According to a report in the Guardian on January 10th they "challenged the notion that trouble was usually caused by a handful of well-organised activists. They claimed that violence tended to flair up if normally law-abiding citizens felt they were being treated as a dangerous, anonymous mass. Such treatment inevitably provoked them into acting exactly in that way."

Considering the role of the police in starting confrontations on actions is certainly a starting point for both mainstream researchers and newspapers to come to a more accurate picture of what is happening on protests. Maybe there is hope that at some point they will actually look at the reasons why people participate in these actions - the simple fact that they are angry about a destructive political and economic system. Or that the acts of targeted property damage on actions such as J18 are very different to the newspapers' stories of "protestors going on a rampage" (quote Guardian).

Maybe that's a bit over-optimistic. But the Liverpool researchers' final recommendation certainly sounds interesting. According to the Guardian they "agreed the starting point for the police and other authorities dealing with crowds ought to focus on how they should help the crowd achieve its aims."