Baton charge

A baton charge, also known as a lathi charge, is a coordinated tactic for dispersing crowds of people, usually used by police or military during public order places

Not to be confused with Baton round.
A baton charge during the 2001 EU summit protests in Sweden.

The tactic involves police officers charging at a crowd of people with batons and in some cases, riot shields. They run at the crowd hitting people with their batons, and in some situations use riot shields to push them away. Baton charging is designed to cause pain or fear of pain, in the hope that they would be compelled to move away from the scene, dispersing the public who are crowded.

South Asia

In South Asia, notably India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, a baton would often be referred to as a lathi. Some Indian police forces use lathis around 1.5 m (5 ft) long, but in other places lathis are shorter. The term lathi charge is used on the Indian media more commonly than "baton charge".[1] In Bangladesh, the baton user is called a lathiyal and lathials who have a long history policing. The lathi khela is a traditional Bengali martial art.[2]

History


British Rule

During British rule in colonial India, lathi charges were a common method to tackle protesting Indian Independence activists. In 1928, Lala Lajpat Rai was heavily injured during a lathi charge, while protesting against the government. Rai subsequently addressed the crowd and said, "I declare that the blows struck at me today will be the last nails in the coffin of British rule in India". Rai died of his injuries on 17 November 1928.

Post-1947

Lathi charges are used to disperse protesters in South Asia.

Hong Kong

In the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests, the police special unit Special Tactical Squad used the same tactics and was criticized that they used excessive force against the crowd and the journalists in order to break up the protest.[3]

gollark: ++remind 2w2d22h50m deploy hypercubical tesseracts version 3.3
gollark: ++remind 2w2d22h53m Heavpoot has been successfully loaded into the identical simulated copy universe. Initiate standard procedure 48H.
gollark: ++remind 2w2d22h55m Using the osmarks.tk™ CTC I have the following important information from the future™ (we do not have flying cars yet): HEAVPOOT IS WRONG, HE IS MARRIED TO BADNESS AND APIOFORMNESS AND UNTRUTH
gollark: ++magic sql select * from sqlite_master
gollark: ++magic sql select * from marriages;

See also

References
  1. Police lathi charge protesters Times of India-Retrieved 29 July 2010
  2. Bipasha Raha; Subhayu Chattopadhyay (22 December 2017). Mapping the Path to Maturity: A Connected History of Bengal and the North-East. Taylor & Francis. pp. 102–. ISBN 978-1-351-03412-8.
  3. Hong Kong police attack journalists with batons, tear gas amid protests Committee to Protect Journalists-Retrieved 15 June 2019


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.