The Militarization of Crowd Control

by Justin Rogers-Cooper

The Pittsburgh G-20 Summit protests in late September were a threshold event. They’ve mostly been ignored for several basic reasons. The commercial media ignores stories it can’t shift into familiar narratives. Vast numbers of the population have also practiced denial strategies for much of the negative news in the past decade. Such news does not match the fatalistic optimism churned from earnings guidance reports, political campaign speeches, upbeat advertising, and entertainment spectacles. These optimistic mediums and genres are all associated with civic and corporate power. They logically behave as institutions that must direct public emotion. They spin simplistic stories that redefine disorders as isolated disruptions or exceptional “tragedies.” Another interpretation of these national “tragedies” and disruptions is possible by connecting together what they have in common. The actions of security forces in 2009 Pittsburgh, 2005 New Orleans, and the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York reveal intensifying policies of the Homeland Security state since 9-11. By tracing police actions back to those policies it’s possible to more substantively interpret the meaning of the Pittsburgh protests.

The policies reflect a consensus between law enforcement and the military about the use of new technological weapons against citizens and non-citizens. New weapons were used against Americans for the first time in Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh security forces used non-lethal forms of equipment to disperse crowds, including the Long Range Acoustic Device, the LRAD. This large sonic gun blasts high volume sound waves into people’s heads. It radiates short bursts of sound waves. It’s audible over very long distances. Firing it up-close on someone makes it very loud and powerful. It has previously been used in Iraq against Iraqis. It was also used as a defensive weapon on the cruise ship Seabourn Spirit in 2005 off the coast of Somalia. The ship used the LRAD against pirates. The pirates left the ship alone despite having rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns. The use of the weapon against non-violent crowds is a human rights violation and a civil liberties crime.

The device is meant to inflict non-lethal injury. In this sense it echoes the “enhanced interrogation” techniques that the military used to torture enemy combatants. Like the Taser, the LRAD is also a new law enforcement weapon that’s supposedly non-lethal but also relatively unstable in live trials. The Taser is an electroshock gun that’s meant to immobilize bodies. Like Predator spy planes that shoot Hellfire missiles at suspected targets in Pakistan, the Taser and the LRAD are new weapons that fundamentally change the new laws of security powers. These weapons modulate ranges of force in order to subdue individuals and crowds.

Local authorities in New York criminalized protest in 2004 through mass arrests, but they went a step further in Pittsburgh by criminalizing the use of communications by protesters. Elliot Madison’s arrest by the Pennsylvania State Police in Pittsburgh for Twittering the location of the police to protesters is symptomatic of a campaign to prevent crowds from intelligently communicating. The subsequent search of Madison’s apartment by an FBI counter-terrorism unit confiscated books by Marx and Lenin as evidence. A grand jury trial is still open. The police are using the 1968 Riot Act as legal precedent. This is an orchestrated attack on legitimate forms of political dissent.

These actions send signals. 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. Another signal should be psychological. These on-going assaults are tolerated because of little compromises that individuals make about the social contract and the ethical responsibilities one has toward suffering. Each little compromise has required a denial. It returns as anxiety in many. 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 real movements reflect essential changes in the technology of crowd control. Companies that provide emergency training for local authorities use computer simulations that simulate 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. It’s as realistic as Grand Theft Auto. These exercises against civil disturbance reflect significant attitudes and expectations of the US towards its own population. The expression of these policies in physical confrontations reveals an organized and methodical approach toward all bodies present in declared “emergency” and “disaster” zones. In much of the military literature, 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. Local and state authorities transfer powers of civil control to security forces. Crowds of the population are ‘managed,’ whether they have formed for looting, to express a grievance, or 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 dollar contract for temporary detention and processing centers. At the time, this contract reminded some independent journalists of the REX-84 “readiness exercise” 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 2000 protesters detained at Pier 57 during the 2004 New York protests. During periods of instability and vulnerability, the state exercises emergency powers. The camps must be understood as logical reactions to national security needs. Governments must manage different scales of population.

Populations can express themselves through specific, collective forms of identity. One such 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 crowd 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 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.

Crowds can overcome state violence. Crowds can overcome crowd control. They can break through crowd control and seize centers of power. They then use their occupation of power as a demonstration of strength. From this position of strength they can demand strategic concessions from authority. These concessions can sometimes only be achieved through crowds, and not through “democratic” institutions sustained by corporate-funded political parties. The government of populations requires that civic authorities and security forces see protest crowds as crowds first and constitutionally assembled citizens second. Crowds must be controlled because crowds have power.

The Department of Defense would control military support of state law enforcement during domestic emergencies that involve crowds. 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 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. Martial law is called into being wherever crowds form. Martial law emergency powers are part of a capillary, distributive system of emergency powers in the United States. Senator David Vitter acted as a liaison between Karl Rove and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco after Hurricane Katrina, for instance, and told Blanco the Bush administration asked 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, but doing so 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 would be renamed Defense Support of Civilian Authorities (DSCA). These forces are also referred to as Civil Support. These Civil Support forces 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 speech act of a local authority. The simplicity of this speech act is necessary for enforcing property relations at any time. Crowds trigger local authorities to invoke emergency powers that are inseparable from the powers of martial law.

Military support is necessary to back local authorities because of the strength of crowds. Operation Garden Plot is the plan developed by the Pentagon in 1968 to create workable strategies for civil disturbances. The Pentagon developed it to consolidate knowledge related to recent deployments of troops legalized by the1807 Insurrection Act. The Insurrection Act allows the President to use military troops against American citizens. It occurred in 1957 Little Rock, 1962 Oxford, 1965 Selma, and 1967 Detroit. These are several of the public disorders that inspired Garden Plot. By 1970 over 375,000 National Guard units were trained in Garden Plot riot control techniques. In the preceding year, state governors summoned the National Guard on 92 different occasions: to Chicago, to Berkeley, and to Kent, Ohio. In Kent they shot four non-violent protesters. These are legal and political precedents for Pittsburgh.

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’s interesting that new crowd control methods were included in the new civil liberties policies following 9-11. 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. This is also to say political dissent in the United States has become criminalized. The criminalization of protest is occurring because protest crowds qualify as civil disturbance emergencies. 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 martial law unless the bailout bill passed.

It is here that the crowd, forces of crowd control, and the constitution clash. The civil liberties that have come under the most assault are freedom of speech and assembly. These 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 constitutional rights.

The permanent emergency is already here. It’s sometimes called the war on terror. It stretches from Kabul to Pittsburgh. It is meant to test the boundaries of what a population will tolerate against fellow citizens. Because these citizens included anarchists, state violence becomes more acceptable. This represents a new fashion of policing undisciplined ideologies. If one is Muslim, or a terrorist, or an anarchist – or a protester – one’s body becomes subject to 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.

It’s hard to direct attention to these policies. The police commit routine violations of the law 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, ethnicities, and genders. American nationalism has functioned throughout the transition from Bush to Obama. Focusing on the individual actions of police officers is not important anyway, however. One need not fear criticizing any individual police officer or soldier. This only mystifies the problem. The problem is one of policy.

Citizens have the right to form crowds. Forming crowds is also a human right. A 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. Decaying political forms will erode in power. The corporate-funded two-party system relies on an infinite-growth economy that relies on fossil fuels for food and labor production. The post-petroleum era will require much more local forms of production. The groups that will dominate this era will form new kinds of crowds. They must be allowed to emerge.