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This was attempted a few times in Oakland and the tail end of occupy, and the answer is that it turns out for planned protests, there's not actually much different about the terrain away from the protest itself. It appears cops manning the protest are usually on OT, so not on their beat/hours, which means there are just as many police patrolling (and of course snitches) everywhere else as there is under normal circumstances. You can always still do something concurrently, but you'll have to take the same precautions you normally would, so unless there's some symbolic gesture you want to make or whatever, there's not much point -- especially when there's ephemeral terrain to operate on while you can. The exceptions to this are 1. when the size of the protest is unexpected, as has def happened in Oakland a few times and the cops are left scrambling for riot gear and backup, or 2. full scale riots, where there isn't enough OT in the world to accommodate patrols everywhere.