Barnard17

In context to obfuscate means to bewilder.

I'd say your view of the police would be different if you'd been there. In Bristol we got kettled just for wanting to walk and chant, my friend was threatened with arrest for sitting down and not moving, I saw someone else arrested for being stood too close on the outside of an expanding kettle. They brought out police dogs where there was no violence present, they threw goading (and sometimes racist comments) at the protestors and used blind threats to try and force protestors to play by their own, arbitrary rulebook (some schoolkids were having a sit down protest and a police officer told them to leave or he'd phone their parents. Suitably they laughed in his face.)

As for London look up the Guardian website which has a video of police at Trafalgar Square charging their warhorses into a crowd or kids, leaving them in states of hysteria. Look up the police van coincidentally left abandoned (in my entire day on the Bristol protest not once did I see a riot van without someone behind the wheel, nor did I on the 10th Nov demo) in the middle of a kettle of thousands. My friend whose sister had gone to the Whitehall protest had arrive at 11am wanting to march and then not moved for 9 hours without a pot to piss in, food or water. She was 16, and there were kids younger in the middle of that too.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't hate all police equally. When I was in a kettle I sat down next to the police lines. I made jokes, sang badly and humanised them so that when they were told to close tighter they dithered, half heartedly asked us to move and eventually went around us. This is what is means to obfuscate police: they're trained so that people will either brick it and run away or get violent and get themselves arrested. When their tactics focus around that and yet you, knowing your rights, know that you don't have to do just everything they say but aren't going to get aggressive about it, buy yourself a lot more safety and time and maintain the protest much better than if it devolves into the chaos the police want to create. The overwhelming anti-police chant of the day was "your job's next!" (not "**** the police") which we used at one point to break up a kettle (soon after which my friend got the **** kicked out of him with no arrest made). But when the police block our human right to peaceful demonstration, when they use tactics to make people either react with terror or rage and when they try to create a fight to kick up a media fuss so that Government bump their budget instead of slashing it then I will do whatever I can to obfuscate them because their illegal actions don't deserve compliance.


Naw, it was someone many rows back.

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