How Protesters Become Police Content

In 2025, protest policing in major US cities continued to take on the character of a spectacle: massive deployments, theatrics, and aggressive crowd control tactics that emphasized signal power over maintaining public safety. This was not a single episode; followed by the deployment of federal troops to several Democratic-led cities, prompting lawsuits and court challenges that local leaders described, rightly, as military intimidation.

Los Angeles provided the first template. After protests erupted in June over an increase in brutal immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, President Donald Trump ordered nearly 4,000 National Guard troops into the city and engaged about 700 American troops. At the same time, he signaled—on the Internet and in the mainstream media—a willingness to move forward with the introduction of the Sedition Act. Soldiers stood shoulder-to-shoulder with long rifles and riot shields as smoke canisters and crowd-control weapons covered highways and city streets, a situation called destabilization and protection of state property but designed to defuse the conflict.

Inside the Pentagon, officials rushed to draft domestic force guidance for the Marines who were considering temporary civilian arrests—an apparently unusual foray into a legal gray area, accompanied by a highly visible show of force.

In August, the federal government moved from partial to direct control: Trump placed the police department in Washington, DC under state authority and deployed nearly 800 National Guard troops, exploiting the region’s unique legal vulnerability. The Washington Post described the city as a “military workshop.”

The administration’s rhetoric was not subtle — Trump cast the scandal as a photo project, calling Washington “a wasteland for the world to see,” and openly endorsing fear as a police tactic, urging officials to “beat the hell out of them.” City leaders have disputed the state of emergency, noting that crime in the capital has fallen sharply in a decade. In town after town, “restoring order” became a vague pretext for a preemptive show of force intended to quell unrest before it reached the streets.

Throughout Chicagoland, protest control was heavily organized. As “Operation Midway Blitz” intensified in September, officials set up barricades and “protest zones” at the Broadview ICE facility. Armed state police marched through the streets, while federal forces repeatedly fired tear gas and other rounds into the crowd, according to videos and witness accounts. The most difficult moment came when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem appeared on the roof of the facility alongside armed personnel and a camera crew, stationed near the shooter’s post, as arrests were made below.

This was policing at its best: public safety was reduced to a spectacle with urban threats vaguely described as reduced risk. The silliness of the shows allowed ordinary acts of misbehavior to be treated as heroic moments of humanity.

This incident did not come out of nowhere. It has done away with the quiet, theatrical model of understatement—but still in control—that had dominated US protest policing for decades. Policing scholars call it strategic inefficiency: a practice in which circumstances are shaped so that protests are ineffective in the first place.