…ever-patient and self-controlled…

From the Department of the Great Majority of the Police, Seemingly Ever-Patient and Self-Controlled, Stood for Hours as Kids Baited and Yelled, Shoved and Provoked. A Handful of Officers Used Well-Placed Elbows while Batons were Raised Only in Response to the Vandalism comes:

The chant goes up: “what do we want? The right to protest!” At first, the cops give curt answers to the kids demanding to know why they can’t get through. Then they all seem to get some sort of signal, because suddenly the polite copper in front of me is screaming in my face, shoving me hard in the back of the head, raising his baton, and the protesters around me are yelling and running back. Some of them have started to shake down a set of iron railings to get out, and the cops storm forward, pushing us right through those railings, leaving twenty of us sprawling in the rubble of road works with cracked knees. When they realised that they are trapped, the young protesters panic. The crush of bodies is suddenly painful – my scarf is ripped away from me and I can hear my friend Clare calling for her son – and as I watch the second line of police advance, with horses following behind them, as I watch a surge of teenagers carrying a rack of iron railings towards the riot guard and howling to be released, I realise they’re not going to stop, and the monkey instinct kicks in. I scramble up a set of traffic lights, just in time to see a member of the Metropolitan police grab a young protester by the neck and hurl him back into the crowd…

See also : Far-right Freedom Party most popular among young Austrians: “Austria’s far-right Freedom Party has become the country’s second-most popular party. The party, which campaigns on an anti-immigrant platform, even ranks first among voters under 30, a new poll found” (Deutsche Welle, November 20, 2010).