So of late I've been considering how best to counter riot police. What is feasible for individuals, small groups and so on. What would create the strongest psychological impact and what would achieve the greatest results in both short and long term scenarios.
Firstly in countering riot police we have to consider the objective. Do we want to crush current opposition allowing rioters/protesters to move past the police cordon? Or do we want to weaken the concept of riot police in order to encourage greater public opposition to riot police in future actions and weaken their ability to project psychological force to counter protests?
In the case of the first. Fire seems a good all round option, more specifically the kind of burning viscous fluids you would use to make a molotov. While initially conceived as an anti-tank weapon they're quite effective against infantry, moreso if they're in big bulky plastic and very flammable riot gear. They have the added bonus of being effective against vehicles used by riot police, though in that context they require foreknowledge of the vehicles likely to be used and where air intakes on them are located (they work against tanks/vehicles by inducing a mobility kill by starving the engine of the oxygen needed for fuel combustion) Even better these things can be easily produced and utilised by small numbers or individuals with effectiveness only increasing the more people are involved. This makes these kind of fire based weapons an essential part of the anti-riot cop arsenal no matter the scale involved. But you have to get the mix right. You can't simply stick commercially available vehicle fuel in a bottle and call it a day, it's not thick enough and will burn up too quickly.
As numbers and ability for preplanning increase or protest length increases. The opportunity for training in group tactics and infantry formations arises. It doesn't take a lot to train a basic and effective shield wall, nor does it take much to procure the materials needed to equip them, even in the middle of a city where they may be readily looted. If your goal remains elimination of current resistance then your goal here must be seperation of individual police officers or small groups of them from the wider mass. Whittle them down a bit and they're forced to retreat. As corny as it may sound using rope is potentially a good trick here. If you can get a rope around an officer you can have a group behind your shield wall pull them out of the police front line and behind yours. At which point they're pretty much at your mercy and may be captured/executed as appropriate. If the rope is long enough then you can exploit the fact that protestors/rioters almost always outnumber police, and that most of them will be too removed from whats going on at the front to understand what pulling the rope means. Assuming you can get enough people pulling then any efforts by the riot police to prevent their comrade being pulled away will only further weaken their line and potentially cause a greater breach. If the officer in command orders them to let go and let their comrade be taken in order to preserve the front, then it causes serious morale damage. Other options in this vein could be to use hooks whether on ropes or poles. Also even if all you manage to rope is the shield, its worth pulling as it removes a vital piece of equipment from the riot police line. Spears or large axes are also an option and very easy to produce in the field. A line of spearmen/axemen behind the shield wall would be quite capable of causing considerable damage very quickly. These combined with fire applied in the aforementioned manner should be more than capable of countering most riot police formations, though the utility would be short lived as such actions would force heavy response from them. In short they're only sensible if you have a specific and meaningful objective in mind.
Whats worth pointing out here is that none of these require a lot of specialised materials. Even the fuel/thickener materials needed for molotov production are widely available in bulk with no suspicion. For the second part you either need a cadre of people for preplanned actions or a prolonged sustained protest. The occupy protests would have been a good example for when this kind of training and organising on the ground was possible and should be pursued. In the Ukraine Maidan coup we saw exactly this sort of thing being done in the protests, with people being recruited and trained on site. A pretrained group specifically trained and prepared to go into such a prolonged protest and begin training once its gained some steam, could do some considerable damage to police operations fairly quickly.
Now onto the other potential goal. Weakening the public perception of the riot police and their seeming invulnerability. Now there are two fundamentally different approaches and actual goals here. The first to weaken the legitimacy of the riot police thus making the public more likely to in future oppose them and their deployment. The second to weaken the carefully cultivated image of power they project.
We shall focus on the first initially. Here the goal must be signal boosting every injury every cut, scrape and bruise. The more blood you can get associated with them the better. Best of all you can even do this without being on the ground so long as there's enough information and footage flowing out of the protests that you can repackage and redistribute. A group of people operating independently can be surprisingly effective. If you're on the ground then you want to go towards the screams and if you see someone with a particularly nasty injury then stick to them like glue. It is rather ghoulish but the profits can be considerable in terms of achieving your objective. Obviously the more grisly the injury the more effort you make to stick to them. Get their name too if its an especially bad one like say the guy who lost his hand to a gendarme tear gas grenade in the recent yellowjacket protests. Don't bother with pictures or footage of them after they've been patched up or otherwise received medical aid, if blood ain't flowing freely then they're not nuch use to you (though some rare instances do exist, use your own judgement) If the injury is life changing. Signal boost as much as possible, set up crowdfunding campaigns to help them. Make sure in said campaign that the injury is associated with the riot police at every point. The best part is that with crowdfunding campaigns these companies and those who donate will often aid in the signal boosting either willingly or unknowingly. You're a propagandist and the best propaganda is truth.
Master tier on this front if you have the people and resources would be encouraging the protest to get messy. Sending agitators into the crowd or somehow tricking the riot police into a needlessly heavy handed response. There's all manner of ways to accomplish this. Use your imagination. Overall the key is to weaken legitimacy. The less they are associated with law and the more they are associated with injuring people and causing property damage the better.
Now the second goal is wildly different. We are assuming here their legitimacy is already sufficiently in question and it is now fear of the riot police that you must overcome. Riot police actions are a great big orchestrated act where every element is designed to give the impression of greater strength than is actually there. The uniforms, the acting in unison, banging their shields, the use of vehicles, the use of horses in many western nations, etc. These are all designed to puff them up, make them look bigger and tougher. There are myths of an old persian military formation called "the immortals", mostly the product of misunderstandings but the myth goes as thus: The Persians deployed an elite heavy infantry force called the immortals whose members could supposedly never die. They all wore matching armour, used the same weapons and wore matching face masks. With membership in the force being dependent on not only meeting its standards as a warrior but having a physique similar to all other members. They would fight in a close knit phalanx formation and whenever a member suffered a notable wound he would be dragged out of the front line by his comrades behind him and immediately replaced by another member of their unit. Giving the illusion of immortality. While the mythos surrounding modern riot police are much less mystical and fantastic, they operate on a similar principle. Whensoever their troops on the front tire or are injured they immediately pull them out and replace them. Even something as minor as having your uniform doused with paint or plastered with stickers is enough cause to pull a man out of the formation and replace him. Now obviously. The most effective means to dispel the myth is to seperate one from the pack. Record and signal boost him being beaten to death by an angry crowd and that will certainly do wonders. Their superiors know this and when one gets seperated expect an immediate heavy response. No matter how you obtain it, a riot officer corpse is a potent weapon in the fight to weaken the perception of immortality/invincibility. Don't be afraid to fabricate one if the real deal is unavailable and you think you can get away with it. If the lie gains traction and the police claim no officer is dead then counter with accusations the police are refusing to care for his widow/children and are withholding the money they're entitled to for his death. While casting the riot police in a sympathetic light may seem counterintuitive, it signal boosts that they can be beaten and will weaken the resolve of the riot police through suspicion.
Another good option on this front is the identification of officers. But it requires numerous people working together to spy on them and get photographs in the field from up close. You will see right on the streets of France that those officers who don't have full helmets or proper masks will be wearing scarfs wrapped around their faces. Anonymity is key to the riot police and those drafted in to assist them. They need to be able to vanish into the community at the end of the day. If they can't then they may face the condemnation of the community wherever they go or even face physical violence. If they're made they have to go into hiding which for prolonged periods will ultimately cause psychological stress and fear in their comrades (what if I'm next?) Get pictures, signal boost the pictures to try and get names. When you've got names get addresses of them, their family, etc and boost those too. The best possible outcome is to scare the family into condemning their riot officer family member. To make wives abandon their husbands or children take part in the protests.
Anything that shows them as people is what we want here. Anything that disrupts the carefully cultivated myth thats been built around them. No matter what approach you go for or goal you have though the key is always propaganda. The more you can signal boost something the better. Creating networks with others who can spread it to other networks is your goal there. Link up to any social media presence you can and spam your shit on there. But ultimately victory on the battlefield is going to rely on being able to either rouse the beast that is the crowd into angrily storming the police of their own collective will or organising them to follow instruction.
Spray paint to tag and blind them, ropes and slings to topple them, cable binder to cuff them. Also throw the molotov under their feet and use their scrambling to pull their groups apart. Very important…take out their camera guys.
Matthew Baker
They may be sandniggers but they've got the use of fire down fairly well. Those molotovs look they have a good mix too which you rarely see in western attempts. Their use of tires brings to mind another thing I forgot to mention in the use of fire. Grabbing some tires and filling them with a viscous fuel mix, setting it alight then rolling it towards the police can be extremely effective when the terrain allows it.
Trebuchets are too big, a catapult or balistae is however much more feasible with in field looting. I would strongly recommend familiarising yourself with the basic principles of their construction.
Firearms while effective are too liable to spook the crowd and not widely available in many countries. Their use requires considerable preplanning and preparation.
