Comment Re:Stay behind the line! (Score 1) 388
Clearly you don't live anywhere near DC.
I used to work in DC (Dupont Circle) and I'd see people going off to protests all the time. I probably saw a protest every other month. There were protests at the White House on a nearly daily basis. If something important was happening (WTO, UN talks, some diplomatic visit) there might be a few protests in a day.
The number of people arrested would be minimal. For the daily protests, it was rare for anyone to be arrested. Only the really large protests got arrests, and only for doing blatantly disruptive or dangerous stuff. Yeah, some people got arrested during some of the WTO talks for "expressing their displeasure with US trade policy" However, I don't have much sympathy when they expressed their displeasure by starting a tire fire on a parkway used primarily by non-governmental commuters.
Yeah, I'm not surprised that some Anonymous people got arrested for their protest. They were protesting... something, and decided that a good way to make their point was to block up traffic consisting mostly of non-governmental people just trying to get home to their families. DC police and the park service are very experienced in handling protests. If you want to protest, they will actually help you. But you don't get to be unsafe. You don't get to threaten the safety of other people, and you don't get to block up traffic just to draw attention to yourself.