DC

On the 18th of December, Twitter posts tagged with #dcferguson disappeared from Twitter searches unless "top" was selected instead of "all." Since "top" stories are old, this made it impossible to use Twitter to call protesters to assemble at a short notice time and place. Twitter themselves or right-wing/police hackers could potentially do this. For several days before this, a #dcferguson Twitter search would return large numbers of "falabeats" audio promos, and finally returned a half dozen pages of those posts at some times on Dec 18, burying almost all other posts.

On the 17th of December, hundreds of people, mostly Pakistani-Americans, gathered in Dupont Circle to remember 141 people, mostly young students, killed in the Dec 16 Taliban attack on a school in Peshawar. There was a call for solidarity with this vigil on the DC Ferguson Twitter feed and no march that would have conflicted with it.

On or before the 16th of December, cardboard Christmas ornaments appeared on trees outside the Church of the Pilgrim Presbyterian near Dupont Circle. The ornaments read "Black Lives Matter." This is in contrast to ugly things hung from trees or gates in other places such as Berkeley, where a dummy in an "I Can't breathe" T-shirt was hung in public.

On the 16th of December, DC police chief Cathy Lanier appeared on NewsTalk with Bruce DePuyt, and complained that the DC Ferguson protests are "very expensive" to MPD, requiring up to 400 cops a night to be detailed to them. She specifially complained that the protests are "a strain on the department" and reduce their ability to "police the neighborhoods.

Well, fewer cops in neighborhoods has to lead to less ability to harass residents and to fewer jump-outs, which are DC's version of Stop and Frisk. Although DC cops have actually become more violent in the neighborhoods since the protests began, if there are fewer cops to carry out this violence the protests may be achieving one of their goals by directly keeping the cops busy elsewhere