CIVIC MANAGEMENT and CROWD CONTROL

New York City is a dynamic instance of how large groups of people circulate in efficient networks of flows without feeling entirely managed. On a given weekend, crowds swell and receede in neighborhoods for a variety of public events. This is a city of parades, demonstrations, carnivals, unrests, protests, festivals and fairs. What is remarkable is the strategic shift in flux and flows of people from borough to borough and from district to district within boroughs, despite local strangle holds of crowds and densities.  The infrastructural contractions and expansions of the city's crowd management and surveillance personnel is large and remarkable to watch. On the one hand, one objects to the excessive policing and heavy handed presence of the police that is so customary to New Yorkers, but still very disconcerting. This heavy militarized presence around protests for Amadou Diallo at Dag Skarmahold Plaza a few years ago was shocking in its over reaching presence.  The more recent scaling back of the heavy militarized presence around public events and a visible easing of attitudes between civilians and the police in large public events is tangible.  The NYPD have a tough job on their hands, but their more recent restraint in volatile public situations has eased the register of anxiety between the police and the public a little, since the overt confrontation during the Diallo protests and the more recent Sean Bell non violent protests by Sharpton and other activists.