Police Provoke Protest Violence sfgate/bayarea/article/Police-often-provoke-protest-violence-UC-5704918.php#photo-6724142 The research team, which studied clashes between police and activists during the Occupy movement three years ago, found that protests tend to turn violent when officers use aggressive tactics, such as approaching demonstrators in riot gear or lining up in military-like formations. Everything starts to turn bad when you see a police officer come out of an SUV and hes carrying an AR-15, said Nick Adams, a sociologist and fellow at UC Berkeleys Institute for Data Science who leads the Deciding Force Project. It just upsets the crowd. Adams said many law enforcement agencies arent aware that they set the tone of a protest and end up inflaming it. His team reached its conclusions by analyzing Occupy protests in 192 U.S. cities in 2011. The researchers sifted through thousands of news reports about the protests, which were sparked by concerns over economic inequality, and isolated patterns of violence and their apparent causes. Read more: sfgate/bayarea/article/Police-often-provoke-protest-violence-UC-5704918.php#photo-6724142
Posted on: Tue, 02 Sep 2014 03:53:21 +0000