So how should you handle protests?

Randy Balko of the Washington Post, who has been on this story and literally wrote the book on Warrior Cops, lays it out:

Wilson believed that an intimidating police presence didn’t prevent confrontation, it invited it. That didn’t mean he didn’t prepare, but he put his riot control teams in buses, then parked the buses close by, but out of sight of protesters. Appearances were important. In general, instead of the usual brute force and reactionary policing that tended to pit cops against citizens—both criminal and otherwise—Wilson believed that cops were more effective when they were welcomed and respected in the neighborhoods they patrolled. “The use of violence,” he told Time in 1970, “is not the job of police officers.”…

Maj. Max Geron is in charge of the Media Relations Unit, Community Affairs and Planning Unit of the Dallas Police Department… cautions against setting arbitrary expectations, such as mandatory dispersal times. “Most protesters will meet, protest, and go home when they feel they’ve made their point. If they aren’t breaking any laws, they can be left to express themselves.” Establishing a dispersal time then gives protesters something to rebel against.

That’s just a sample of two points I found particularly interesting, Balko has interviewed a range of police officers actually using the community policing approaches to great effect.

One final, important point: Policing is often cast as a balance between safety and freedom. The problem with that formulation is that it implies that to get a little more of one, we have to give up a some of the other. You need only look at Ferguson to see why that isn’t true. I doubt the residents of that town feel particularly safe or particularly free right now. The corollary to this is that there’s also a zero-sum relationship between officer safety and less aggressive, less militaristic more community-oriented policing. You have to give up some of one in order to get more of the other. Again, Ferguson is a pretty compelling argument to the contrary. The town is essentially a martially law zone right now. And I’d be surprised if you could find many officers on duty these last few nights who would tell you they feel safer today than they did a few weeks ago.