How protesters became happy with the cops

In 2025, protest Policing in major American cities increasingly took on the character of a spectacle: massive deployments, theatrics, and aggressive crowd control tactics that emphasized signaling power rather than maintaining public safety. This was not an isolated episode; This followed the deployment of federal troops to several Democratic-led cities, prompting lawsuits and legal challenges that local leaders have rightly described as militarized intimidation.

Los Angeles provided a first model. After demonstrations erupted in June following an increase in aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, President Donald Trump ordered about 4,000 federalized National Guard troops into the city and activated about 700 U.S. Marines. At the same time, he has signaled – online and through traditional media – his willingness to go even further by invoking the Insurrection Act. Troops stood shoulder to shoulder with long guns and riot shields while smoke bombs and crowd control munitions covered highways and city streets, a posture theoretically designed as de-escalation and for the protection of federal property, but calibrated to provoke confrontation.

At the Pentagon, officials rushed to draft national-level use-of-force guidance for Marines that considered the temporary detention of civilians — an unusually explicit entry into a legal gray area, coupled with a highly visible show of force.

In August, the federal government shifted from episodic deployment to direct control: Trump placed the Washington, D.C., police department under federal authority and deployed about 800 National Guard troops, exploiting the district’s unique legal vulnerability. THE Washington Post describes the city as a “laboratory of a militarized approach”.

The administration’s rhetoric was not subtle: Trump framed the crackdown as an image project, calling Washington a “wasteland for the world to see” and openly endorsing fear as a police tactic, urging officers to “kick the hell out of them.” City leaders countered that the so-called emergency was fabricated, pointing out that crime in the capital was at its lowest level in several decades. In city after city, “restoring order” has become a flimsy euphemism for preemptive shows of force aimed at deterring dissent before it reaches the streets.

Across Chicagoland, protest control has become openly choreographed. As “Operation Midway Blitz” intensified in September, authorities erected barricades and “protest zones” around Broadview ICE facilities. State police in riot gear lined the perimeters, while federal agents repeatedly fired tear gas and other projectiles into the crowds, according to videos and testimony. The most brazen moment came when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem appeared on the facility’s roof alongside armed agents and a camera crew, positioned near a sniper’s station, as arrests took place below.

This was performative policing in its purest form: public safety reduced to a spectacle with vaguely defined urban threats presented as neutralized danger. The absurdity of the displays allowed routine acts of disorderly conduct be seen as folk hero moments.

This performative turn did not come out of nowhere. He replaced a quieter, less theatrical – but nonetheless controlling – model that had dominated American policing during protests for decades. Police specialists call it strategic incapacity: a practice by which conditions are shaped such that protests cannot become effective in the first place.