Around the World: A Pattern of Policing

The Olympics’ use of policing, surveillance, and evictions are as old as the Games themselves.

In every country, and in every host city, local and federal police are deployed for the Olympics. Surveillance and criminalization accelerate consistently, no matter the country and no matter the year. Local policing budgets explode. Federal police or the military embed further with local authorities. And all of this massively intensified policing and militarized technology stays for decades after the games.

And if you think these examples won’t happen here in LA? Know that LA28 representative to the California Olympic and Paralympic Public Safety Command (COPPSC) Doug Arnot helped organize security in Rio, Sochi, London and Salt Lake City. If the Games are allowed to proceed, the outcome in LA will be no different than these other cities.

Here is a brief rundown of the history of policing at the Olympics:

Rio 2016

The Rio 2016 Games are perhaps the most stark case of how Olympics militarization violates the rights and lives of Black people. In the years Rio prepared to hold the Olympics (2009-2016), police officers killed over 2,500 people in the host city, with a disproportionate number of Black youths from favelas among those killed. These murders took place amid a multi-billion dollar ‘security’ initiative that placed permanent occupying police forces in favelas.

In the same time period, police helped the City evict more than 77,000 people, violently repress protests, and preemptively arrest activists ahead of the 2014 World Cup.

Sochi 2014

In 2013, ahead of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, Russia passed a law which banned “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations.” Russian public polling shows a drastic increase of homophobia from 2012 to 2014. Pussy Riot’s 2014 Sochi arrest (along with seven other activists) was heavily publicized. There were 40,000 policemen and 400 Cossacks policing Sochi during the Olympics.

London 2012

The London Olympics created the largest peacetime security and military force since the end of the second World War. London was already the most surveilled city in the world, but Olympic organizers made sure to add extra CCTV and to spend £80 million on an 11-mile long electric fence. Security company G4S – a company which also provides jail security support locally in Garden Grove – was granted a £330 million contract to police the Olympics.

London even got the army involved, installing missile batteries on several residential sites. With an officially vague goal of stopping “people who would cause harm to the Games from crossing our borders,”anyone who may seem oppositional to this goal could be seen as a target — including protestors.

Beijing 2008

For 2008’s China Olympics, we saw the deployment of the military. Even in 2008, Uighurs were beginning to be characterized as threats – “separatist insurgents” – which functioned to help validate the current ethnic cleansing China is conducting. Over 300,000 cameras were used to surveil the 2008 Olympics.

Athens 2004

$1.5B was spent on security in Athens in 2004, deploying 70,000 military and police personnel, and leaving the city with 1,200 CCTV cameras after the Games. Many breaches in rights and privacy were also made, including DNA testing without consent, non-jury criminal trials and more. With this Western Olympics, the excuse of a threat was al-Qaeda.

Seoul 1988

In Seoul, thousands were aggressively evicted, and thousands more living on the streets were swept up by police. This included the unhoused as well as disabled people and children, who ended up abused and killed.

Mexico CITY 1968

In 1968, ten days before the 1968 Olympics, government-employed snipers opened fire on student and civilian protesters in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City. Eyewitness accounts reported hundreds dead while the government shrouded the event in secrecy.

While the themes that ignited the protests were related to policing and brutality, the level of brutality of the crackdown was directly related to the Olympics. from the vast overspending on the Olympics.