Soccer hooligans beware: The South Africa police — all 41,000 of them — know who you are and will be looking for you during this summer’s World Cup games.
[marketwatch.com] What’s more, they’re ready for you, thanks to months of training and exercises in crowd control like the one held Thursday, according to the press reports. Police stood ready in full combat gear, sweating in the hot sun, outside Ellis Park Stadium as a staged angry crowd pushed, shoved and pelted them with plastic bottles filled with water, cans and petrol bombs. It was a lesson in force. When the crowd – army soldiers in civilian clothes – grew violent, or as one report referred to as “more enthusiastic,” police fired stun and smoke grenades and were prepared with back up.
Unruly crowds are a regular occurrence at many football games in Europe but unheard of in South Africa, despite its reputation for violence. So the top cops there turned to experts, the French Gendarmerie, for intense physicial training and to learn the technical skills needed to quell the hooligans.
“The training we have received from the Gendarmerie will enable us to deal with situations similar to these during and after the World Cup,” National Police Chief Bheki Cele told reporters.
Cele and company also have been working closely with Interpol and other international agencies to block hooligans from entering the country. “We have a database with their names,” he said. “They are known and they will be denied entry. If some do manage to slip in, we will deal with them.”
Nine countries whose matches are likely to cause trouble have been pegged. And the match between the U.S. and England is one of them, Cele said.
“We have categorized security risk fans on a scale of 1-to-2, with 1 being the most dangerous,” said Cele.
Source: http://blogs.marketwatch.com/worldcup/2010/04/15/hooligans-on-notice-sa-cops-know-who-you-are/
