I'm an 57 year old martial artist, and I was taught what appear to be the same techniques back in the 1980s by a police instructor in Australia.

I have also been in protests in England and full scale riots in Hong Kong (when it was still a British colony).

The pressure points underneath the nose, ear and jawline cause great pain but are not lethal and should not even cause injury.

They are designed to cause enough temporary pain to force the person they are used on to stop resisting and 'come along' quietly.

I've had them applied to me, and I've used them on others (only in training class, folks).

Aikido and Ju Jitsu wrist locks are designed to be painful if you resist, but if you relax and do as you are told, the pain is reduced.

Now let me state here that what happened to your protesters was wrong. Okay? The police were doing exactly what they are trained and paid to do. Like soldiers, they face disciplinary action if they say "No", and they are taught / conditioned to just do as they're told anyhow.

This isn't putting the cops down; it's just how police anywhere in the world operate. In some places they would have used Mace or Pepper Spray... Maybe even Tazers or electric batons. All of these are 'non-lethal' tools available to most police forces.

In less enlightened countries (not that yours or mine are perfect) the police would have used boots and riot batons to break heads and bones; and in some places I could mention, the women would probably be carted off to the station and sexually assaulted.

So what I'm saying is, nobody got cracked skulls or broken bones... Nobody was taken out the back to have the sh*t kicked out of them. be glad of that.

Don't attack the cops for doing their job. Blame lies with the person in authority who decided the cops should remove you by force. Those coppers were just the 'removal men'.

You guys knew the police were going to do something; it's just that they weren't as nice as you had expected.

You can learn a bit more about pressure points here www.gedanate.com/vital-points.html
That's not the only article on the web site.

Don't shoot me, guys, I'm only the messenger!