Sunday, April 23, 2006
A wild fantasy crowd control solution...
for Friday and Saturday nights. A lot of town and centres usually have clubs in clusters, or along a street (think Saucciehall Street in Glasgow, for example).
Come kicking out time, a mobile machine of some sort should be positioned at the bottom of the street, and emit a curtain of very powerful air that takes up the width of the street and ushers people further up the street, but is too strong to breach if people try and get past it.
Slowly, this curtain of air pushes the drunken revellers further up the street, so they don't congregate and fight over taxis or whatever. Eventually, it gets to the top, where there's hundreds of taxis waiting, more than enough for most town and city centres, and people get home quickly and easily and without risk of being killed.
Everybody wins here - the air is free and renewable, so it doesn't drain on resources; it'd be relatively cheap; it doesn't hurt people and people don't get hurt from it, plus it wouldn't require as many yellow jackets on the street.
If people are getting lairy, then the machine should also be able to serve as a water cannon, and as a flamethrower tank for the REALLY violent. That'll make them think twice about causing problems if a big wall of flame is behind them!
The idea would never work in practice, of course. It'd be audited to death and there'd eventually be a human rights challenge, resulting in the machine being withdrawn because the force would be too scared to contest the challenge for fear of bad publicity.
(c) Bow Street Runner. None of the material contained in this post, or this blog as a whole, may be reproduced without the express and written permission of Bow Street Runner. All rights reserved.
for Friday and Saturday nights. A lot of town and centres usually have clubs in clusters, or along a street (think Saucciehall Street in Glasgow, for example).
Come kicking out time, a mobile machine of some sort should be positioned at the bottom of the street, and emit a curtain of very powerful air that takes up the width of the street and ushers people further up the street, but is too strong to breach if people try and get past it.
Slowly, this curtain of air pushes the drunken revellers further up the street, so they don't congregate and fight over taxis or whatever. Eventually, it gets to the top, where there's hundreds of taxis waiting, more than enough for most town and city centres, and people get home quickly and easily and without risk of being killed.
Everybody wins here - the air is free and renewable, so it doesn't drain on resources; it'd be relatively cheap; it doesn't hurt people and people don't get hurt from it, plus it wouldn't require as many yellow jackets on the street.
If people are getting lairy, then the machine should also be able to serve as a water cannon, and as a flamethrower tank for the REALLY violent. That'll make them think twice about causing problems if a big wall of flame is behind them!
The idea would never work in practice, of course. It'd be audited to death and there'd eventually be a human rights challenge, resulting in the machine being withdrawn because the force would be too scared to contest the challenge for fear of bad publicity.
(c) Bow Street Runner. None of the material contained in this post, or this blog as a whole, may be reproduced without the express and written permission of Bow Street Runner. All rights reserved.
