Kettling protesters, provoking them with multiple charges, then pushing them to "expendable" places with cars and shops is a common tactics to smear their public image. Someone will eventually lose their patience, throw something at a car or a window, to be immediately caught by a camera and broadcast nation wide with comments by political opponents. This happens pretty much in every so called democratic country; in other countries the police directly shoots at protesters.
I was on the ground floor at George Floyd protests in Seattle and someone mysteriously left a large pile of neatly stacked bricks in the location where police kettled us.
To add: Quebec police infiltrated a peaceful protest while wearing face masks and carrying rocks. In this case the protestors picked up the ruse and kicked them out. Of course they claim they weren't trying to instigate anything.
I saw a video, years ago, where three guys in masks and boots (matching the nearby cops’ boots) were trying to instigate. A protest leader with a white beard was loudly denouncing them and saying they wanted no violence and that they weren’t part of their group. The instigators left, crossing into the crowd of cops in uniform unheeded. Huh, what a coinkidink.
My gf and I were accidentally in a crowd that was kettled in London's Occupy protests quite a few years ago. Facing a line of masked police with riot shields was an extremely intimidating experience, even though it only lasted twenty minutes or so before they started letting people out through a gap. Maybe the intimidating effect would have diminished over time, and maybe if we were actually protesters we would have been amped up and fortified by numbers but it was interesting to note my immediate panic and helplessness!
Hehe, where I live in germany, there are regulary demonstrations and clashes between nazis, antifa and police. And I used to find it entertaining, to cycle around those areas, as a sort of a demo tourist (while keeping some distance). So I can say, most of it is just show (of force) and it is indeed all about intimitation (from police as well as protestors).
So yes, suddenly being trapped inside and facing riot police can be scary. That's by design.
But when you know the details, you can say quite easily, if there is any real danger of violence, or not. Usually it isn't.
But violence can sometimes erupt spontaneously though, so be aware (and fast) if you are close. Also, if you are good with words and kettled in, usually you can convince the police that you are just a tourist passing through (don't ask those, who face the heat, go to the quiet corners and ask someone in charge who does not look stressed out, the low ranks won't let you through, if they have the order to block everyone and their superiors are watching, so rather ask those a little bit higher up, but not too high, or find someone who is not being watched)
One of these days, the police will sic the Nazis on you, or the Nazis will sic the police on you, and then you might rethink whether it's really that entertaining.
I remember being told more than a decade ago that the German police were unofficially more friendly to far-right/Nazi street activities than to those opposing them. I guess it's more out in the open now. Although it's probably also location-dependent.
Just worth keeping in mind that the UK police is about the softest there is in terms of crowd control. No guns, no gas, I don't think they have used a water canon yet.
They do have horses though which are scary AF. Once you got a panicked horse playing rodeo with it's rider while chasing you through an alley, you know what immediate panic feels like.
Edit: I found horses worse than the crowd panic, breathing and eye issues after CS gas was released. And despite water cannons engaging is a very dramatic moment, I cannot imagine how it must feel when police give warning shots or even fire live ammo into the crowd (even you don't get hurt). Musst be a completely different level. Luckily I have never been in a situation on which police was even near such an escalation.
> the UK police is about the softest there is in terms of crowd control. No guns, no gas...
The UK police forces literally invented rubber bullets, and used them very liberally, and lethally, against protestors in Northern Ireland [0]. Just because they go easy on some climate march you were at in London doesn't mean they never take it further.
Oh, I had thought that the Northern Ireland conflict was mostly suppressed with the army. A quick skim through the article seems to attribute use of rubber bullets to military, too. But I have not read in detail, yet.
This list [0] of 17 people killed with rubber or plastic bullets in NI gives 6 by police and 11 by the army. I'd assume it skews higher when looking at all shootings, not just fatal ones.
I've been to a lot of protests but I think the worst one I've ever seen was summer 2020 chicago. They declared an immediate curfew and simultaneously raised the bridges to downtown and shut down transit.
The police were so incredibly violent after that, they had total control and very little restraint. And there was local news or police media team ready to catch every act of desperation from the protestors. But very little of the state violence made it to the news. They were singling out people filming, smashing phones, arresting anyone nearby. I remember stumbling into a corner and falling to the street and seeing it already covered in blood and mucus and teeth, and thinking "that's more teeth than one person has in their head wtf happened here."
And then having to come on the internet every day since and hear about the "rioters" and looters and lawlessness and shit.
They did this in Brooklyn in 2020 and a lot of people I know won’t ever forgive the cops for that. They kettled them and then beat them with batons. They had been completely peaceful.
fascinating tactic. i wonder if there are any countermeasures?
- surely this does not work in all cases, only those where protestors are still convinced of the lawfulness of a peaceful protest, exploited by the threat actors (police)
- what is the maximum size of a "kettle?" can this be exploited by creating an oversized kettle such that it would "burst?"
- could kettling trigger a violent fight-or-flight response depending on demographic? many wild animals will exhibit ferocity when similar tactics are imposed.
- can you kettle a peaceful --yet fully armed-- protest? what are the benefits? risks?
- what is the economic impact to the city? minneapolis and other US locales have had to pay millions to settle unlawful detainment lawsuits during such events. is there a "break-even" point where kettles will be avoided for fear of inciting overwhelming expenditures? does the class/race makeup matter?
> - can you kettle a peaceful --yet fully armed-- protest? what are the benefits? risks?
If you wish people to accept or even join your movement, violence seems to be counter-productive:
> For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. By attracting impressive support from citizens, whose activism takes the form of protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of nonviolent noncooperation, these efforts help separate regimes from their main sources of power and produce remarkable results, even in Iran, Burma, the Philippines, and the Palestinian Territories.
There's a zero— and I mean absolutely zero— percent chance the government would not respond to a large armed protest with a very heavily armed national guard, with lawyers starting on the paperwork to handle millions of dollars in collateral damage from artillery before the boots even touched the ground.
> fascinating tactic. i wonder if there are any countermeasures?
I'm guessing history has some anti-phalanx tactics that may be useful. My naive assumption is that well-organized protestors could choose one spot to focus on and try to break through using sheer numbers and momentum with some uh, ablation at the edges and tip of the spear. This comes with a very high risk of trampling. Veteran Black Bloc practitioners will likely have less naive countermeasures
When you intentionally enter an area with restricted ingress / egress like a highway in an attempt to shut it down, it's not exactly dirty pool to try to actually arrest and charge everyone involved.
I think there's certainly a middle ground. Disrupting and provoking the very people you are trying to convince of something is objectively counterproductive. On the other end of the spectrum if there's not some level of disruption you just get ignored.
The trick is to find the line where you cause people enough disruption to think about why you're without causing so much that they just immediately side against you, and it seems like most protests completely miss the mark.
>Disrupting and provoking the very people you are trying to convince of something is objectively counterproductive.
What were all those "whites only" lunch counter sit-ins MLK did then? They sound like a textbook definition of "provoking the very people you are trying to convince", and yet.
The sit-ins were specifically targeted to break the laws they wanted changed. I don’t think many people are protesting laws saying that you can’t stand in the middle of the road.
Activists protesting the Vietnam war weren't participating in sit-ins to change the laws about loitering around campus buildings or in government offices. The people who chain themselves to trees scheduled to be cut down aren't protesting to change laws concerning tree bondage. Some sit-ins are planned as narrowly targeted acts of civil disobedience, but others are simply acts of passive resistance and they are no less valid as a means of protest.
While at a high enough level of disruption, the acts of protesters might harm public support of the cause, I think that level is probably pretty high and supporters will largely understand if they are temporarily inconvenienced, while some people who already oppose the protestor's cause will tend to use any inconvenience as a more socially acceptable excuse to justify their opposition instead of more honest reasons like plain old bigotry.
Define "disrupting". All movements generally start off small, and if you wish to effect change you need to bring over more and more people over to the cause.
Pissing people off (too much) seems to be counter-productive and can prevent people with sympathizing/empathizing/joining you:
> For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. By attracting impressive support from citizens, whose activism takes the form of protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of nonviolent noncooperation, these efforts help separate regimes from their main sources of power and produce remarkable results, even in Iran, Burma, the Philippines, and the Palestinian Territories.
So your point is the laws prohibiting people from blocking major traffic highways are racist and should be abandoned, and people should be granted free pedestrian access to the highways, while driving should not be performed on them at all? Or what's the point of comparing this to the "whites only" sit-ins? Are people wanting to drive on the highway doing it because they are racist?
> So your point is the laws prohibiting people from blocking major traffic highways are racist and should be abandoned,
Laws buttress/codify the current social order, and forbid shaking it up, in particular through disruptive protest. If the social order is racist, then these laws will be used to preserve racism. They're inherently repressive, not inherently racist.
If you're the government - you don't want to abandon them. If you're a social movement - you're against their existence (if you're more principled), or against their enforcement in your case (if you're more opportunistic).
> If the social order is racist, then these laws will be used to preserve racism
That's a very convenient "if". I just declare social order is racist, so the laws no longer apply to me and any lawless action I take instead of being a crime becomes struggle against racism. Nice deal. Except the society that allows such deals can not survive. Of course, if you want to destroy the society - either because you genuinely think it's "racist" or because you just don't care - then you don't have a valid base for complaint when the society tries to defend itself and arrests you. You are literally destroying it, what else should it do?
If you are disruptive to the point of violating the law, then you should get arrested. That's the point of having laws. It's not "it's normally the law but if you feel your thing is important enough to violate the law, then nah, never mind, you do you".
Was impressed with the professionalism from this angle. They seemed to focus on charging people with only the correct crimes and communicating processes to ensure those arrested wouldn’t lose their personal effects. Were there abuses of LRAD or tear gas etc on the ground during this NSA arrest or was it done correctly and humanely at all levels?
A lot of those “correctly charged” crimes would not happen at all, if the police did not aggressively corral and use riot control tactics on peaceful protests… it’s crazy that this is lawful.
The crime was blocking the highway. If there were no police at all, that crime still would have been committed.
I'm all for civil disobedience but at least if I'm not mistaken, when Dr. King organized so many marches and sit-ins he guided his followers to peacefully allow themselves to be arrested -- overflowing the jails and courts was an intentional part of the civil disobedience. He himself was arrested many times. That peaceful action made media coverage of events like the police violence in Selma, Alabama more impactful than they would be otherwise. I grew up in a "violent leftist" city, which was a major hub for the Weathermen and various bombings of law enforcement buildings during the era of "Days of Rage", but the general advice for attending protests/marches in the early 2000's was "bring a check in your pocket to fill out for bail", not "run away from the police and attempt to avoid getting arrested" or "attack the police and burn down the police stations".
The thing to keep in mind about comparisons to the civil rights era is that it was a learning experience for state power as well. Training has changed to avoid the sort of "righteous confrontation" king was capitalizing on. Propaganda is much more sophisticated now, dissipating and denigrating public support, portraying protestors as unruly criminals or unsympathetic radicals both before and after the protests. Not that they didn't try, and to some extent succeed, to do this with civil rights protests but they are much better at it now.
Protest is as sophisticated a conflict as anything else, and tactics are not static but constantly changing on both sides. It's important to keep that in mind, and that also that king's own tactics were considered polarizing and unhelpful by the white mainstream of his time. Only in retrospect do we consider them noble and effective for his cause, but that doesn't mean they necessarily will be effective for other causes, against other tactics.
A large amount changes to policing and police policy has been in direct response to the civil rights movement in the abstract. EG not about its goals and consequences per se, but how to preempt, discredit, and disperse public movements so that nothing of its size and power can emerge again, regardless of the motivating cause.
1A protects peaceful protests, once you shine the laser into an aircraft cockpit it's no longer peaceful. You can temporarily blind everyone in the cockpit with a single $15 laser.
Nobody implied they were. The first amendment guarantees the right of free speech, but that doesn't give you a free pass to not get arrested when you do break another law.
I could be upset about Hersheys and choose to organize mass theft of their candy bars from the grocery store as a protest, and that would be speech. But it doesn't shield me from the consequences of the crime of theft, nor does it mean that "candy is more important than the first amendment".
> that doesn't give you a free pass to not get arrested when you do break another law
This is covered in the article. Part of the program, after 'boxing in' the protesters, is to indiscriminately arrest everyone regardless of any crimes committed. Charges will be handed off later.
This is a distant relative of the 'I've got nothing to hide' argument in favor of surveillance. In effect, it looks like just being there is enough to get arrested - and this is ignoring the fact that you may actually try to defend yourself when being pushed and prevented from leaving by armed police, maybe while breathing in some tear gas or pepper spray. You may even consider that the goal of the whole operation is to stir up violence, so that everyone has a reason to be arrested...
Maybe it should be, but your assertion is incorrect. It is not currently a crime to create spaces where people using motor vehicles have a statutory right-of-way over people not using motor vehicles.
Cars themselves have very few rights. Property has its own rights only in very esoteric court cases like United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins[0]
Personally I'd rather live in a society in which most common roads reserve default right-of-way for pedestrians and bicycles, but also in which some spaces are reserved for motor vehicles, particularly limited-access highways away from city centers. I'd also like plenty of public transportation both locally and inter-regionally, to eliminate the "need" to own personal motor vehicles.
I just keep separate what I want from what is reality.
For the benefit of people, cars and trucks should have right of way over pedestrians on limited access highways. Just as trains should on intercity train tracks and aircraft on runways.
So the actions of a single individual can change the nature of the entire protest? That line of thinking seems to incentivize the use of agent provocateurs.
So what's the answer? 1A doesn't protect non-peaceful protests. There's no court in the world that would classify lasers used in this manner as peaceful.
"Oh it's just some pig doing it, not the real protestors" is such an intellectually lazy response and most of the time it's false anyway. If you want to have a peaceful protest I will be the first one to support it whether I agree with the end goal or not. But the people running these things have an obligation to see that they remain peaceful.
The answer is protest is an invaluable tool for a functioning democracy and if the government has the power to explicitly state which square footage of a city that people have the right to protest in, then we’ve lost the right to protest.
Police forces use unconstitutional and unlawful force all the time. Should we disband the police every time that happens? Should we force all police to leave the area in the first instance of that happening?
>But the people running these things have an obligation to see that they remain peaceful.
See, I class that as a DDoS on a protest if you're going to cut carte blanche for law enforcement to play agent provocateur though. They should be passive and uninvolved in en trying to coerce a resolution, or we should accept that a kettled protest gains legitimacy, and by extension, justified use of violence if it's the police who push it over the edge. It's like Union-Busting, and the recent NLRB ruling. If LE has to start pulling dirty tricks, then maybe the protesters had a point.
My answer is that police have no business deploying aerial assets to perform surveillance of protests. Cops aren't in the air to intimidate people then they're not gonna get shined.
Look at the quality of food you can afford and not afford. Cheaper foods tend to be fattier geared up for manual workers. You'll have a shorter lifespan.
Tap water is just pus, then you have the high levels of chemicals in them. The best water you can drink is deionised water, the stuff used for vehicle batteries and steam irons, and then add in the best chemicals to top up your mineral content.
Chlorides are better than other forms like gluconate or sulphates which become sulfuric acid when exposed to the hydrochloric acid in the gastric juices, which then destroys tissues in the body oh so slowly.
Iron chloride for example generates the least amount of reactive oxygen species, and is also the most labile, able to switch between state more easily than other iron supplements. Its the best form of iron you can get, show me a supplement that uses it!
Chlorides also work better in the most acidic parts of the body.
I really do question the medical experts, legislators and food industry.
So if you know what chemicals will do what in the body, through the diet, you can alter the personality's and health of the population. One way to do that is through food legislation. Global manufacturers can also play their part as well.
>They seemed to focus on charging people with only the correct crimes and communicating processes to ensure those arrested wouldn’t lose their personal effects.
This was less for the protesters convenience as it was all about not making the officers on the ground deal with that level of pain in the ass logistics. They were told to search all belongings, but unless anything was found to just tag the bag and send them on to I'm guessing booking. During booking in a much more controlled environment, they could take their time and do the normal processing of personal items. It's a triaging decision, not a polite to the protestors decisions
Weird article, a protest can be peaceful, but dont you need a permission?
"Authorities ended up arresting and charging then-19-year-old college student, Amina McCaskill. Prosecutors charged her with felony, second-degree riot armed with a dangerous weapon, the weapon being the laser."
Yes? A laser can damage eyes and blind people. If shined into a heli it is VERY dangerous.
You don’t need permission to protest, but you do generally need one to march. In this case, since the protesters were physically obstructing a freeway, on which pedestrians are usually legally banned, a march permit would never have been issued. I suspect that’s part of the police rationale behind not giving orders to disperse. You might end up with a riotous crowd semi-spontaneously on a city street, so reading the Riot Act and ordering them to leave is appropriate. Everyone in this protest already broke the law by walking onto a freeway.
Agreed that the laser user should face stiff penalties. Federal ones. You want to protest violently, that’s one thing. You want to endanger people who just happen to live within a mile of you by blinding pilots? That should hurt a lot more than spending a night or two in jail.
Genuinely asking - don't modern helicopters have the ability to hover or go on autopilot in some capacity, or am I (likely) very _very_ ignorant when it comes to helicopters?
I agree with you that the person shining lasers into helicopters and blinding pilots causing potential permanent eye damage should face stiffer penalties.
Depends on the design of the helicopter. They are, in general, extremely difficult to control. About helicopter autopilots, I'm not qualified to answer so: https://www.quora.com/Do-helicopters-have-autopilot
Doesn’t really matter, you never know when flying when you’ll need to react to an emergency situation, which you very much need eyesight for. If you lost vision during an engine out in a helicopter you’d surely die
> Weird article, a protest can be peaceful, but dont you need a permission?
The first amendment is quite clear about it
> Congress shall make no law ... abridging ... the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances
It violates the rights of other people to free movement and causes them economic damages. It may also lead to catastrophic consequences if emergency vehicles are blocked (happened many times) and since the highway is a common property, regulated by the laws of the jurisdiction owning it, assembling there contrary to these laws is also a violation of property rights.
If I set up a "protest" tent in the middle of your driveway, not letting you exit the house, would you say it's a constitutionally protected activity or would you call the police on me, claiming property rights and trespassing violation?
- blocking the only entry/exit point for other people who have places to go. Some of these are emergencies. What if you block an ambulance and indirectly kill the patient?
- creating a risk someone will hit you and be injured/killed/traumatized or even start a pile-up
There are time, place and manner restrictions on assembly. If you decide to peacefully assembly in the middle of a major highway, the police will be there to explain that to you pretty soon.
Then you'll get trumped up charges with interfering with officers, destruction of property, possibly some sort of nonsensical assault, who knows just how creative they can get.
Also, won't you be super easy to track? Doubtful you could get enough people wearing these to be any more effective than ID'ing yourself
A <1mw pointer is fairly safe all around. Some $15 ebay lasers have real risk of temp retina damage at arms length. Lasers in the $150-$400 dollar range can do real damage fast under 30'.
Much more powerful Chinese military dazzlers are intended to incapacitate (not blind) at hundreds of yards.
>If shined into a heli it is VERY dangerous.
True. Aircraft are very vulnerable. Fifteen dollar ebay lasers are an absolute menace to night vision at hundreds of yards.
Any ebay / china laser can be unsafe. I did some test orders in Germany and 2 from the three 'high power' lasers I bought for less than 10 euros were easily over 100mw, and are even labeled as 200mW and 350mW. Very illegal to sell to consumers, but no one is checking. Ebay kicks the listings if they mention the power, so they just.. don't mention it. Buy a "high power laser pointer" and chances are you actually get one. They diodes are dirt cheap.
Even at way lower output power you will damage your eyes by just looking at the dot on a wall.
Use it indoors and all it takes is one unlucky reflection on a shiny object and you will wake up to a detached retina the next morning.
If somebody is using a laser in a protest, we can be pretty sure they're not doing it to highlight the main points in their powerpoint presentation "How to Peacefully Protest for Fun And Profit". Trying to blind cops & helis with laser is a known riot tactics, and pretending we don't know what's going on is not very useful.
Seems to me like a weakness. Imagine if hundreds of those protesters had lasers and shot them at the helicopters? No way you're arresting all of them and it would quickly render the police surveillance from the air moot.
Yeah, definitely “someone” distributed those lasers.. noway all of them have the same type/color and being all over the protest like that (as an oppose to be a bunch of kids playing with these lasers in a limited area of that protest)
Clearly. The helicopter is doing just fine. You don’t have to stare down if you’re a pilot. You can, you know, look at the horizon. Jeez the amount of boot licking here.
Ummm... Laser pointers get diffracted by the intervening distance, and as a result, one does not have to look directly at the emitter to receive a blinding flash.
Also keep in mind, these are helos, meant to hover in close proximity to things, which generally requires good visibility, often surrounding the instrument panel.
Furthermore, unlime most aircraft, helos are dynamically unstable. Think of it like balancing a spinning plate. If they get the tiniest bit off kilter, they continue gettting more and more off-kilter unless actively corrected.
A fixed wing aircraft could potentially nose up and safely fly on until vision returned, but a helo requires active management by the pilot to do the same, which requires vision. Helo people are fond of a saying that "planes want to fly, helos beat the air until it complies".
In short "just don't look at it" isn't as effective a countermeasure as you'd like to believe.
Also leads to some interesting possibilities - given that this occured in November in Minneapolis, there seems like there would be opportunities to manipulate the infrared camera. Off the top of my head - extra hot point heat sources could "blow out" the image, or insulated umbrellas/barriers could obfuscate where or how many protesters are present.
Could anyone with infrared camera experience weigh in?
While I haven't used the equipment here, I own a number of consumer- and low-end professional-grade thermal imagers. Resolution and NETD differ, but I expect the overall behaviors are similar.
They're remarkably good at not letting point sources blow out the image. That's a very important performance parameter, since often you're not concerned with the hottest point, but the parts immediately adjacent, so you can see how heat is flowing through the device being inspected. A lot of investment and IP goes into this -- since the hot spot _will_ heat the imaging array, and on older imagers it would cause streaking if moved, modern ones do extensive thermal modeling of the array itself to try to cancel out this effect, all baked into FPGAs so it can be done in real-time. They're very good at it.
A very naïve implementation may have auto-scaling for the color palette, in which case a hot-spot would skew the palette and make cooler stuff hard to distinguish, but that would be a total amateur mistake. Setting the palette to highlight human skin temperature is like step 1 of any such operation.
Insulated umbrellas, or just big aluminized-mylar space-blankets, would definitely play havoc with the image. An AI people-counter trained on the image would probably lose its marbles, but a human looking at it would quickly understand what's going on and make some educated guesses. It's very hard to hide your thermal signature for very long, which is why thermal imaging is so important in warfighting.
Sorry, I used 'shitting on' figuratively to mean 'disrespecting' and 'denigrating'.
In the linked bodycam video, the MPD officers involved banter about 'needing to spit' when the community engagement officer goes by, and also appear to be partaking in a game where anyone who actually says the officer's name (Dubuc) is subject to mock punishment.
Honestly it's pretty juvenile. It's possible that this is part of a healthy culture somehow (like, I can jump through enough mental hoops to make that happen), but it's almost certainly not part of healthy culture.
I genuinely had no idea the video surveillance tech was that good. The detail of the people on the roof in particular was astounding to me. It makes me wonder just what tech is like being used in the echelons (ahem) above regular law enforcement?
There is something really wrong with that video at the exact moment the helicopter gets hit. If it was just the image that's one thing, but the overlaid UI blurs and zooms as well.
Looks like a cell phone recording of a monitor. It's also slightly askew, you can tell the horizontal lines are not quite horizontal. The bright explosion likely confused the autofocus, or maybe the person holding the camera jumped.
No, I think you're right to be suspicious of this .If you step forward frame by frame from 18s, (pause, then use '.' and ','), you can see that the loss of focus occurred before the helicopter was hit.
By watching the bluer bits of the image, you can see that it seems that the camera was very quickly (almost immediately it seems?) centred on the cliffs to the bottom right, then recentred a few frames later but at an angle (probably rotated around 10 degrees anticlockwise). The next few frames are the actual explosion, where the offset angle seems to remain consistent, and then, interestingly, the HUD is almost perfectly recentered at 0 where it remains consistently
Through 19s, again the person recording this from the screen seems to either zoom or move the camera very quickly towards the screen, before immediately resetting.
It's clear that this weirdness is being introduced by the person recording the video (not from the drone itself) because the HUD also moves and blurs (you can see what it looks like when the drone camera pans throughout second 23/24. Note the HUD remaining static and clear).
Second 26 is also interesting, because you can see static bright spots suddenly seem to begin moving. However, I think this is actually a rotating lens cover on the drone camera which is introducing these artifacts. You can also see that immediately after this, the HUD display is different. A different number (I believe it's 80, based on a frame at 37s) is displayed, and the centre of the HUD is a crosshair rather than a small circle. I believe this new lens is slightly shorter, and is supposed to give a wider view of the explosion that just happened.
If you advance slowly through second 37-38, you see the camera 'zoom out' from 80 to 402, and it seems both the drone and the person filming this's cameras needed to recalibrate their exposure settings.
It's not quite enough for me to say it's definitely suspicious, but those movements at the 18-19s mark are definitely a bit odd. It could potentially be artifacts of YouTube automatically stabilising the video, but there's definitely something unnatural here.
They redact some video's to not give away the type of rocket used etc. Perhaps that is the case here as well? Also the direction of the missile could be information that you don't want to give out for example.
Could be. There are plenty of potential explanations which don't amount to 'this is fake', but I am fairly confident this has been doctored in some way.
The ridiculous zoom/tilt effects are added in post-production for dramatic effect, or whatever. You can tell it very clearly as the zooming/tilting/"WOW!" crap is far higher framerate than the source footage (watch the pieces of debris falling and how "stuttery" their movement looks, to get a sense of the framerate of the original footage). Now the question is: who added the stupid cinematic effects?
To be fair, if we're watching a 25fps iPhone recording of 12fps feed being played through a 60Hz monitor, the "zooming/tilting/"WOW!" crap" would keep the iPhone framerate, so it doesn't necessarily tell us it was done in post, although I agree that some of the frame-to-frame jumps in pan/zoom suggest these are not natural movements and that them being added in post for dramatic effect (or as another commenter suggested, to obscure potentially compromising information) seems to be a very plausible explanation.
I actually think this is pretty 'meh'... There is no way they could recognise faces from that footage. They might be able to track people, but if someone disappears behind a car or building for just a few seconds, then in court they could argue that they weren't the same person - and that any crimes caught on camera before walking behind a building must have been someone else.
> if someone disappears behind a car or building for just a few seconds, then in court they could argue that they weren't the same person
They could argue it, sure. But if that's their only argument they would almost certainly lose because judges and jurors understand the concept of object permanence.
Lose sight for ten minutes with not enough detail to verify whether it's the same person? Reasonable. Hide behind a car for 30 seconds, with footage showing no one else coming or going? Good luck convincing anyone that it was the other guy hiding behind that car.
Maybe as there's more evidence it's harder to convict innocent people to pad the metrics? I have no idea, but there's a lot of possible causes for correlations like this.
I was surprised to not see IR beacons on LEO units. In military operations with air surveillance, individuals/vehicles often use IR flashing and IR reflection to mark themselves to air assets. If MPD has the money for 1) an air surveillance unit (this cost is not trivial; SFPD, for example, hasn't had their own aviation section in decades due to the cost), and 2) decent thermal optics on said surveillance unit, then it surprises me they don't spring for sub-$100 IR beacons to distinguish their own personnel from everyone else, and enable rudimentary "blue force tracking", as it were.
They were flashing an aircraft with a laser - none of this is surprising...
That said, I loathe the police in my area because they basically don't do anything. Dangerous drivers and motorcycles are more common than ever, my neighbor in a nice neighborhood was car jacked at gun point and police were annoyed she called.
The worst example was police taking 2hrs to show up after a friend was hit by a drunk driver... by the time they bratholized the drunk driver she was already under the limit.
For me, I'm far more worried about license plate scanners on police cruisers than FLIRs on helicopters (they've had this tech since 2006).
That’s nothing to what other capabilities are used in protests by law enforcement, for example, if you fly any consumer RC drone, most likely they have the AeroScope running to capture the drones AND the pilots’ locations, it was actually used in Canada in one of the big protests happened before. However, if you build your own drone and you don’t fly it over RC link, it is a lot harder to track.
Just joking. That would be irresponsible. That kind of thing doesn't happen until the crowd's missed a day or two of its meals. Or had a few relatives murdered.
Besides, some of that kid's lasers might conceivably bring down a helo, depending on sights and of course <All_The_Wacky_Things_That_Affect_DEWs/>
for those complaining about the video quality, lets see the still/flash photography photos & their quality that helicopters take during flight as well. theres your detail.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettling
* https://www.vox.com/2020/6/6/21282509/george-floyd-protests-...