Thought Provoking
So, I’m watching the video of NYPD staff officers beating on people with nightsticks, and I’m trying to figure what in hell is going on.
The ‘white shirts’ who are doing all of the assaulting are the military equivalent of field grade officers. They seem to be working in packs, actually outnumbering the regular street cops in many videos. This is not the way the world works. They are supposed to be directing things, not massing and leading the charge. Then I recalled that ‘Tony Baloney’ was in the counter-terrorism unit of NYPD.
This is just guess work, an hypothesis that would explain this strange phenomena. What if there were agent provocateurs among the crowd? Their identities would not be shared with the regular officers, but the counter-terrorism unit would know who they were. If you were planning an assault on the protestors, you wouldn’t want to beat up or Mace your own people, so the attacks are being carried out by those who can recognize them.
Given what is known about the NYPD’s ‘intelligence’ activities, having infiltrators among the protestors would be ‘standard operating procedure’.
2 comments
Of course there are agent provocateurs among the crowd. That’s SOP for handling protest events nowadays. There’s a YouTube video somewhere of one of these provocateurs at the Toronto G20 protests, he starts yelling trying to incite violence, the protestors turn on *him*, and the cops have to “arrest” him (and turn him loose on the other side of the police line) to save him from protestors who were threatening to smother him with kindness (literally — you ever been hugged by twenty different people at once?!). The NYPD was one of the consulting agencies on that one. Gosh, why am I not surprised?
That said, you’re right, this is exceedingly strange, because at the Toronto protests the Toronto equivalent of a white shirt simply issued the order, he didn’t wade into the crowd himself. On the other hand, there’s also another explanation: That the white shirts are concerned that the street cops might not follow orders if they order the street cops to start beating peaceful protestors. Remember, the street cops are union. And they’re protected by both the union and by civil service as long as they follow written policy. Beating protestors for no real reason is contrary to written policy. I don’t know about New York, but in Texas I was indemnified against personal lawsuit only insofar as I followed district policy, if I violated district policy I was toast, so if someone had ordered me to violate district policy I would have immediately demanded that they put it in writing and not done a thing until they did so, and only after filing a protest for my personnel file. So the white shirts wade into the crowd and try to provoke a violent response that would justify them giving the order to the blue shirts to wade in and start busting heads. Which doesn’t seem to be happening. Hmm. Think the protestors have out-thought the white shirts?
And a final alternative is, of course, that the NYPD is padded by a huge layer of political appointees above the street cop level and that’s why we see so many white shirts at these incidents, sort of like the stereotype of four Streets Department supervisors watching one Streets Department worker digging a ditch. Naw, NYPD *couldn’t* be padded by such a huge layer of useless political appointees, something like that *never* happens :twisted:.
Well, everyone above the rank of captain is a political appointee, and captains are the only civil service-protected cops in white shirts. With a uniformed force of 35K, there would be a sizable number of ‘white shirts’ in NYPD, but there is a hell of a lot more going on in the City than this demonstration that requires monitoring, so the number of ‘white shirts’ is way out of proportion to the number of cops. The street cops have to hate having all of the ‘bosses’ around – you have to look busy even if there is nothing to do and you can’t take a break and sit down.
BTW, the ‘white shirts’ don’t know how to use a baton, and, in fact, violated written rules on use. You never go for a head shot because it doesn’t work and will only results in a bloody scalp wound that rarely stops the person hit. It is much more effective used to jab soft tissue or against the lower arms if someone is armed.
I would love to sit in on a roll call for the street cops, because I’ll bet that the complaints about the conduct of the ‘white shirts’ are flowing. The regular cops have to live on the streets when this is over, and they aren’t going to be happy about all of the animosity being created by the ‘bosses’.