Police State USA 2002: This is What A Police State Looks Like
February 14, 2008
The following video is from a 2002 demonstration against the Bush administration in Portland, Oregon. It demonstrated very clearly what the police have been and are still doing today when dealing with peaceful demonstrations. They are taking video with the expressed intent of identifying people at a later date - in this case focused on people who attempted to cover their faces. The video is over 5 years old and it has only gotten worse since then.
For myself, I can testify that Canadian police also engage in the same sort of video surveillance of demonstrations. During the September 2007 anti NATO demonstration in front of the Hotel Grand Pacific here in Victoria, the police were videotaping the crowd from the roof of the building across the street from the (Wax Museum). Below is a picture of them doing their videotaping.
In addition to this monitoring there was about 1 police officer for every 10 demonstrators and many of them were interspersed throughout the crowd (that is the ones in uniform and doesn't include those in plain clothes - I was told there were 5 undercover offices by the police themselves in my capacity as police liason which of course we knew anyway)