How Protesters Became Content for the Cops

In 2025, protest policing in major US cities increasingly took on the character of a spectacle: overwhelming deployments, theatrical staging, and aggressive crowd-control tactics that emphasized signaling power over maintaining public safety. This was not a one-off episode; it followed the deployment of federal troops into multiple Democratic-led cities, prompting lawsuits and court challenges that local leaders described, with justification, as militarized intimidation.

Los Angeles provided an early template. After protests erupted in June over an increase in aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, President Donald Trump ordered roughly 4,000 federalized National Guard troops into the city and activated about 700 US Marines. At the same time, he signaled—online and through traditional media—a willingness to escalate even further by invoking the Insurrection Act. Troops stood shoulder to shoulder with long guns and riot shields as smoke canisters and crowd-control munitions blanketed highways and city streets, a posture nominally framed as deescalation and for the protection of federal property but calibrated to provoke confrontation.

Inside the Pentagon, officials rushed to draft domestic use-of-force guidance for Marines that contemplated temporary civilian detention—an unusually explicit entry into a legal gray area, paired with a highly visible show of force.

By August, the federal government shifted from episodic deployment to direct control: Trump placed Washington, DC’s police department under federal authority and deployed roughly 800 National Guard troops, exploiting the district’s unique legal vulnerability. The Washington Post described the city as a “laboratory for a militarized approach.”

The administration’s rhetoric was not subtle—Trump cast the crackdown as an image project, calling Washington a “wasteland for the world to see,” and openly endorsing fear as a policing tactic, urging officers to “knock the hell out of them.” City leaders countered that the supposed emergency was manufactured, noting that crime in the capital was at multi-decade lows. In city after city, “restoring order” became a flimsy euphemism for preemptive displays of force aimed at deterring dissent before it reached the streets.

Across Chicagoland, protest control became overtly choreographed. As “Operation Midway Blitz” intensified in September, officials erected barricades and “protest zones” around the Broadview ICE facility. State police in riot gear lined perimeters, while federal agents repeatedly fired tear gas and other projectiles into crowds, according to videos and witness accounts. The most brazen moment came when homeland security secretary Kristi Noem appeared on the facility’s roof beside armed agents and a camera crew, positioned near a sniper’s post, as arrests unfolded below.

This was performative policing at its most distilled: public safety reduced to a spectacle with vaguely defined urban threats cast as the danger being neutralized. The absurdity of the displays allowed routine acts of disorderly conduct to be perceived as folk-hero moments.

This performative turn didn’t emerge from nowhere. It displaced a quieter, less theatrical—but still controlling—model that had dominated US protest policing for decades. Policing scholars refer to it as strategic incapacitation: a practice whereby conditions are shaped so that protests can’t become effective in the first place.