[s_jambo]

This may thwart kettling but I think it also thwarts protesting.

The whole idea of the kinds of protests which get kettled is to show that a large number of people care about an issue. If the software advises people to disperse if the police show up where is the protesting?

I'd have thought the best response to kettling would be distributed civil disobedience. It could easily be far more economically costly which would hopefully persuade the politicians and police that mass gatherings of people don't require impromptu imprisonment.

[TimHardy]

Kettling also discourages protest. We have had many emails from elderly individuals, people with disabilities, families with young children who have been scared to march. There is a massive demonstration being planned in the UK by the TUC on 26 March against the savage cuts being imposed in the UK and a whole raft of ideological reforms that are being pushed through by a minority government and which have nothing to do with the state of the nations finances.

We have just had an election in which MPs courted votes with a signed pledge to scrap tuition fees - then slashed funding to the universities by up to 100% in many subjects and tripled the fees. When a mockery is made of the ballot and the voting system by such duplicitous behaviour, then people have a moral and legal right to take to the streets in mass, peaceful demonstrations.

When aggressive police tactics are used to dissuade people from doing so you have a serious failure of the democratic process.

We see our role as one of increasing transparency and accountability and reducing tensions in the street and we hope that we can help people legally and peacefully demonstrate and by doing so put pressure on the government to change their policies.

That is something all people, I hope, would want to see in a healthy, democratic society.

[steveklabnik]

The idea is that people temporarily disperse and regroup elsewhere.

Often, things like 'free speech zones' keep the protest away from the actual venue of the thing being protested. In Pittsburgh for the G20, for example, we weren't able to get within two miles of the actual summit happening. Yeah, people saw the news, which was a bunch of images of people breaking stuff, but they didn't see that people started breaking stuff because the police started throwing tear gas. And using the LRAD.

Unfortunately, the geography here really sucks for this kind of thing, but in a more gridlike city, the main body of people could have dispersed and filtered through police lines.

[sliverstorm]

It sounds like you're saying you don't believe a protest can be effective without a confrontation with the police.