You're forgetting that in many cases these protests turn violent as a direct result of police confrontation. In that regard these surveillance operations only increase the likelihood of escalating tensions between citizens and police.
I don't know that either of your assertions is true. I suspect very very few demonstrations turn violent (a negligible number) and I suspect that a small but significant number (maybe as high as 1/3) of those that do, turn violent due to police involvement.
But I have seen no numbers; they could be the opposite for all I know. The episodic nature of how news reporting is done (where most events are treated sui generis or are arbitrarily linked due to the structure of reporting) makes it impossible to tell unless someone actually does a study.
There is nothing in principle wrong with various entities monitoring public statements. In terms of policing there are several structural problems in how it is performed, in California, the US, and in the world at large. I doubt anyone would disagree.
If anything it gives law enforcement a heads up of where thier presence might be needed.
edit - changed often to sometimes, since 'often' really isn't accurate. Lazy writing on my part.
Crowsds are so easily manipulated, its a time old tactic.
That sounds very conspiratorial. Is there any evidence for that claim?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
COINTELPRO (a portmanteau derived from COunter
INTELligence PROgram) was a series of covert, and at
times illegal, projects conducted by the United
States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at
surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting and disrupting
domestic political organizations.
Cops in the US are people with guns who have been trained that force is their only tool. The idea that cops will ever decrease violence is deeply misguided.
Surely there are documented cases of abuse of police power, but it is not all of the time. In fact, those cases are a very small minority when compared to all citizen-police interactions.
You are woefully misinformed if you think that police in the US are taught that violence is the only tool in their repertoire. And even more so that you would say that police presence is the cause of violence.
"There have been too many lives lost to police killings. Too many phone calls telling families that their loved ones, particularly young black men, won’t be coming home. But in most cases, it isn’t because individual police officers are consciously racist or think black lives don’t matter. It is because officers perform the way they are trained to perform."[1]
"Officers are trained to shoot until the threat is no longer present."[2]
Paul Waldman: Did you think what the officers did [in Powell's shooting] was appropriate? It seems pretty clear that that's standard operating procedure.
Maria Haberfeld: Yes it is, absolutely. [3]
> And even more so that you would say that police presence is the cause of violence.
Could you explain to me how a person with a gun could ever decrease violence?
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/12/police-g...
[2] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/19/ferguso...
[3] http://prospect.org/article/expert-us-police-training-use-de...
The way every standing army out there does it by just being there and having guns?
As for the quotes, the biggest issue I see with the police brutality topic is lack of hard numbers. "There have been too many lives lost to police killings" is meaningless in this context. How many? 5 this year? 50? 50 000?
Eyeballing numbers from [0], the US - a 300 million country - has about one million police officers with arrest powers. 5, or even 50 deaths over one million officers is, frankly, an irrelevant statistical blip, not a major and important issue.
Now I'm not saying there is no issue in the US. I haven't seen the numbers, because they tend to not show up in the discussion. It seems to me however, that this is another media-driven issue - i.e. something that does not exist until media start talking about it, and worst case may actually become a self-fulfilling prophecy afterwards.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_the_United_...
Now contrast with all the posts going around social media from military veterans explaining the training they got on rules of engagement, including use of deadly force as an absolute last resort when all other options fail after explicit attempts, and look at how often the narrative with police is simply shoot first, then shoot more, then keep shooting. And that's without getting into increasingly-recorded incidents where we see things like officers retroactively planting guns on corpses to back up a claim that "I had to shoot him, he was going for a gun!"
Also:
5, or even 50 deaths
Try 2.8 per day[1] that we know of, which is over one thousand per year.
And how is that, exactly?
The cold war, where much greater threats than the threat of standing armies were at play, exhibited itself in violence all over the world.
It shouldn't require explanation that the threat of violence doesn't prevent violence.
I'm not sure which country you're talking about so I can't tell.
That said, I agree with OP, if you're posting in a public forum, don't turn around and then say you expect privacy. The internet is a broadcast medium, in this sense, you can't push the genie back in the bottle once you let it out.
So, if you're going to say provocative things which don't broadcast them and then expect only your followers to pay attention.