[Ads-l] Kettling

[Laurence Horn]

From Stephen Colbert’s show yesterday (or maybe the day before):

"Colbert further noted that police have been corralling protesters and refusing to let them leave, guaranteeing they break curfew and thus giving the police an excuse to arrest them. Not that lack of an excuse appears to have stopped the police before. There's a name for when police box in a crowd of people to create a pretext to arrest them. It's called a 'kettle,'" said Colbert.  I guess that's a case of the cops calling a kettle on anyone black."

https://mashable.com/video/stephen-colbert-police-brutality-peaceful-protests/
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A bit forced, but...


> On Jun 6, 2020, at 4:18 PM, Mark Mandel <markamandel at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> https://www.gq.com/story/what-is-kettling
> 
> What Is Kettling?
> This controversial police tactic is appearing in cities across the United
> States.
> BY COLIN GROUNDWATER
> June 5, 2020
> 
> On Tuesday evening, as a large group of peaceful protesters marched over
> the Manhattan Bridge, members of the New York Police Department parked on
> opposite ends of the span, trapping 5,000 people over the water for nearly
> an hour. The night before, in Dallas, police officers corralled protesters
> on the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge before arresting 674 of them (they were
> released later that night, with ‘at-large charges’ for ‘blocking
> traffic’). That same night in Washington, D.C., police officers drove
> protesters into a crowded intersection of Swann and 15th NW with teargas.
> All over the country this week, police officers have surrounded
> protesters—and then refused to let them leave.
> 
> This tactic is called kettling, a word you might have seen popping up in
> social media posts from and about the protests. The term evokes a boiling
> tea kettle, but it actually comes from a German military term referring to
> an army that’s completely surrounded by a much larger force. “Kettling is a
> law enforcement tactic specifically applied when the police have chosen to
> criminalize existence in public spaces,” says Blake Strode, Executive
> Director of ArchCity Defenders, a legal advocacy group that has handled
> kettling cases in St. Louis. “So separate and apart from who is caught in
> them and how people are impacted, which is all true and well-stated, it is
> also fundamentally about police dictating whom is allowed to be where and
> when.”
> 
> Ostensibly a form of riot control, kettling occurs when police officers
> block off streets and push people into confined areas, like a city block or
> a bridge. While protest and riot management traditionally focuses on
> dispersing crowds, kettling is all about containment. When you’re kettled,
> you have no access to bathrooms, very little space, and no place to go.
> Critically, no one gets to leave until the police say so. “Basically, it’s
> a pressure cooker without a valve,” said civil rights attorney Javad
> Khazaeli, ArchCity Defenders’ co-counsel on kettling cases.
> 
> MAM
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org