ABSTRACT
Research has singled out three main interrelated strategic areas for protest control that the police have favoured differently in various historical periods (della Porta and Reiter 1997): coercive strategies, that is, the use of weapons and physical force to control or disperse demonstrations; persuasive strategies, meaning all attempts to control protest through discursive contacts with activists and organizers; and information strategies, consisting of widespread information gathering as a preventive feature in protest control, as well as the targeted collection of information (sometimes using modern audiovisual technologies) to identify law-breakers without having to intervene directly.
