Tuesday, 14 April 2009
Some resources from the RAND Foundation 1
The Advent of Netwar
Although RAND are more usually associated with arcane studies relating to the projection of US force, quite a few of their publications are of interest to demonstrators. Here's three which contain much to get your teeth into!
The two works on netwar highlight decentralised forces as a future of warfare. But you'll note there's a chapter on Seattle in 'Networks and Netwar'. There's much that's applicable to how protesters can operate - and perhaps could have operated within the City of London recently. If the wars of the big battalions effectively went out in the 1940s and '50s, it's working in the past to concentrate forces of demonstrators - the future's to successfully disperse as was done on June 18.
Byting Back looks at how information can be gathered on insurgents - or protesters. The section on mobile phones alone ought to get people thinking of how they communicate.
If demonstrators are to succeed in the future as they deserve, then the information out there about insurgency and counterinsurgency should find a prominent place on reading lists. This is by no means to suggest that people should take up armed struggle. The tactics and methods of counterinsurgency are already being honed by the state - the surveillance society is, in my opinion, all about preparing for the day people do turn from protest to resistance to insurrection. So it's worth being prepared and taking applicable lessons from documents like these.
Monday, 13 April 2009
First things second
There are a number of reasons I set up this blog. Having contributed articles to a number of anarchist papers and websites over the years, I wanted somewhere of my own to put up information and views which interest me. And few other people seem to be doing what I'm interested in.
I've been to all the big 'offs' in London in the past two decades. But while I've learned a thing or three about public order policing in that time, many people still fall into the same tired traps. By airing some of the things I've taken on board, I hope that people getting involved now won't have to learn painful lessons the hard way. This blog doesn't seek to replicate what other people are doing well, for example the people at Fitwatch. Rather, I hope to complement what other people are doing by putting up some of the stories behind the development of policing and security in the UK.
Some of these are 'sexy' things, to do with what's going on in the world of public order policing. But behind the TSG lies a whole hidden milieu of 'soft' policing which few people have as yet taken a decent look at. Take Safer Neighbourhood Teams, for example. This isn't simply bread and butter policing, there's a different agenda there. You don't get former TSG personnel, like the Lambeth SNT officer who was at the Poll Tax Riot, or people like Elaine Van Orden, in charge of SNTs in Hammersmith, late of the Met Police Specialist Training Centre at Gravesend, involved with Safer Neighbourhood Teams unless there's some sort of security or intelligence function there. There's VIIDO - the Visual Images, Identification and Detection Office - headed by DCI Mick Neville. You may recall that last year he said that only 3% of CCTV was of any use as evidence in court. He's making the running in the forensic use of CCTV. There's the Forward Intelligence Team, so ably covered by Fitwatch but only recently receiving the coverage in the mainstream press that they deserve.
All these things taken together add up to a network of policing intiatives, many apparently unobjectionable when taken singly, which combine to form a very worrying totality. A new academic discipline, surveillance studies, has started to look at part of this, at the new geographies and social implications of the 'surveillance society'. This has as yet not been accompanied by the 'security studies' which would put the developments of the last twenty or more years into a proper perspective. There's scope for scores of academic careers here: but, more importantly, the new trends have not been placed into context for the people who really should know about them, the man and woman in the street.
What appears to be happening is the formation of a counter-insurgency state without an insurgency as yet. Jihadist terrorism does not predate the start of this trend, but is used to justify it. The state's strategy appears to be to put in place the lessons from the north of Ireland plus extra initiatives to preempt any insurgency and to create threats where none exist, such as the furores over the Climate Camps or anarchist demonstrations. Playing a long game, the state, not simply the Labour party, is putting into place a host of organisations devoted to keeping tabs on what's going on. Although not on the scale of the Total Awareness projects of the US military as yet, what is being established should worry everyone who simply wants a bit of privacy, as well as people whose goal is changing society for the better.
Anyway, that's what this blog's about. I hope you'll find it interesting enough to return to.
Sunday, 12 April 2009
Public order resources 1
Kettling's very much in the news at the moment. But that's just one public order tactic. People will continue to get kettled as long as they don't know about the policing of public order, which is the subject of this blog. Here are two documents to get you started thinking about public order policing, one from the Association of Chief Police Officers and one from the US Army. The US Army manual goes through the panoply of police (and military) responses to disturbances, and reading it will give you a better idea of how the police gain and maintain control of a disturbance.
US Army Field Manual on Civil Disturbance Operations (large pdf!)
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