Name a country where police beat you if you protest:

[CreekDog]

Oh, I guess this one.

"My ribs didn’t hurt very badly until the next day and then it hurt to laugh...They had hit me hard enough so that I was sore for days, but not hard enough to leave much of a mark. I wasn’t so badly off. One of my colleagues, also a poet, Geoffrey O’Brien, had a broken rib. Another colleague, Celeste Langan, a Wordsworth scholar, got dragged across the grass by her hair when she presented herself for arrest."

-Robert Hass, former US Poet Laureate and current UC Berkeley faculty member writing for the New York Times.




Poet-Bashing Police
By ROBERT HASS
Published: November 19, 2011

Berkeley, Calif.

Activists raised a tent in front of Sproul Hall on the Berkeley campus as police officers in riot gear retreated on Nov. 9.
LIFE, I found myself thinking as a line of Alameda County deputy sheriffs in Darth Vader riot gear formed a cordon in front of me on a recent night on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, is full of strange contingencies. The deputy sheriffs, all white men, except for one young woman, perhaps Filipino, who was trying to look severe but looked terrified, had black truncheons in their gloved hands that reporters later called batons and that were known, in the movies of my childhood, as billy clubs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/at-occupy-berkeley-beat-poets-has-new-meaning.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1

[Rosa Luxemburg]

1. Who is ordering the police to do this?

[banned from Kos]

2. police brutality isn't confined to protestors -- in fact protestors are a small

percentage of cases.

[htuttle]

3. Name a country where they don't

[Posteritatis]

7. Fictitioustan! (nt)

[jberryhill]

10. Didn't they beat down the separatist U-beki-beki-stan-stanis?

[Posteritatis]

11. That's true. It was one of the most savage chess matches I'd ever seen. (nt)

[Amonester]

15. Tibet.

Maybe not anymore since the (new) communist$ took over.

[Kaleko]

19. Germany for one.

Huge OWS-style protests there of late. No clashes with police as far as I've seen.

[rainbow4321]

23. Well, a co-worker of mine has told me India

She was born/raised there and she has been following my Occupy stories on my facebook whenever I go to our local one. That started us talking about Occupy in general and the police brutality.
She told me how the brutality would never be tolerated over there, that when they go out in force they go out in HUGE ASS NUMBERS and the police are outnumbered and scared. She went onto say say how she doesn't see America as a democracy with how our Occupiers are being treated. From what she told me, it doesn't take much for the population in her homeland to shut cities down and take to the streets if they feel that the government is fucking with them.
I am just going by what she told me..there are probably alot of people here with more knowledge about India, I can only go by what she has told me.

[BlueToTheBone]

4. Tibet, Mynamar (Burma), East Timor, USA.

To name a few.

[FarCenter]

5. Doesn't anyone watch cable? "Detroit SWAT"? "Ultimate Fighting Championship"

The police are being quite gentle with Occupiers.

[Quartermass]

6. I still bet some of these police dudes are animal lovers.

[Amonester]

18. Yep. They would nevey pepper-spray pets.

Fellow human beings, though? Fair game....

Go figure.

[jberryhill]

8. The Netherlands

[jberryhill]

9. Sweden

[Liberal_in_LA]

12. lots!

[RSillsbee]

13. China won't beat you if you protest

They'll just run you down with a tank.

[provis99]

14. Canada

[B Calm]

16. Who can forget the G 20 protest

[Amonester]

21. Not in Montreal though (pic+article)

Occupy Montreal staying put

snip
"Montreal will show that we are able to live together in harmony,"

Mayor Gerald Tremblay told QMI Agency earlier in November. "As long as it's safe and we have social peace, there will be tolerance."

Tremblay hasn't publicly said that protesters can occupy Victoria Square indefinitely, but his patience has started to irk the provincial government.

"We will not create a Mumbai slum right in the middle of Victoria Square," Quebec Finance Minister Raymond Bachand recently told QMI.

http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/sunnews/canada/archives/2011/11/20111120-084008.html

"Liberal" party's sinister minister...

[provis99]

22. err, well actually, the Montreal mayor is getting the clubs and pepper spray ready:

Montreal mayor tells Occupy protesters to leave
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x5067265

[Throd]

17. I have seen things get pretty hairy in Spain.

[rucky]

20. Apparently they don't bother you if you're packing...

[Synicus Maximus]

24. Name one where they don't.