[Ads-l] Kettling

[Nancy Friedman]

"Kettling" made its first US appearance during the 2011 Occupy protests. It
had already been used for at least a decade in the UK, and may be a
translation from German.

https://nancyfriedman.typepad.com/away_with_words/2011/10/word-of-the-week-kettling.html

On Sat, Jun 6, 2020, 1:18 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