Sometimes the vast predictions may seem provisional, and this reflects the real world flash points: In Alvarado, Texas, an alleged coordinated ambush at a detention center pulled with fireworks this week before the firearm broke out on July 4, shooting a police officer in the neck. (Almost a dozen arrests were made, at least ten on charges of attempted murder.)
Prior to the protests, agencies increasingly rely on intelligence prediction to identify groups that are as ideologically undermining or tactically unpredictable. Demonstrators who are marked “transgressively” can be monitored, detained without charges or by force.
Social movements scientists widely recognized the introduction of preventative protest policing as a deviation from the late 20th century approaches that prioritized the discharge, communication and facilitation. Instead, authorities increasingly emphasized the control of protests through early intervention, supervision and disruption – monitoring of organizers, limiting public space and proactively responding based on perceived risks rather than real behavior.
Infrastructure that was initially designed to combat terrorism now often serves to monitor street level protests, with virtual investigative units targeting protesters for inquiry based on online expression. Fusion centers, funded by DHS allowances, have increasingly issued bulletins that protest logans, references to police brutality and solidarity events as signs of possible violence -which prevent these assessments to law enforcement, absent from clear evidence of criminal intention.
The supervision of protesters included the construction of dossiers (known as “baseball cards”), with analysts using high-tech instruments to draw up topics’ social media posts, commitments, personal networks and public statements that are critical of government policy.
A DHS dossier on Mahmoud Khalil, former Columbia student and anti-war activist, is obtained exclusively by Wired, showing that analysts from Canary Mission, a shady blacklist, who obtained critics of Israeli military action and supporters of Palestinian rights profile.
In the Federal Court on Wednesday, a senior DHS official acknowledged that material from Canary Mission was used to compile more than 100 files on students and scholars, despite the ideological, mysterious financing and incompatible acquisition of the website.
Threat bulletins can also prime officers to predict conflict, form their posture and decisions on the ground. In the aftermath of violent protests in 2020, the San Jose Police Department in California cited the ‘numerous intelligence bulletins’ which he received from his local regional fusion center, DHS and the FBI, as central to the understanding of the “attitude of the officers in the days.”
Specific bulletins quoted by the SJPD-who caused a $ 620,000 settlement this month-have estimated the protests as possible coverage for “household terrorists”, warned against opportunistic law enforcement attacks and promoted an “unconfirmed report” of U-Haul wagons that are allegedly used for ferry weapons.
Subsequent reporting in the aftermath of BluruleAs-A 269-Gigabyte spills of internal police documents obtained by a source identified as the Hacktivist group Anonymous and published by Transparency Group Distributed Denial of Secret Federal Bulletins is filled with uneducated claims, vague a parody website that is supposed to pay protesters. On fire, despite a clear banner labeling the website “false”.
Threats warnings – unsclassified and regularly accessible to the press – can help to help law enforcement to form the perception of protests before they begin, and the basis lies in legitimizing the aggressive police reactions. Unexplained DHS warnings about domestic terrorists who infiltrate protests in 2020, publicly reflected by the acting secretary of the agency on Twitter, are widely distributed and reinforced in media coverage.
Americans are generally opposed to aggressive protest action, but if they support them, fear is often the driving force. Experimental research suggests that support for the use of coercive tactics depends less on what protesters actually do than how they are portrayed – by officials, the media and by racial and ideological frames.