Black Lives Matter, the People’s Climate March, the Arab Spring, and the Egyptian Revolution are or were social movements originating from small community protests that swarmed sidewalks. Eventually, they grew into large-scale demonstrations that shut down streets. All of these movements represent sections of a repressed society calling for change, up against a justice system controlling the cause. Issues from fair wages to the environment and from immigration to police profiling are helping activists gain the attention of the public; previously unengaged citizens, politicians, and media are starting to talk about these issues as well. But have we mastered an understanding what the new era of social revolutions will bring?

As we have witnessed throughout neighborhoods calls for reform and social justice, an individual’s idea, communicated on an individual device, through a social network has the potential to quickly draw a crowd on a massive scale — a dream to an activist, a nightmare to law enforcement. In the heat of these demonstrations, protesters and security officials have seemingly disparate purposes in mind: one to enact change and the other to protect the public and themselves. To be clear, I would never dare suggest that either purpose is wrong, but under what conditions should we protect spontaneous, socially-fueled, and self-organized action?

In the book Shutting Down the Streets, authors Amory Starr, Luis Fernandez, and Christian Scholl claim there is still much to learn about how we in homeland security understand social movements. They argue that existing repression efforts by homeland security agencies mainly concentrate on policing protests but neglecting the effects of social control, dissent, and social movements as objects of analysis.

An after-action assessment of Ferguson law enforcement’s initial response to the civil unrest found a “failure to understand endemic problems in the community” as a key theme. In addition, other deficiencies included broken policies of crowd control, monitoring, and most striking, a misguided response by officials unaware of an impending resistance who lacked the relationships to know it was coming.

“The protests were sparked by the shooting of Michael Brown, but they were also a manifestation of the long-standing tension between the Ferguson PD and the African-American community.”

Officers had not been trained to understand human behavior, and areas were not set up for the overflow of an already tense population.

“The overwatch tactic, in which police snipers took positions on top of tactical vehicles and used their rifle sights to monitor the crowd, was inappropriate as a crowd control measure.”

Ferguson is only one example of glaring gaps in current security protocols. Over the past two years, we have seen several other cities overwhelmed by the same civil unrest, promulgated by social technologies in concert with citizens’ inspirations of a common good.

In Shutting Down the Streets, a broader framework is developed that extends the object of analysis from the effects of policing protests to the social control of dissent. Starr, Fernandez and School argue there should be a change to the current unit of analysis, a transition from individual protests to a wider scale of social movements. Therefore, community policing can avoid violence and coercion at protests by using a variety of “soft” methods, such as psychological operations, infiltration, and surveillance.