ABSTRACT
In the run-up to the 2012 NATO summit in Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration purchased some 8,500 new face masks for the city’s police department. It was claimed they were needed to prevent the offi cers “being blinded by bags of urine and faeces that are thrown by ‘anarchists’ and other militant protestors” – allegedly common practice in a “riot-type situation” such as the authorities were expecting (Picket, 2012). Preparations for the Republican Conference in Tampa that same year saw a joint FBIDepartment of Homeland Security bulletin issued, warning, among other things, of anarchists wielding “acid-fi lled eggs” (Levine, 2012). In 2008, prior to the Democratic National Convention in Denver, the City Council approved a new ordinance “aimed at preventing protestors from carrying buckets of faeces”: this despite a jocular treaty signed by three prominent protest groups labelled the “doo-doo accord”, which called for “a moratorium on the public throwing, spraying, smearing, hosing or inducing of excrement” (Osher, 2008).
