Egyptian protesters defeated the police but seized only symbolic ground

Evidence

A huge mass of Egyptians went to battle with the police that day, and the police lost. Some ripped off their uniforms and scattered into the wind. Protesters burned down over ninety police stations that night. One wave of Egyptians battled cops on the Qasr al-Nil bridge, holding their ground while suspended over the Nile, pushing back, taking losses, and then advancing again until the police simply retreated. At that point, the revolutionaries could have taken anything. They chose to stay in Tahrir Square, the default destination for many in the crowd; it was an empty piece of land, and its conquest offered no strategic value, except for its visibility. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 224

Categorization

• XREF: The choice of spectacle over strategic power echoes the book’s standing theme of prefigurative protest — and links to the media-driven protest analysis from chapter 8. — connects to: Apparent protest victories over police reflect police withdrawal, not defeat — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 421
• QUESTION: Why did a victorious revolutionary crowd walk past power stations, TV stations, and ministries? The book asks this and notes nobody had the authority to decide what to seize — a leaderless movement’s structural inability to take state power.