are watching, so rather ask those a little bit higher up, but not too high, or find someone who is not being watched)

In the last 20 years who were the most eager to open fire in any situation?

If you wish people to accept or even join your movement, violence seems to be counter-productive:

> For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. By attracting impressive support from citizens, whose activism takes the form of protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of nonviolent noncooperation, these efforts help separate regimes from their main sources of power and produce remarkable results, even in Iran, Burma, the Philippines, and the Palestinian Territories.

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10056014-why-civil-resis...

I'm guessing history has some anti-phalanx tactics that may be useful. My naive assumption is that well-organized protestors could choose one spot to focus on and try to break through using sheer numbers and momentum with some uh, ablation at the edges and tip of the spear. This comes with a very high risk of trampling. Veteran Black Bloc practitioners will likely have less naive countermeasures

The Hong Kong protesters are the ones who developed the best tactics.

I have never heard of a 2nd Amendment protest (where most protesters show up armed) being kettled.

Make of that what you will.

I'm all for civil disobedience but at least if I'm not mistaken, when Dr. King organized so many marches and sit-ins he guided his followers to peacefully allow themselves to be arrested -- overflowing the jails and courts was an intentional part of the civil disobedience. He himself was arrested many times. That peaceful action made media coverage of events like the police violence in Selma, Alabama more impactful than they would be otherwise. I grew up in a "violent leftist" city, which was a major hub for the Weathermen and various bombings of law enforcement buildings during the era of "Days of Rage", but the general advice for attending protests/marches in the early 2000's was "bring a check in your pocket to fill out for bail", not "run away from the police and attempt to avoid getting arrested" or "attack the police and burn down the police stations".

Apathy is a powerful tool.

I agree with you that the person shining lasers into helicopters and blinding pilots causing potential permanent eye damage should face stiffer penalties.

Also, won't you be super easy to track? Doubtful you could get enough people wearing these to be any more effective than ID'ing yourself

corrections welcome

Even at way lower output power you will damage your eyes by just looking at the dot on a wall. Use it indoors and all it takes is one unlucky reflection on a shiny object and you will wake up to a detached retina the next morning.

They're remarkably good at not letting point sources blow out the image. That's a very important performance parameter, since often you're not concerned with the hottest point, but the parts immediately adjacent, so you can see how heat is flowing through the device being inspected. A lot of investment and IP goes into this -- since the hot spot _will_ heat the imaging array, and on older imagers it would cause streaking if moved, modern ones do extensive thermal modeling of the array itself to try to cancel out this effect, all baked into FPGAs so it can be done in real-time. They're very good at it.

A very naïve implementation may have auto-scaling for the color palette, in which case a hot-spot would skew the palette and make cooler stuff hard to distinguish, but that would be a total amateur mistake. Setting the palette to highlight human skin temperature is like step 1 of any such operation.

Insulated umbrellas, or just big aluminized-mylar space-blankets, would definitely play havoc with the image. An AI people-counter trained on the image would probably lose its marbles, but a human looking at it would quickly understand what's going on and make some educated guesses. It's very hard to hide your thermal signature for very long, which is why thermal imaging is so important in warfighting.

In the linked bodycam video, the MPD officers involved banter about 'needing to spit' when the community engagement officer goes by, and also appear to be partaking in a game where anyone who actually says the officer's name (Dubuc) is subject to mock punishment.

Honestly it's pretty juvenile. It's possible that this is part of a healthy culture somehow (like, I can jump through enough mental hoops to make that happen), but it's almost certainly not part of healthy culture.

More likely, decreased policing in the more dangerous neighborhoods has let to more unsolved crimes.