That is, how many cops do you need on hand to arrest one person? How many do you need when the neighborhood is up in arms against you?
After watching the video I posted yesterday and others just like it, you notice that no one is getting arrested. It's immediately obvious that given the anger of the crowds and the relative size of the two forces, the cops couldn't arrest anyone even if they wanted to without provoking a full-scale melee which they would lose.
Something else you see when you watch raw video from these riots is the hatred directed at the police. You get the feeling that the crowd is itching for a fight. They've been whipped up into a frenzy by years and years of propaganda. The narrative they've been fed was originally designed to keep them voting for Democrats*, but it's metastasized into something truly dangerous.
Do you suppose the mobs know when they become too big to control?
* - 4 years ago, when Vice President Biden told a group of blacks the Mitt Romney (!) wanted to put them all back in chains, it seemed funny. I know I had a laugh at Crazy Uncle Joe. Looking back on that, it wasn't funny at all. It was hideous.
Based off of what I saw in the Navy and heard from talking to other security forces:
ReplyDeleteA minimum of four to one for every 'one' that might, possibly, fight.
For large groups, the guidance is more like eight to one.
The time and place people get hurt is when they think they have a chance at winning if they fight-- the police or security are better trained, better equipped and have some sort of a plan; their only disadvantage is that they don't want to kill people.
(If the police did want to kill people, there'd be a huge number of dead, and the media wouldn't have to be selectively editing out the cops screaming for a guy to drop his gun several times before he's shot.)
Even when they're not going to arrest people, mobs mean that the escalation of force has to be a lot faster. You can't assume that the liquid being thrown at you is a softdrink, you have to assume it's something dangerous, and react accordingly. (Say, lighter fluid or gas, for a nightmare scenario.) If someone grabs your shoulder, you have to respond to it as an attack, or you might get everyone there with you killed because you went down quickly and easily. The mob can take out the cops, if they get going fast enough that the ones dying are the only ones who realize there's significant resistance.