Wow. What an overwhelming victory Mayday was. As far as I can tell, a few police vans were defaced, a Jaguar was utterly trashed & maybe two shop windows were cracked. A lot of people got hurt, but hey, that's the way it goes, right? A glorious victory for the choking money machine - little property damage and many human casualties, which means hospitals, insurance firms, pharmaceuticals all make a profit. Even on Mayday, they make a profit. Wow.
What I saw yesterday was a whole new ballgame. Instead of protecting the stores, the police just bashed us. Instead of stopping any naughty goings-on, they stopped any goings-on at all. The right to peaceful protest has been effectively removed - sure, you can all head for a particular place, but whether we will allow you join up, never mind to actually protest, is up to us.
At one point the horse lines were moving steadily inward, we were getting crushed, people were starting to panic as they just kept herding us into a smaller space, the people at the edges were pleading with police, telling them to stop moving us in because we had nowhere to go, warning them that someone was going to get hurt. They endangered all our safety for the sake of a few shopfronts.
I say I've never seen anything like it - I lie. Back home in South Africa, we had something very similar once. It was called the State of Emergency, and that too allowed police total freedom to detain & arrest & harass & intimidate under some draconian "special" anti-terrorist law. In Joburg, they used these laws to help people commit suicide out of police station buildings, miraculously losing their fingernails on the flight down - how long will it take for that to happen here?
As we saw yesterday, it's far easier to restrain those "difficult" sectors of the public. Why bother to let them do anything wrong? Control them before they even try then nothing will get broken! Oh, terribly clever that is. What's next? Thought crime?
I did not go out yesterday with any hatred of the police force. I still do not hate policemen, I will not spit on them or deface their cars. But I am shocked, truly shocked, at how all human compassion can vanish from someone because their face is behind a visor. I felt like those damn helicopters were control centres, & all these black-clad people were cyborgs run from them. The system has removed autonomy, common sense, morality... it has made these people into automatons who will happily advance on horses, swinging truncheons, onto a peaceful friendly group.