De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer
fivethirtyeight.com
fivethirtyeight.com
The article points out that many protests in the U.S. went smoothly through the practice of police and protest organizers meeting and jointly managing protests, but that this practice fell into disuse after the 1999 Seattle WTO meeting in which protesters violated the negotiated terms and police responded with violence.
While some recent (and ongoing) protests have turned violent, many didn't. In the coming months we'll have time to do a postmortem. I strongly suspect spontaneous protests without organization will be found to have the most potential for violence, while those with organizers committed to self-policing and, ideally, cooperating with police will be found to have fared much better.
Individual people may be intelligent and responsible, but crowds have their own rules of behaviour and need to be managed. Protests are more dangerous when unplanned or when their organizers give no thought to self-policing.
There will always be organizers who want violence because it reliably brings press coverage and attention to their protests, but social media is also creating new problems. Coordinating a large number of people to show up at the same time and place used to take considerable planning and effort. When you have to work hard just to get the even to happen, why wouldn't you plan how it will unfold as well? Now a couple of tweets or posts on the right reddit subs will suffice. How can police meet with the organizer of a protest when it's really just some dude who had a lot of social media followers and might not even bother showing up himself?
What about american history would lead you to this expectation?
That said, I like the rest of your comment. It’s somewhat disturbing to hear people compare the rage of the crowd with the individual intentions of folk who break windows, raid to bring things home, and set things on fire—you’re allowing one person to derail thousands.
not "I expect". Your parent comment is not expecting this, but hoping for it.
Beyond the general history, this is a big ask of the protesters when one of the primary motivators for this specific protest is distrust of the police.
The political class had collectively decided they understood protests, that people would turn up peacefully, shout some slogans and then go home.
But that's not what a protest is. A protest is a clear and specific message "this is how many people took time out of their day, free time, time off work to come and represent themselves for an issue - do you think it's wise to ignore them?"
Decade? More like century. The labour demonstrations in the 19th and 20th century were ignored until they got militant. Nothing's changed since then in the US.
The right to protest is baked into the first legal document the country as a political entity wrote. For the last 250 years politicians and cops have had the knowledge that Americans care a great deal about their right to stand in front of a statehouse and shout to their heart's content. They should create their own policies to deal with that fact. If that means ensuring no roads go near the statehouses, that there's ample space around popular protest spots, hell that there's guaranteed public restrooms in those areas, so be it. It also means that cops should have 250 years of collective knowledge in how to deescalate... But instead they've always gone the violent route (remember the 60s, when young black people were being shredded by police dogs?)
Now that being said, black lives matter in particular suffers from (in my opinion) a lack of leadership and organization. Over the weekend I wanted to attend protests. I have 100 surplus masks and shitloads of water bottles I wanted to give out. But after a straight hour of searching on every social media platform I could conceive of (as well as Google and just asking on Twitter) I found nothing but out of date websites, with articles from the beginning of the black lives matter movement.
If I want to donate money, I can choose between several different variations of the name "black lives matter," with no way to verify that these are representative organizations, or where the money goes.
During the protest (I just turned up at city hall and hoped for the best - it happened to work out), I didn't see any sort of leadership. Sure some local community leaders turned up, but nobody that represented any sort of modern iteration of a black rights movement.
Far be it from me to tell people how to best accomplish social goals - in my opinion raw, unfettered, and disorganized rage is a perfectly valid outlet for the people against the crimes of the American police system. I just feel like organization could only help.
A universal problem with "leaderless movements" is that they quickly devolve to the lowest common denominator level. Anyone can put out their slate and call themselves an "activist" and it's inevitable that some dim person will come along and try to make a name for themselves by taking things farther. Put that person into a crisis situation with quickly gathering flash mobs, and what should we expect?
Then, on top of that, add on extremist opportunists who decide to exploit the situation, with the goal of destabilizing social order. A "leaderless movement" has all of the biomass of a huge national organization, but none of the immune system and command/control to counter such organized exploiters.
in my opinion raw, unfettered, and disorganized rage is a perfectly valid outlet for the people against the crimes of the American police system.
No. Outside of a protest, the worst actions we've seen would be crimes and qualify the perpetrator as a bad person. Just because they're in a protest doesn't change that. Would you feel that way if they came and burned your house or business down?
Evil is evil. Violence is violence. Another's evil is no excuse to perpetrate your own. Especially if it falls on innocent bystanders.
Yup, and I have the receipts to prove it: my motorcycle was vandalized in Oakland during the protests. A small price to pay for unsung voices being heard.
You say violence is violence, yet I bet you have no problem with criminals being put in jail, i.e. their freedoms being violently removed from them.
Not seen news come out of people's homes destroyed. If we're going to participate in a damages competition, though, let's do that - the cops shot out a couple people's eyeballs, but only after of course kicking off this whole thing by murdering black people with no consequences. There, that settles that.
No. The Gandhi movie termed that, "An eye for an eye, making the whole world blind."
How about we condemn evil, and try to make sure there's less evil in the world? Just because you say you're fighting evil, that doesn't nominate you to commit evil, especially if it's in the name of others without their consent. Especially if it's so you can coerce others into seeing things your particular way.
Isn't that what sparked the protests in the first place? Someone who committed evil, in the name of fighting evil?
Can you elaborate? All four of the police officers were immediately fired. The primary officer that was kneeling on him was charged with murder and manslaughter and will go to prison. Likely charges will be brought on the other three.
Lord forbid nobody caught the murder on video. This happens all over America, all the time. Thread is full of links or a quick hop on google will serve you in this regard.
What would have happened if it was citizens? All four would be in jail immediately, if they even get that far without being shot for "resisting arrest" first. At the very least they'd get a beating somewhere between having cuffs put on them and getting into a squad car. We know this from all the recorded instances of police brutality looking exactly as I've just described.
Lost their jobs. Come on. Would you merely "lose your job" if you watched your buddy murder a guy and stood there throughout the whole thing?
I feel like that's more coincidence than anything
> This happens all over America, all the time. Thread is full of links or a quick hop on google will serve you in this regard
I bet there is tons of anecdotal data to support any claim. There needs to be aggregated data that shows it's happening in high enough rates to be a "systemic" issue.
> Would you merely "lose your job" if you watched your buddy murder a guy and stood there throughout the whole thing?
In most countries bystanders are not obligated to assist. So nothing would happen to you?
Ooooor you'd be an accessory to murder.
Sure, but that's not what you asked.
I believe the other three will be charged and convicted. At least that what I hope will happen.
Do you have any sources for that? I can't seem to find any references for that. According to some reports on the incident, the police at one point went into the store not sure what they did there though.
Sadly, "belief and hope" hasn't worked for entire swaths of the population. If "belief and hope" worked, we could just "hope" there wont be riots and everything would be merry.
In reality, every two months something horrible happens happens and gets on the news. It probably happens much more than that and isn't on the news. And if it wasn't on video -- it is like it didn't happen.
It is rare to have video. It is even more rare for a charge. Even more for a conviction. I dont think looting is the answer here, but i seriously question the judgement of people who actually think there is no problem of police violence.
Even if you think that police violence is rare, there is the added problem of no consequence. I grew up with case after case, the most memoriable wones were https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Amadou_Diallo and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_King#Beating
Any time a person is killed or treated wrongly is terrible and police should be held accountable. But I believe it is more to do with rotten people than it is a rotten system.
We have aggregated data. We in fact have been building the aggregated data over years. Black people are disproportionately killed by police.0,1.
0. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
How is it sustainable that nationwide protests need to happen before an officer is charged for murder? Does that not seem like a broken system?
The state should have the monopoly on violence. Then, instead of everyone doing violence, we have certain, appointed people given the responsibility who can then be trained and monitored. This is part and parcel of the Rule of Law. Certainly, this system isn't perfect. But you only have to live in a country or region without Rule of Law to know that it's much preferable to improve the system, than to abandon it.
Yup, and I have the receipts to prove it: my motorcycle was vandalized in Oakland during the protests. A small price to pay for unsung voices being heard
Are you going to speak for the elderly woman who was beaten by a 2x4, or her husband who was beaten when he came to protect her? Are you going to speak for the independent owner of the vintage clothing store in LA who was preparing to re-open and had his windows smashed and his inventory stolen?
Can you determine who will pay, and what "price" they will pay?
Have you ever criticized someone for their callous opinions on these matters, because it doesn't affect them so much? Well, perhaps the tenor of your opinion is connected to your not being affected so much.
Your circumstances just happen to afford you that privilege.
Sure, I will - it's a shame that the cops refused to follow the science on the subject and deescelate protests. Instead they chose to fire on peaceful protesters and kick off a riot.
It's not like this kind of shit isn't studied. What article are we commenting on right now? This information has been available for a very, very long time.
So, to everyone that has been harmed by the police, directly (having their eyes shot out, being choked to death), or indirectly (property damage due to an avoidable riot), I think the police should be held responsible.
> Sure, I will
Easy for you to say. You are in the privileged position of only having lost some body work on your motorcycle. Do you really think they'd consent to your "speaking for them?"
it's a shame that the cops refused to follow the science on the subject and deescelate protests. Instead they chose to fire on peaceful protesters and kick off a riot.
The bad people here are the extremists who are egging on the violence, while creating the devious tactical position of making it very hard for the police to distinguish who is who.
So, to everyone that has been harmed by the police, directly (having their eyes shot out, being choked to death), or indirectly (property damage due to an avoidable riot), I think the police should be held responsible.
Yes. And how about someone speaks for you, as you say you would for others? You are going to pay for the inventory of the shop. You are going to pay for the medical bills of the shop owner and his wife, plus pain and suffering. How about that?
Well shit it isn't, it results every year in people being murdered in cold blood, nobody being arrested for it despite the perpetrators being known, and the majority of the population is apparently utterly fine with this - even you are merely saying that this situation "needs improvement", like you're marking homework. "The police only murdered one person in cold blood today rather than two, have a cookie!"
I've had a friend in an EU country have the police break their bones and leave them locked up without medical treatment for weeks, because they were an Eastern European refugee. This is what "Rule of Law" looks like - it looks like entire populations being utterly terrorised by a sanctioned force that they have absolutely no power to stop.
Law is a bunch of words on a piece of paper, it has no power to rule. We leave that to organisations (the police, prosecutor's office, courts and prisons) with a history and present of institutionalised racism and no accountability to the communities they terrorise.
I think that's an important distinction to make between such a place, and a place of anarchy or a commune, which aren't necessarily places that don't have "rule of law" and aren't necessarily hubs of raw violent chaos.
monopoly on violence exists because people are evil and violent
without a lawful monopoly on violence you get much of what you see in the rest of the world
anarchist want to destroy the current system flaws and all for a vacuum of justice
Is this a good faith interpretation of what you honestly think they were saying?
That doesn't sound too bad to me.
> people are evil and violent
It seems that isn't the really the case, it seems only a small minority of people are, but unfortunately violence allows aggregation of power which allows more violence which allows...
> anarchist want to destroy the current system flaws and all for a vacuum of justice
Not aware of any anarchists that want whatever a "vacuum of justice" is.
In fact, note that the concept of a jury is intended to work this way (although is missing many elements, and exists under the permanent organisation of the court) - a temporary organisation gathering to find justice, then dispersing.
Unfortunately it's difficult to tell the exact outcome of implementing any of it on a wider scale, as the times leftism has actually been in power have largely been during times of war where a lot of theory was thrown out the window, or using leftist messaging to implement something closer to a dictatorship. All we know is that a lot of it works when implemented in our own communities.
After the George Floyd incident, everyone was in agreement that this should stop. What's happening with the violence and the vandalism is just muddying the waters. It's almost as if the purpose isn't to make things better, but to foment a race war to destabilize the USA.
No, they really weren't - or at least not in any way that might lead to actionable results, like building systems that do not give cops the power to murder people without accountability. The same as all the other times the police have murdered people. It's not like this is a new thing that people are just waking up to.
Can you substantiate that, or is it just your opinion? You can justify the imposition of your opinion on everyone? (Through violent intimidation?)
like building systems that do not give cops the power to murder people without accountability
This has happened, incrementally. Can you design a system, ground-up that will work as well as the current one? I suspect that's far more likely than iterating on the current one. That's also an opinion.
Do you have statistics that show that? Are more cops charged and imprisoned after murdering unarmed people every year, or does the number of unarmed murdered people go down, at all? People who die mysteriously in custody?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/fatal-police-s...
However, the overall trend in police killings is flat.
https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends
Interestingly:
“White Police Officers Are Not More Likely To Shoot Minority Suspects”
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/26/745731839/new-study-says-whit...
The notion that peaceful protest will be respected? The president and vice president have asserted it. Yet both of them castigated Colin Kaepernick's peaceful protests. They don't have any respect for peaceful protest. Kaepernick was subject to ridicule, his livelihood destroyed, and threatened with ejection from his own country, for his peaceful protest, by the sitting POTUS.
Amy Cooper insists she's not a racist. But used her whiteness as a weapon, and a black man's blackness as a deficit, knowing full well with her threat against him that this same racial animus would be applied by the police. That's why she made the threat. What's more striking about the story? Her lie about the events that were to have transpired? Or her truth? White power. White power. White power.
There is no good reason for thinking people to respect American rule of law from an ethical or moral standpoint. Only respect it the same way black Americans, minorities, poor have come to: fear of its power.
The system isn't just imperfect. It isn't what it purports to be. And it isn't accountable. Why defend it? Where's even the pride in defending it? Where could legitimacy even come from?
What if those people don't do it according to the law or in a just manner? We just all say: "oh well, they have a monopoly on force, so nothing to be done"?
You probably think it was quite rude to separate from the British at all. Perhaps we should go back to being a colony, since the separation was actually a complete violation of the crown's monopoly on violence!
When you commit a crime and violate someone's freemdoms (the primary being right to life, liberty, property), you forfeit your own. When you kill someone and take their life, you steal or destroy property, you are now in debt to society. By living in a society you agree to its rules and when the rules are broken a price must be paid to deter others from breaking them.
Just because someone broke the rules, doesn't mean that everyone else gets to. The police officer was in the wrong. He was arrested, and charged. He will pay for what he did.
Be the change you want to see. Protest in a way that doesn't harm others. Many lost business and their livelihoods due to the destruction. What did they do to deserve that?
The Police reaction to these protests clearly shows systemic reform is needed. Peaceful protesters and reporters have been tear gassed, shot, and arrested. They don't deserve to be tret like that just because others decided to vandalize and loot.
This is exactly what extremist groups exploiting the protests want. The extremists want to foment violence between the protesters and the police. The situation plays into their hands, because the police have no way of distinguishing who is who.
The circumstances are not normal. Rule of Law has broken down. By continuing the protests, peaceful protesters are creating cover for looters and violent perpetrators. Those protesters who are willfully exploiting this situation to "pressure" the authorities are having evil done for their goals.
There needs to be another kind of lockdown to prevent the spread of the contagion of violence, the contagion of chaos, and the contagion of injustice.
That's a pretty bold claim. Do you have any statistics to show police are by and large using disproportionate force?
> Peaceful protest over the years haven't changed the system. Charging that one officer doesn't solve it either.
There are bad people in society. That doesn't mean the whole system is bad. Of course there is room for improvement, and action should be taken to remove those who are not fit to serve.
> The Police reaction to these protests clearly shows systemic reform is needed. Peaceful protesters and reporters have been tear gassed, shot, and arrested. They don't deserve to be tret like that just because others decided to vandalize and loot.
I agree that peaceful protesters don't deserve that. But let's get this clear, it was violent rioting that was occurring. In that situation, how are you to quickly separate the two groups?
The crowd of people slowly marching while getting shot and teargassed or the protesters. Those in the liquor store are the looters. Pretty simple.
If firing indescriminantly into a crowd makes it hard to tell these groups apart it sounds like the police tactics need work.
Oh well, the liquor store is getting looted. Sucks that you can't deal with that because there are protests because you are murdering black people. Fix the bigger problem before worrying about property.
All of the videos from the last few days is still being sorted, but from what I've seen the violence from police against protesters far outstrips that of protesters against random people or cops. I'm in fact only aware of several incidents, and all of which were easily justifiable - a man firing a bow at protesters, an idiot screaming the n-word at protesters, and a man charging at protesters with a sword.
So whenever people say "but riots!" I can't help but question the priorities - can't that wait until after we figure out the police brutality thing? You're only hurting our efforts here, and helping the cops justify the unjustifiable.
How? As far as I can tell no one was killed at the hands of the police (after protests started). Just in Chicago at least 17 people were killed during the protests.
And how many by the protestors?
> As far as I can tell no one was killed at the hands of the police (after protests started)
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/01/867281529/louisville-police-c...
Note that shooting someone isn't the only form of violence possible. Escalating by firing rubber bullets or tear gassing or driving your car into peaceful protestors are all violence, and I've seen tens, maybe a hundred examples of that at this point.
> And how many by the protestors?
We don't know if they were all "protestors" but at least not the police: https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/16-dead-at-least-30-pe...
From your article: "the police and National Guard were shot at first and that the shots that killed McAtee were fired in response", and that they weren't part of the protests.
It seems rioters exhibited a disproportionate amount of violence compared to police though.
> We don't know if they were all "protestors" but at least not the police
In fact, we don't know if any of them were protestors, so your insistence to relate the two groups is odd.
You're not to quickly do anything. Most countries claim to have the right an assumption of innocence for a reason - they believe, very strongly, that committing violence towards an innocent person is worse than letting a guilty person get away with whatever they were doing. Property can be rebuilt, for the most part; people's lives, not so much.
To put it bluntly - if a group of people robs a bank in the middle of the business day, you don't tear gas and shoot at everyone inside it.
I'm sure there was things the police could do better, but no one died at the hands of the police (after protesting started). The same can't be said for the protestors/rioters.
That sounds an awful lot like a dictatorship, not democracy. In a democracy, it's the citizens' job to keep their Government accountable - when the population says that the right to a presumption of innocence is paramount, they create a Government to ensure that right.
What you are suggesting is that the population does not believe that the right to a presumption of innocence is paramount - that it is ok to risk life, liberty and limb of innocent people to go after a criminal. That's maybe fine (although I'd argue ethically wrong), but stop teaching the opposite to your children. If you taught your children that the police and courts were out to kill them or lock them up indefinitely for nothing they have any control over, maybe they'd correctly be a little more terrified from an early age - and maybe they'd campaign to change that. Funnily enough, one demographic does get taught that, and others the opposite - because that's how it works out in practice.
The police have literally blinded people, including journalists, permanently, by the way. And potentially have killed people - "In Louisville, David McAtee, 53, the owner of a well-known barbecue business, was shot and killed early Monday. The authorities said that officers from the Louisville Metro Police Department and National Guard soldiers opened fire in response to a gunshot as they tried to disperse a large crowd after a curfew had gone into effect. It was not immediately clear if Mr. McAtee had been killed by the police or someone in the crowd, the authorities said." Of course, as always when the police kill people, body cameras were not on.
Many people have died at the hands of other rioters as a result of the protests.
I'm not saying that people needed to loose their eyes, but they were out after curfew which was enacted because they wanted people to go home due to the violence.
There's a lot of energy being put into making this sound like it's more violent than it is, again, so that you agree with it and stay compliant. When the Government does something violent that goes against the reasons it was created, you should not be compliant. I'd hope that you would agree that the Government cannot unilaterally execute people, and that just sitting there while it does so is... completely immoral.
> I'd hope that you would agree that the Government cannot unilaterally execute people, and that just sitting there while it does so is... completely immoral.
No of course I don't want the government executing people. But the death of George Floyd was the result of actions from one man, not of the entire government. I think you would be hard-pressed to find any member of the government that didn't see an issue with what happened.
[0] https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-chicago-gun-...
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/08/police-officer-shooti...
Just some starter insight to reading about police violence. Police in US use disproportionate force compared to any other country.
> between 90 percent and 95 percent—of the civilians shot by officers were actively attacking police or other citizens when they were shot”
Sounds like the vast majority used exactly the amount of force required.
Also, does not anywhere state the types of crimes being committed which would be relevant.
Showing an avg. 50% fatality rate on police shootings. You can compared this to other countries, which have the same statistic at something like 5-10% and it's not like these countries are overrun by mass shootings or terrorists. Some might actually says its the reverse :D
He was only arrested and charged because of the protests.
I have a feeling that would have happened regardless. Do you have a source that shows there wasn't an intent to charge him before the protests?
Protest in a way that doesn't harm others.
Also the government might try to go after you legally or kill you even if you do things peacefully. See: COINTELPRO, Aaron Swartz, etc.
How does the "pursuit of happiness" become "property?"
I believe that property rights are a core principal of American freedoms. Otherwise there would not be 'just compensation' for it in the constitution.
"He will pay for what he did." You seem to have certain knowledge of the future. Dismissively saying everything will be OK does not actually make it happen.
I'm only going from past experience: If anything is learned from the many times this story has played out in the past, the cops wont wont pay. In fact, until an independent investigation: the cops were well on their way to freedom:
"The criminal complaint said that the autopsy “revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation.” Mr. Floyd, the complaint said, had underlying health conditions, including coronary artery disease and hypertensive heart disease."
https://www.nytimes.com/article/george-floyd-autopsy-michael...
These are things people are protesting:
0. That a video has to exist
1. That nationwide protests need to happen before an officer is charged
2. That when it happens, many non-PoC say "oh he probably did something wrong [thus i dont care if the alleged criminal was killed]"
3. That when it happens, non-PoC say "oh it will be OK" knowing full well their own children will never be subject to this type of treatment.
People are not angry about this incident only they are angry about it happening over and over and over w/o any real systemic change.
I appreciate this part a lot. It helps me realize that movements also have brands they need to manage and have similar struggles to companies that are trying to manage brands at various levels of centralization—e.g., the challenge of maintaining brand alignment among distributed franchisees.
> A "leaderless movement" has all of the biomass of a huge national organization, but none of the immune system and command/control to counter such organized exploiters.
I wonder how well leaderless movements can create things. It seems as organizations and movements become less coordinated, less structured in how to resolve internal conflicts and align, that they would be more suited to attacking things or ideas, rather than building them.
Any thoughts on this?
As you say, social change movements face many of the same struggles as companies, including maintaining brand alignment and quality control across a network of distributed actors. For this reason, social change movements often adopt (and adapt) the same management tools and techniques that large companies have developed for their operations.
But there is a bunch of literature about managing these challenges specifically for social change movements. One reasonably concise and approachable example is: https://www.citizenshandbook.org/network-campaigns.pdf
>It seems as organizations and movements become less coordinated, less structured in how to resolve internal conflicts and align, that they would be more suited to attacking things or ideas, rather than building them.
I'm not sure this is true. Leaderless movements can be well coordinated and structured (it's just hard). And poorly coordinated and structured movements aren't really suited to doing anything well, even just attacking things and ideas.
Going by the praise he had for his organization and the people helping him, MLK had something like this.
And poorly coordinated and structured movements aren't really suited to doing anything well, even just attacking things and ideas.
When exploited by organized outside forces, they do one thing really well: Create disorder, chaos, and disdain.
I believe it was Thomas Carlysle who said something like, "Revolutions are started by idealists, prosecuted by fanatics, and co-opted by scoundrels."
Tim Pool recently quipped in one of his videos that some copies of the Antifa handbook have explicit instructions to "pretend to be BLM" for cover.
Yeah. My house and business would be insured. No amount of insurance can revive a man, woman or child murdered by police. I'm OK with personal sacrifices in service of justice.
I would happily burn all of my earthly possessions if it meant babies like Bou Bou Phonesavanh were no longer at risk of being critically injured by flashbangs or murdered by stray gunfire.
On the one hand, the latter avoid the weaknesses of the former, in that they can neither easily be 'taken over' by outside forces nor provide a single point of weakness for their enemies to target.
And that's useful for both software and protest movements, since it leave a single target for the opposition to go after, whether that's through legal threats, harassment, arrest or assault/murder.
At the same time, it also makes the system prone to abuse by bad actors, since there's no one able to either get rid of them or distance the group from them in general.
Hence the extremists taking over political movements and protests, and the trolls/extremists/criminals becoming an increasingly prominent part of any decentralised community or social network setup online.
This in turn leaves both open to attack from their opponents and the media, who can point at the worst elements and say "See? These people are all evil/sociopathic/crazy/whatever' based on it.
It's like to some degree, avoiding bad actors and running a robust and uncensorable system are fundamentally incompatible with one another, in the same way as usability and security are.
In situations where mob mentality can take over and chaos can create a "fog of war" this is not true! Even though most of the protesters want to remain peaceful, the amplitude of sowing chaos, and its potential to spark additional chaos within mass rally situations, are providing extremists that "single point of weakness."
Basically, against an organized opponent that wants to create chaos, mass rallies are kind of like packing together certain isotopes of uranium atoms. Even if most of the units are "inert" (in that most of the people want peace,) if enough individuals with activation potential are densely packed enough, you can still get the chain reaction.
The police have loads of leaders, and they've devolved pretty fast too. I'm not sure if leadership is really a decisive factor.
I find it very odd that the police still cannot after all these years and with all development in surveillance tech distinguish between peaceful demonstrators and rioters. One could almost believe that they have no interest in making that distinction.
We refused to leave and fortunately they left and let us have a peaceful march.
There doesn’t seem to be an interest in separating out the extreme minority that protest violently. There had been zero violence or destruction that day. A very well-behaved crowd exercising peaceful civil disobedience met by violence from police. In 2020.
Are the lockdowns optional now? Are they situational depending on the politics of the event? Because it sure seems like it. Georgia got hammered for reopening too early, but nobody had much to say about Atlanta having massive protests over the past days. Either the lockdowns are unnecessary or they are necessary and people are putting public health at serious risk with these “large gatherings.”
I wish we could reboot 2020. It’s a g-damned mess.
A global pandemic is awful, but it does not alleviate us of our civic responsibility.
Was it uncomfortable and difficult? Yes. Am I glad I went? Hell yes. Black lives matter.
The protests haven’t worked though for the last 20 years or so. IMO it’s more important to vote and promote change than to block traffic.
People remember how you made them feel more easily than what you actually said. Preventing them from getting somewhere is a great way to just piss people off.
How do you know? Do you have an alternate timeline of history to compare it to?
You can. As far as I know, the US is still a democratic country with elections.
And they were told to "shut up and dribble" and the president said they were sons of bitches and should be fired? [1]
There's your peaceful leadership right there.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._national_anthem_protests_...
Then, people who are complacent complain no one is trying.
You just don’t like the priorities of everyone else so you’re claiming it hasn’t worked.
That bit is correct. Yes, it does work -- for some. But the masses that are angry are whom it didn't work for. When it starts working for the other 90% people wont be as angry.
Exactly how is destroying low income housing, small businesses (many of them minority owned) and peoples places of employment going to persuade "the elites"?
If not, please explain how you having a mutual fund means that "the elites" who control Apple aren't impacted by lost revenue.
So if you can't understand how hurting the pocket books of "the elite" can encourage them to compromise, you haven't been paying attention to history.
History says that mob violence is probably more likely to lead to a dictatorship than to another new deal, but you're being willfully ignorant if you don't acknowledge the existence of a potential chain of consequences that starts with "damaging companies' bottom lines" and ends with policy change.
Many of these issues were reversed in an attempt to be tough on crime again with a big push from the AG in 2017. Tensions have been stoked by things like a pardon dealt out to a sheriff who violated a court order relating to racial profiling. I have a hard time believing these acts aren't having their intended effects.
Are you suggesting shooting rubber bullets is an appropriate means to enforce social distancing?
So, yes, context matters. I would absolutely argue the value in the being part of the strongest push against police brutality in decades, that just might result in systemic change, is incredibly more worthy than virtually any other activity. It does not mean there is no public health cost. It does mean it is a tragic choice to have to make.
Thanks.
Mostly flashbangs, fireworks, tear gas and mace.
A couple of videos associated with incidents in Seattle from tonight are here:
- https://twitter.com/izaacmellow/status/1267679820600668161
- https://twitter.com/jxyzn/status/1267684722341064704 (same incident, higher angle)
- https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1267673936659021830
The general characterization I would give is that there have been calm periods, and then moments of intense chaos. In the chaos, protestors have often been throwing projectiles (mostly plastic bottles, occasionally firecrackers; some have claimed bricks have been thrown in Seattle, but I haven't seen it myself).
However, in general I would say that the SPD has repeatedly been the party to _instigate_ the chaos, by launching a round of flashbangs, mace, and pepper spray.
> after all these years and with all development in surveillance tech distinguish between peaceful demonstrators and rioters. One could almost believe that they have no interest in making that distinction.
The thing is that they can. That's a very deliberate tactic, down to planting of provocators.
If you been watching what's going on around the world, the allegations of that, including provocator planting, followed pretty much every major demonstration event.
It's naive, if not silly, to use that "hey, he started it first!" argument at the time when the fact of confrontation happening is already obvious.
The talk now should not be who started the violence, but how to end it, a peace treaty to say.
There exists an asymmetry in the dynamics of protesters vs police during a protest. Very simple:
Anyone can be 'planted' in a group of protesters to start stirring up trouble (agent-provocateur). Then the police have 'justification' to use whatever amount of force they think is required.
On the other hand, it's practically impossible for a regular citizen to be embedded into a riot police response unit.
Add to that the police have practically no real oversight and investigate themselves (assuming internal affairs counts as police).
One side can't fail (except morally), while the other side always will end up with the shorter end of the stick.
For all the obvious, on-the-nose proof that reactive states differ from proactive states, I find it very odd that people are still folding their arms and brandishing smug expressions for their equivalently useless ideas as soon as someone else's idea yields a critical failure.
Critical thinking is not an art, nor a science, nor difficult. It just requires someone to maintain a consistent curiosity and skepticism for the utility of information. If someone tells you cats climb trees, you should automatically think, Not all cats can climb trees and How useful is this to me?. And if you have a cat, you might sequentially think, Do I have any trees that my cat could climb? and How much of a tree should I trim to prevent my cat from climbing it? and maybe Do I have a way to retrieve my cat from one of my trees? and so on and so forth. So, someone please explain why, given the seriousness everyone attributes to the lockdowns, to police brutality, etc. Just... why are you doing the equivalent of hearing that cats can climb trees, and then you think, My cat would never climb my trees, because my trees aren't cat-climbable trees, so that makes my cat, my trees and myself better than other cats, trees, and cat owners?
I have been in the middle of protests when I worked for Reuters and the difference between peaceful and violent is very tiny. I was in the no-man’s land between the KKK and the New Black Panthers in the wake of the James Byrd Jr. lynching and it went from frenetic but peaceful to riot in 8.3 seconds. Actual combat is a a lot less ambiguous and disorienting. Not defending police or condemning them, but when an airborne brick heads your way, it’s a pretty tall order to expect immediate and accurate identification of friend or foe.
It is fascinating to me how left wing protests seem to frequently degrade into violence. Recent case in point was the reopen protesters. I don’t think a single shot was fired by the crowd, nor were any buildings burned or looted. The Charlottesville, VA protest by the extreme right wing however is a counterexample — but it’s an exception that proves the rule. The Tea Party protests were never violent. In almost every large-scale protest that has left and extreme left wing elements, looting, fires, and violence is a foregone conclusion. It’s historical record.
It’s really tragic because pretty much all Americans were outraged about Floyd’s death, but as soon as looting, fires, and violence starts, then a large portion of the population now starts discussing and being angry about that rather than the core issue.
I'd also like to see numbers. There are a lot of pride parades, various demonstrations, women's marches etc that aren't met with violence.
I guess my point was that at a police brutality protest, you have protestors facing police which is instantly adversarial and a form of counter protest if cards are played poorly. If you have a reopen rally per the example up-thread, you're (very generally speaking) not going to have quite the animosity between them and those securing the area. And combine that with the fact that someone not wanting to rush and reopen is likely to stay at home per state instructions.
If true, then it’s sad that loss of property is such an effective distraction to facing down centuries of systemic oppression. On a more conspiratorial note, this seems like a good counter strategy for the people who ostensibly would rather the masses focus on property damage than laws, statutes and police training.
On a separate note, the historical record of protests is mostly disseminated through MSM, which has a profit motive for click/read bait. So it’s truly hard to know the extent of violence occurring in recent protests. The citizen record (captured through Twitter, Instagram, TikTok) seems overrun with police violence against protesters and the media record seems overrun with pictures of looting and burning buildings. How does one truly grasp the extent of either?
On a more conspiratorial note, this seems like a good
counter strategy for the people who ostensibly would
rather the masses focus on property damage than laws,
statutes and police training.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_provocateur
There's a lot of direct and circumstantial evidence pointing toward exactly that sort of thing happening during this current time of unrest.
There are plenty of incidents during the current protests that, and I'm going phrase this very mildly for HN's sake, certainly invite... uh... speculation as far as whether or not there are agents provocateur at play.
Moving away from speculation and into the realm of hard facts, this sort of escalation is an explicitly stated goal of some movements. Example:
It's not any kind of exception. Protests involving the klan and the Nazis have often been extremely dangerous.
Aside from that, the point you're making is trivial in an obvious way that you really ought to understand. Violent right wingers are not typically on the protesters' side in American demonstrations, Nazis and KKK notwithstanding, because they are on the side of the police.
Think about what these ideological categories mean for a moment and you wouldn't normally expect leftists to put on riot gear and bust heads for the man, or for conservatives to go out and violently oppose the status quo.
Can you spot the difference between an African and European swallow? I bet you can't. But a professional bird watcher could tell them apart in a second.
Same thing with protestors. When I was active I could easily tell the difference between someone potentially violent and someone peaceful. Woman with a stroller - probably peaceful. Person in all black with a large backpack - potentially violent. Admittedly, this was many years ago but I don't think rioters are any harder to spot these days.
Thing is, most riots are planned and not spontaneous events. Troublemakers infiltrate the crowds and try to cause confrontations with the police. The police reacts with heavy handedness causing those who are peaceful to sympathize with the troublemakers. More of them join the troublemakers side causing more confrontations and eventually it spirals out of control.
The simple solution to this problem is for the police to target the troublemakers and to let the peaceful protestors be. It actually is that easy because organizers almost always knows who the troublemakers are and would share that info with the police. But the police isn't interested. I suspect that is because by and large they love riots just as much as the rioters.
https://twitter.com/s_Allahverdi/status/1267240521052946432
Many protest organizers are constantly trying to identify troublemakers and stop them.
Wait for it...
> The simple solution to this problem is for the police to target the troublemakers and to let the peaceful protestors be.
You are suggesting that the police should profile individuals based on their appearance?
I think I know what you want to imply, but did you note the complete absence of race or colour in OPs comment? And alos the completely different circumstances, crowd control vs. standard law enforcement?
I did notice the absence of race or color and you will note my comment does not include any notion of race. You added race. I did note judging by appearance. You added age, out of nowhere.
Using appearance to treat people differently is profiling, though not always racial profiling. Should non-racial profiling be okay? To your inclusion of age, should we treat gatherings of youth differently than gatherings of the elderly?
The GP says "...for the police to target...". No distinction is made between crowd control and standard law enforcement.
You're comparing protests about systemic racism and murder to protests getting hair cuts and lowering taxes.
Of course one side's protests usually break out in violence. They are protesting the very fact that they are inordinately subject to widespread state-sanctioned violence.
People in Waco were also heavily armed.
"The Women’s March on Washington was likely the largest single-day demonstration in recorded US history" and entirely free of violence.
> all Americans were outraged about Floyd’s death
"Outraged" is a strong term. "One more tragic item in the news which is quickly forgotten" is more accurate for most of white America.
> as soon as looting, fires, and violence starts
No longer forgotten, is what that achieves.
There's a big difference in protesting because you're being taxed too much (in you opinion) and protesting because people with your same skin colour are being systematically targeted by police and killed for no reason.
thats very interesting. The difference seems to be in initial reactions of the police to peaceful protests. With lockdown protesters, police showed up in soft clothes and didn't initiate violence on the protestors.
Regarding the much more serious issue of police brutality, police responded very violently to the initially peaceful protests. They were the ones that escalated things. Very interesting overall, and I think the obvious answer is that left wing causes seem to offer critiques that are much more incisive and dangerous to the government.
Why the "government"? I don't think the police automatically defend the interests of the currently-elected politicians. In the absence of distinguishing evidence, I assign much higher priors to them defending their own interests.
Well, because one is made by enemies, vs friends of the power? One expects retaliations, and prepares to counterattack, and another don't because they don't even know why they should?
Every time when the revolution happens, and the power is toppled, its topped by a greater power, which means one with bigger guns, and heavier fists.
This is just you being selective in how you view things due to your personal politics. I live in Portland and for the last couple summers we had to deal with Joey Gibson and his band of goons repeatedly attempting to incite violence at protests. It's a core view among modern white supremacists that they will rise to power atop a race war that they instigate. And let's not even start talking about the 2A crowd that shows up to everything armed in an attempt to intimidate people.
It's a bit much to ignore all that just because you wanna take a jab at left leaning politics you disagree with.
I find it very saddening as the victims of these crimes end up being victims that are ignored by "privacy" advocates and proponents, as if "privacy" is a bigger concern than violent crimes.
FWIW, German police regularly used undercover, black-clad, violent agents as a pretext for breaking up peaceful protests. It's probably an established tactic. But the situation in the USA looks very different (from here), violent protesters appear to be a small minority of the problematic people, most of which are just criminals using the opportunity to loot.
There are a lot of bad actors that win with choatic protests.
> "Ich weiß, dass wir bei brisanten Großdemos verdeckt agierende Beamte, die als taktische Provokateure, als vermummte Steinewerfer fungieren, unter die Demonstranten schleusen. Sie werfen auf Befehl Steine oder Flaschen in Richtung der Polizei, damit die dann mit der Räumung beginnen kann.
Translation: "I know that we insert undercover agents as tactical provocateurs, as hooded(disguised) stone throwers, among the protesters during large controversial protests. They throw stones or bottles at our command towards the police so it can begin the evacuation".
It’s already happening in India and China. I’m sure it’s happening here too, with an added startup component with the example of Clearview AI. The big companies get in on the action too:
‘There are many companies that offer facial recognition products and services, including Amazon, Microsoft and FaceFirst. Those companies all need access to enormous databases of photos to improve the accuracy of their matching technology. But while most facial recognition algorithms are trained on well-established, publicly circulating datasets — some of which have also faced criticism for taking people’s photos without their explicit consent — Ever is different in using its own customers’ photos to improve its commercial technology.‘[2]
'In the 1998 Hollywood thriller Enemy of the State, an innocent man (played by Will Smith) is pursued by a rogue spy agency that uses the advanced satellite “Big Daddy” to monitor his every move. The film — released 15 years before Edward Snowden blew the whistle on a global surveillance complex — has achieved a cult following.'
It was, however, much more than just prescient: it was also an inspiration, even a blueprint, for one of the most powerful surveillance technologies ever created. So contends technology writer and researcher Arthur Holland Michel in his compelling book Eyes in the Sky. He notes that a researcher (unnamed) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California who saw the movie at its debut decided to “explore — theoretically, at first — how emerging digital-imaging technology could be affixed to a satellite” to craft something like Big Daddy, despite the “nightmare scenario” it unleashes in the film. Holland Michel repeatedly notes this contradiction between military scientists’ good intentions and a technology based on a dystopian Hollywood plot.'
'In 2006, the cinematically inspired research was picked up by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is tasked with US military innovation (D. Kaiser Nature 543, 176–177; 2017). DARPA funded the building of an aircraft-mounted camera with a capacity of almost two billion pixels. The Air Force had dubbed the project Gorgon Stare, after the monsters of penetrating gaze from classical Greek mythology, whose horrifying appearance turned observers to stone. (DARPA called its programme Argus, after another mythical creature: a giant with 100 eyes.)'[3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/millions-people-upload...
How many organizers are there compared to participants? How are the participants supposed to know the police intrusion has been agreed to? How do you know there aren't participants who would choose to align themselves with the "autonomous bloc" over the police? Assuming all "good"(work with organizers) demonstrators work together, how would you give notice without giving the "autonomous bloc" ample time to disappear into the crowd? It isn't like the demonstrators are surrounding the rioters and/or opening a path for the police.
As for using tech to track rioters, perhaps it is far from good enough in protest situations. I imagine it is hard to get a hold of enough data to train for that situation. Perhaps the police have been prevented from using it. I know Clearview AI tech has already been banned in a number of places.
Did you ever go to the police to find out what you could have done differently to prevent the indiscriminate charge?
These are complex situations that don't follow rules. The mob consists of peaceful protesters, violent protesters and looters. people's membership in any of these groups can be multiple and shift over time.
it's not reasonable for police to make an assessment who is who on the ground because their job is not to be a jury. what is reasonable is that once a gathering crosses the threshold of criminal activity it becomes illegal.
one solution is to just arrest everybody after giving them time to disperse. but to do that you need overwhelming numbers. not always the resources to do that.
you can't just stand there and let people beat you, stab you, lob projectiles at you. you have to respond to that force with force. You also need to protect property again using force.
again unless you have overwhelming numbers you can't engage in hand-to-hand combat or using battons. this strategy cannot be used by itself to bring the crowd under control. so each officer needs a force multiplier some sort of tool that can effect multiple people. it's a given that in such situations any such tool will affect multiple people even those doing nothing violent.
tear gas and rubber bullets are okay tools. but I think there needs to be more. when a patient becomes psychotic and dangerous in a hospital or asylum you don't mace their face. you give them a sedative. instead of CS gas it would be great if there was some sort of sedative gas to just slow people down enough to sap their will to continue.
police have to handle the situations as best they can using the tools they have.
I don't think you can say that big protests are all about the death of one man or the treatment of one group. I think the causes of people's unhappiness here is systemic and this is probably just an outlet where people feel now we can stand up.
the police can't cure the people of their anger no matter what they do.
when I see this chaos, I remember ahow US media lionized what happened in Hong Kong not even 1 year ago, and I can't help thinking of the proverb, people in glass houses....
However, mayors or governors could. Tell AGs to have compulsory investigations of all policce shootings. Charge police officers who don't report corruption or violence with conspiracy charges. Bust police unions which arehelping criminal cops and charge them under RICO statutes.
Actually, what I was trying to say, and I did not say clearly...was I don't think the anger that is driving this unrest is only a result of police violence.
I think it's a lot of anger from multiple causes, economic, the lockdown, and so on. That's why I said, no matter what police do, they cannot cure that.
Hopefully I made it clear now.
That is the most casually delivered fucked up dystopian line I've seen on HN.
I still think it's a great idea
This way of thinking, looking at it as a war-like situation and vocabulary, is what leads to escalation. On the other hand, neither is a completly off-hands approach. Tough call, right? Funny thing, when white guys with masks, tactical vests and AR-15s stormed official government buildings, e.g. in Minisota, police didn't intervene.
And seriously, hand-to-hand combat? Hope you're not a cop.
Correct from your perspective.
I don't think it was used when the gathering was peaceful unless it was area denial. I think there's some or all of property damage, arson, looting, arming and throwing, before they use those tools.
Interested to see a video with context from the current unrest where that's not the case.
By hand to hand, I mean the stuff that happens when police and gatherers engage at close quarters.
There's lots of these scenes from the HK unrest. it basically is hand-to-hand combat with batons like I said.
It's called food. If the price of food hadn't just doubled (no sales, low unit prices sold out), and urban supermarkets didn't continue to have bare shelves, we wouldn't be seeing the same level of unrest.
I'm certainly not trying to downplay the longstanding grievances behind these protests. But there are orthogonal reasons causing them to happen at such scale.
Gregg Popovich expressed a similar thought in his interview with The Nation: [1]
”[Protests] are very necessary, but they need to be organized better. It’s frustrating. When Dr. King did a protest, you knew when to show, when to come back the next day. But if you’re just organizing protests and everyone is coming and going in every direction, it doesn’t work that way. If it was nonviolent, they knew to be nonviolent, but this is muddled. More leadership would be very welcome so these incredible mass demonstrations can’t be used by people for other means. We can limit the bad, but only if things are organized better.“
[1]: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/gregg-popovich-geo...
None of these get more coverage than property violence. None of these got a response from political leadership.
It’s a bad look for the country that the only time our leadership is willing to punish law enforcement relatively mildly (currently the police officer in question is charged for only up to 35 years in prison with his accomplices merely losing their jobs, something statistically has been borne out that they get hired for more law enforcement work in neighboring districts) for killing someone in a terrible and slow manner is when disruption on property happens.
1. Should there be police at all?
2. If so, can an institution staffed by these particular people ever function correctly?
The more effectively the protesters self-police, the more powerful an argument they make that you could improve society by disbanding urban police departments and letting the protest organizers assume de facto responsibility for maintaining the social order.
Of course, the other end of the violence spectrum is an effective argument, as well.
The problem is not de-escalation, is that the police is behaving in a criminal manner.
I am not sure because "this content is not available in your region".
Also this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LTeTUtbKvo
cops unloading bricks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTA0N3kkPaE
Most of the bigger conspiracies about police being behind everything are usually wrong and show similarities to all conspiracies (they take tiny seeds of truth and amplify it 1000x fold into far bigger schemes).
There was a video of that one agent provocateur cop with an umbrella breaking windows with a hammer, then there were a bunch of 100k tweets blaming them for burning down all the buildings.
I get police use an awful tactic to stir up violence to try to end large unsanctioned with protests quickly before worse damage happens - for some cynical ends justify the means. But it amazes me that people don’t realize just how many people show up to cause violence and simply steal things.
And not even just the anarchists and Black bloc who use property damage and vandalism as a tactic since they despite private property, that’s been proven thousands of times and those groups exist in every city, but just the average mob will always have trouble makers and opportunists.
There was even tweets from DSA groups prompting the burning and destruction of property.
Yet everyone is so quick to blame police for everything. It’s seems to strange and cynical to not only take zero responsibility for the wider group but to completely blame their it on outsiders when it’s so obviously not just police.
The only real solution is isolating and dismissing the radical groups as a policy. Just like right wing groups telling Nazis they aren’t welcome, the unions and powerful left wing groups should refuse to protest with black bloc and other violent protestors. I don’t believe they need to actually physically stop them but they need to denounce them early and often, and organizers need to put real efforts in warning people not to engage in violence, theft, and vandalism.
The other half is police cause as much problems as they prevent at almost every single protest I’ve ever been to. Mayors and leaders need to put pressure on police to change their tactics to deescalation and middle managers who don’t stop their lower ranking cops from provoking fights and high ranking police who allow agent provocateurs need to be fired.
Police are, in the aggregate, racist. They are more violent towards people of color. The marches are led by POC, include large numbers of POC, and are all about calling the police out for their own biases and illegal behavior.
This is simply a fact. It's not only intuitively true based on astute observation of current affairs, but the data trends towards supporting it.
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/08/police-officer-shooti...
This point is important. The police can't police themselves, and for a lasting solution to this problem to emerge there'll have to be major structural changes to the way police oversight and review is carried out.
I hope these protests are a turning point that'll lead to such reforms, but I suspect no significant changes will occur. Hopefully I'll be proven wrong.
If you want change, make lasting change.
Protests might have been unorganized, but riots most certainly are organized. Torching a police car carries a minimum 5 year sentence. It's not the protesters who are doing that.
Moreover, it is still being "organized". Someone keeps dropping off pallets with bricks. There are agitator leaflets all over twitter. People have been recorded on video handing out cash to "protesters" from a thick wad of bills. Someone is organizing and funding the riots.
It would be trivial to contrive that exact scenario.
I’m not say that it was contrived, just that it would be trivial to do so.
But at the same time I think peaceful protesters would not burn police cars or loot, seeing how looting does absolutely nothing good whatsoever for their cause. They would especially not burn or loot minority businesses, churches, or low income housing complexes. Someone is very deliberately and efficiently pouring gasoline into this fire IMO, that much is pretty obvious by now.
The very next day we had several trucks unloading beds of bricks and large rocks throughout the Plaza (where protests were and would be again that night) throughout the day and people were snapping videos of at least two buses full of protesters in the full black getup unloading on the edge of the Plaza a few hours before sundown. That night we had 85 arrests, multiple cars set on fire, multiple officers put in the hospital, and plenty of CS gas in the streets.
After seeing the peaceful protest on Friday, I find it a little bit suspicious that the crowds grew so quickly and things escalated so quickly (and intentionally, by the looks of people dropping of brick caches) just 24 hours later.
After the photo op was done, the police started macing and tear-gassing the crowd. The news then ran this video [1], but with the first 20 seconds cut out, and blamed the protesters on initiating violence.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/gv0ru3/this_is_the...
2. Which particular part of this smells like horseshit to you? The news cutting the clip before airing it? The SPD twitter claiming that the police retaliated to an attack by rocks and bottles? Do you see any rocks or bottles thrown in the first 20 seconds of this video? Who are you going to believe - a cop trying to defend his violent outburst, or your own two eyes? In what universe is what you are observing a defense to an attack? Did you even look at the video?
3. Do you deny the neighbourhood being in good shape prior to this? I can confirm this one in person, by the way. Nothing was looted, windows weren't broken, no cars were burning.
4. Here's a first person video account of that, too. https://twitter.com/izaacmellow/status/1267679820600668161?s...
That the police would tear gas people unprovoked. That just doesn't happen in the United States in my experience, although if provoked, they do not hesitate.
Did you look at either of the videos? Do you believe your anecdotal experience, or your eyes? What kind of evidence do you need at this point, to convince you that yes, the police do, in fact, gas people unprovoked?
Would you like another one from Seattle?
https://old.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/gu3qq1/cop_just_ca...
Did that sheriff look like was being attacked? Like anyone was throwing rocks or bottles at him? Like anyone was setting police cars on fire?
It is more likely the police are doing this as a sign of their own solidarity with other police officers rather than with the protestors. After all, this entire thing started because of kneeling.
And I don’t mean “you are incapable” can’t. I mean, “You are not allowed” can’t.
Here in NYC we have a spineless mayor who has completely given up even attempting to exert civilian oversight on the police since 2014. They have free rein to do whatever they want and to "self-police" themselves, and because of the union violent cops are never fired.
I think places where the police still walk a beat (or other regular outreach over a wide area) and get to know the locals rarely have issues with regular people. But cities don't want to spend that kind of money on these things as they would rather not tax people to pay for it. Yet it's an investment in cities' future; otherwise you wind up with this.
[0]: https://twitter.com/sbkaufman/status/1267271423527022592
I'm certainly no expert in police budgeting, but when you see some police forces literally buying tanks, at least in some cases there must be room for money to be better spent. John Oliver did an interesting story on police militarization after the Ferguson riots following the shooting of Michael Brown.
I think you may be underestimating how much cities dedicate their budgets to police spending:
"Mayor Eric Garcetti's 2020-2021 city budget gives police $3.14 billion out of the city's $10.5 billion. That's the single biggest line item, dwarfing, say, emergency management ($6 million) and economic development ($30 million)." (In fact, LAPD is getting pay raises while LA teachers are getting a pay decrease)
"New York City spends more on policing than it does on the Departments of Health, Homeless Services, Housing Preservation and Development, and Youth and Community Development combined."
"A whopping 39 percent of Chicago's 2017 budget went to police, and still the department got even more money, peaking in 2020 with a 7 percent increase to nearly $1.8 billion."
Note, this is, to the best of my knowledge, solely police, not even adjacent forces like e.g. fire departments or ambulances.
https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proacti...
How are people thinking they will get better police service (or any police service) by reducing police budgets? Most of said budget is spent on pensions anyway from the breakdowns I’ve seen. It’s not like cops are rolling in it. Even if you rake in overtime you still have to work during that time.
But even in well funded departments the response is laughable. At best if your stolen item is serialized they will record that number and it will be recovered at a later date when they happen to bust someone for something else and catalog everything they found in the vicinity and their computer system tells them your thing was reported stolen.
>Even if you rake in overtime you still have to work during that time.
The Massachusetts State Police and their 2-5yr recurring "whoops it looks like a bunch of people were getting paid for working overtime that wasn't actually worked, we'll fire someone as a sacrificial lamb and go right back to what we were doing" scandal would beg to differ.
That said, as much as it pains me to defend them, the fact that the job can be easy money for anyone willing to step in line with the organization means that you get people who just want to slack and make easy money or want to over achieve and run a full fledged side business on company time (MSP isn't the only MA gov department where people do this but they're known internally for it) and not the people who want to LARP as soldiers and kick down doors. As a result they don't often wind up receiving allegations of excessive force.
Obviously this is by no means and ideal status quo but it's far superior to having a more violent police force.
It's great. They take the big stuff (violent crime and trafficking in hard drugs) seriously but don't have time to be running BS task forces, procuring military equipment they don't need and sitting around watching for "sketchy looking" people to harass. I'm sure it sucks to be them and they're all over worked but frankly it's great for the people.
Not being seen as jerks gives the local police better freedom of operation than the much better funded state cops who are seen as being jerks who enforce every law to the letter and nobody wants to cooperate with. I kinda feel bad for the state cops because cities like mine are where they stick the fresh academy grads who have no connections or seniority to avoid a crap assignment and then they get locals hating them for doing what the state trained them to do (also goes to show you the conflict between what the state wants and what the people of the city want).
That said, were the Real Crime(TM) to vanish I can see the local police using their newfound free time to optimize enforcement for revenue generation which would be very bad.
> "Mayor Eric Garcetti's 2020-2021 city budget gives police $3.14 billion out of the city's $10.5 billion. That's the single biggest line item, dwarfing, say, emergency management ($6 million) and economic development ($30 million)." (In fact, LAPD is getting pay raises while LA teachers are getting a pay decrease)
The Los Angeles Unified School District boundaries don't match the Los Angeles city boundaries, so comparison is tricky, but the most recent budget available (2018-2019) was $13.8 billion. [1]
In California, school districts are not connected to city government, despite like all the mayors ever always talking about them. Zero of the LA city budget goes to LA schools, because school districts get their money from the counties they're in and the state. I don't know if San Francisco has a county government separate from its city government, so it may be an exception.
[1] http://ssr.lausd.net/BudgetTransparencyDistrictGrp1.aspx?Fis...
The broader Bay Area is closer to the LA system, although transit and utilities are more likely to be detached from cities than education.
Regardless, as far as policing goes, NYC's 5 borough/county/city system is _much_ more complicated, which proponents might say justifies their (imo insane) $6 Billion(!) annual budget allocation, but if you compare that to NYC's $34 Billion [1] education budget, it looks a little more reasonable than LA's $3 Billion LAPD budget compared to LAUSD's $7 Billion [2] education budget.
[1] https://www.schools.nyc.gov/about-us/funding/funding-our-sch...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Unified_School_Dis...
Usually people at large anti-establishment rallies know very well there is litle to be gained by violence. Those in power otoh know very well how they can turn media coverage spotlights away from the issues and towards any disruptions to discredit or mute the actual grievances.
He mentions how society is at its core a contract on how to engage with one another. Everything we do is in some form conforming to that contract and when this contract is violated (like the stores being looted and vandalized), it angers you.
However, to the people who're really affected by this issue at the very bottom of the society - they feel they're being ripped off in the contract and are being cheated every single day. After a breaking point they can feel like they don't really have to adhere to the contract anymore themselves when no one else sticks to it in their oppressed world.
PS - Please note, he's obviously not justifying the lootings, mainly tries to make sense of it and how we got to where we are right now.
but it's because they are the status quo, and they define what's looting or not. i'm not in favor of stealing and violence, particularly because the ones getting stolen from are at the bottom as well, but it sure seems those at the top sure live in a different society and under different rules that conveniently favor their form of "looting".
For example, your idea of voting in the minds of the protestors is laughable. They believe (and I tend to agree) that money controls policy in this nation and the ultra-wealthy have control over policy, therefor their vote doesn't matter.
He called Trump the “fake right”, which makes me think this guy isn’t some trad-catholic conservative. Is he the conspiratorial conservative type?
The Renton PD seemed to employ a "out of plain sight" approach.
Patrol vehicles strategically placed, a few uniform officers were near occassionally chatting with protestors, and patrol vehicles driving by the scene.
At one point a team of bicycle cops appeared out of no where rode through along side the protestors.
Each "side" seemed to be respectful of each other.
The approach of the Renton Police Department not antagonizing the protestors had it's intended effect--the protestors protested peacefully. In fact, when police vehicles flashed lights, or chirped sirens in support of the protestors, the protestors cheered in support back.
I have seen this so many times where police stay out of the way and everything goes smoothly. I think US police actually want a riot. They want to create violence.
I think that's unlikely.
Keeping the peace is an inherently challenging job that gets harder exactly when it is needed the most.
Considering the vast, vast amount of footage of excessive force from the police in the last few days, I think it's likely the police want a riot. If they don't then they're beyond incompetent since they keep causing riots regardless.
My ex was career military. One day, I was seriously set off by something and he accidentally got up in my physical space and bumped into me and his military training apparently had prepared him for how to de-escalate in the face of imminent physical violence because I was quite ready to hit him over it. The end result was that I left the house to go cool off elsewhere.
So I've experienced first-hand physical de-escalation tactics and my ex was one of the calmest people I have ever known. I'm the only person he ever raised his voice at (when we were fighting). Most people were incapable of getting a rise out of him.
So I think I have a pretty fair idea of just what it takes to actually de-escalate physical violence when faced with imminent physical violence and most people have neither the temperament nor the training. He had been in the military quite a few years at that point.
I don't intend to argue this further. I've said what I wanted to say. I was surprised my initial comment got any upvotes at all instead of being just stomped into the ground, given the current climate out in the world.
More realistically, I think it is rarely this simple, on either side. I'm sure that usually there is a feedback loop of escalating responses.
The premise of the article is Police showing escalating force, increases escalation of protestors.
While likely it's a feedback loop, the police are expected to keep the peace; so there exists a higher standard for their behavior.
Yet, an oft criticism is that LE agencies don't always get the de-escalation training they need.
That doesn't mean that they can't do more de-escalation or take other steps, but the high prevalence of guns does seem like it would be a contributing factor.
(I realize this touches a hot topic (guns) but it's an honest question, and sympathetic to law enforcement.)
Despite the much higher relative levels, the amount of gun violence in the US still isn't all that high in an absolute sense, and police are not particularly the target of it.
Maybe it's to do with having guns?
(Don't get me wrong, what those protestors did was senseless and the epitome of entitlement.)
This is a highly misleading way of describing the situation.
The police set up a traffic stop to arrest them. They fled the stop. Finicum told the police he wasn't going to surrender and that they'd have to shoot him. He reached for his gun in his pocket, and then he was shot.
If black men were only being killed by police after fleeing arrest, refusing to surrender, challenging the police to shoot them, and then reaching for a gun...then we wouldn't have much of a police violence problem.
As a born and raised American, I'm inclined to think not. I could be wrong of course, but everything that I've seen and experienced growing up and living in the US has led me to believe otherwise.
I want to think that more protestors being armed would make a difference, but ultimately I believe it will just lead to escalation and more deaths by cop (and/or the national guard, as we're finding out in Louisville currently).
There's precedent for this. In the 60s the black panthers open carried in California to protest, of course, police misconduct. Reagan signed in the Mulford Act [1], banning open carry in CA.
If BLM want stricter gun control laws (not sure if they do), all they need to do is arm themselves at protests.
Apparently they were let in, then arrested, then released without charge and their guns returned as they hadn't broken the law. However, they were there protesting against the 'Mulford Act' that intended to disarm them, and it was subsequently passed. So they didn't get shot, but they didn't get what they wanted either, and they did get banned from doing it again.
Of course, there's a lot more detail than I've put into this post, and society was pretty different at the time. Reagan supporting gun control? The NRA as a sporting organisation that supported gun control? And the panthers were Marxist? So I'm not sure it's a very instructive example about how the same thing would go today.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party#Protest_at...
It’s almost as if the American gun lobby wants both sides to need lots of guns and bullets for some reason...
Switzerland (disclaimer; I'm Swiss) has also lots of weapons around, but if the police are ever shooting someone it's usually big news with investigations on whether it was really necessary.
From my laymen point of view, police training and holding them accountable to their actions is probably even a bigger factor than gun availability (although this is certainly a factor too). If I'm not mistaken, Swiss police training strongly encourages to back off if someone draws a weapon, trying to keep it cool, talk softly/slowly etc. It seems that in the US, the first hint of a weapon will result in drawn weapons by police and a 'drop your weapon'-shouting-contest; that's at least what seems to often happen in footage that ends up in the news where something goes wrong and someone ends up being dead.
Edit: One of the more memorable examples I saw was a video via NYT, where some guy was being arrested, tried to adjust his pants and was immediately being shot because the officer thought he was going for a gun. This is absolutely unimaginable in Switzerland; I would have to look it up for the facts but I think to remember a case where someone was shot holding (and threatening with) a fake-gun, and the officer who did so went to jail if I remember correctly.
Cop's look more and more like soldiers and I think you're right about the 'winning' being the main goal. Where i live, the cops are very tacticool, even though we have effective gun control and hardly any civilian vs police violence. All i think about is how much my back hurts now from carrying all that shit when I was in the military.
What were some of the concrete rules/policies that you found effective overseas that could be effective here? I wish we as a society talked in more concrete terms around this topic.
In war like operations you'd still follow the rules of war, but generally you were shooting first to take objectives, there was a lot of latitude.
In peace keeping and non warlike, everything was about a force continuum.
- Ie we will patrol with weapons slung over our shoulders, with the weapons at 'action' (cocked but safe) and hands by our sides.
- If things change we actively patrol with our weapons (Still at action)-
- then you get to pointing weapons (action)
- cocking weapons (for direct crowd control, kinda silly because you lose a round at with this action but it makes the point you ain't stuff about)
- Then there's pointing with safety off, and closely followed by firing at people. (A lot is happening to get here in 'police' or 'peace keeping' scenarios)
Also our ROE had specifics such as, if your are engaged by IED or Ambush you can fire when fired upon but you can't fire at suspected targets (Like anyone on a cell phone), you have to confirm the threat. Which is pretty reasonable but in war like operations you may just fire at positions of cover because there could be enemy waiting there and you're generally trying to suppress an area. You don't want to do that in a heart's and minds kinda fight.
Anyway, I can't remember them all and they have probably changed over the last decade. But those are the main points and generally we didn't make the first move. we just waited.
I remember being shouted at by some kids and young guys for like an hour and just waiting them out. It was very frustrating but my rifle and grenades would have just created bigger issues.
Now, it seems that I misjudged it. What say is basically shedding a very bad light at LE in the US, when even the military, in Iraq of all places, had better ROEs for policing than the actual police.
Maybe it is related to looking like a soldier, acting like a soldier, without being a soldier. No idea, all I can say is that I don't like the situation at all. Let's hope nobody is deploying the armed forces.
If the military fires on unarmed civilians, it's going to take things to a whole other level.
How many videos, at this point, are out in public of police taking out tasers at routine, non-violent traffic stops? Of chemical spraying non-violent protestors? And of shooting unarmed people? The famous photo of the UC Davis photo casually spraying seated students at a campus protest makes the case more eloquently than I can: that was not a person in fear of their life, and we've created a system where that person avoided criminal prosecution (https://humansarefree.com/2014/04/the-cop-who-pepper-sprayed...). When that happens, it seems an offense to logic to reach to "well, our police are more violent because our criminals are more violent." It may be true, but it's outright offensive to their victims not to pause, first, at "...and because their violence goes unpunished." Pointing out the risk they are exposed to is less plausible when we see violence undertaken in non-violent situations, and where they do not see criminal prosecution for wildly disproportionate responses.
How many events have we learned of where unarmed people providing no violent resistance were killed by officers who didn't suspect violence? The death of Eric Garner in NYC involved an unarmed man, stopped by the police for selling single cigarettes, who was pinned down and choked to death, while his hands were up and he was wheezing and begging for air. Those officers were neither permanently removed from duty, nor prosecuted. It's difficult to interpret "slowly choked an unarmed and unresisting man to death" as "acting in response to fears of the violence possible in the situation." Situations like that make it highly unlikely that violent police are a simple correlation to violent criminals, because that would at least suggest that the police violence is constrained to violent and reasonably-possible-to-escalate-to-violence situations. Which isn't what we see riots breaking out over.
That second voice, "lift up your shirt". it stopped being a conversation with 1 officer and became two people giving orders to 1 guy.
Isn't that somewhere in the Bill of Rights?
In the first scenario, if someone chooses to randomly shoot a police officer then nothing can be done. This is generally true throughout society. If people choose to randomly shoot others they can mostly succeed. This is not an argument for an officer having a gun, but for less guns to be involved in society in general. Even if the activist or newscaster had a gun drawn from the beginning the outcome easily could/would have been the same.
In the second scenario, there's no reason for a gun to be involved over something less lethal like a taser or a baton. This is essentially a misdirect after people are freaked out from the first scenario.
In the third scenario, again why is a gun involved? Similarly a taser or baton would get the job done. Or actually using other tools like handcuffs rather than shakily pointing a gun at someones back, which is begging for an accident.
All of this to me ironically paints a picture of guns unnecessarily escalating situations, rather than the point they were trying to make.
In 2018, 150 US law enforcement officers died due to work related reasons. There were about 690,000 officers employed in America at that time. This means 21.7 out of every 100,000 officers died due to a work related reasons.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that about 25 out of every 100,000 driver/sales workers died due to work related reasons.
For both jobs, most of the deaths were accidental.
Sources: https://www.odmp.org/search/year?year=2018 https://www.statista.com/statistics/191694/number-of-law-enf... https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cfoi.pdf
"you win and I go to jail forever / I win and you die" actually literally is a zero-sum a game. People fight/support wars over even completely unrealistic fears that they might one day lose even a bit of their freedom.
Maybe you mean that deciding not to voluntarily lose that zero-sum game makes someone a sociopath. And, tbh, in that situation, I would rather surrender than kill (for a lot of reasons, both moral and practical). However, I also wouldn't call someone a sociopath for deciding to kill in order to avoid a life sentence. "Live Free or Die" is literally the motto of the state of New Hampshire.
If I were about to arrest someone who knew they were going to jail for life, I would go into that situation expecting a life-and-death struggle. Even if that person were a completely balanced and mentally healthy person. Anything less seems a bit naive.
This American Life did a story about a new chief trying to reform the Firehouse culture in Amsterdam in order to combat discrimination:
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/684/transcript
Spoiler alert: he failed. It's hard to turn an organization around.
> Security force abuses and the social upheaval caused by collateral damage from combat can be major escalating factors for insurgencies.
The standards for these positions must be higher, especially domestically (police).
We’ve become pretty normalized to it, but a militarized police force wasn’t always a thing in America.
The scenes of the WTO protests in Seattle two decades ago, of cops in riot gear shooting tear gas and rubber bullets into crowds of people — those images were pretty shocking at the time. Now it’s a familiar scene, one that is currently playing out in cities around the country and beyond.
From what I've seen of videos posted of the vandals and looters in my own and other cities it seems a certain, very small, percentage of bad actors are provoking escalations to the detriment of everybody else. Some of these parties seem to be doing that as a primary goal, others are simply causing the escalations as a side-effect of their actions.
Certainly this doesn't account for everything we have witnessed, such as the NG shooting rubber bullets at people on their porches(srs WTF?), but it has contributed substantially to the escalation IMO.
They do this to scare regular folks from not participating in protests. Because good and honest people will stay home if they worry about getting hurt.
The goal of the police is to make protests undesirable and that's what they do.
Undercover cops, for example have been video taped in many instances of breaking store windows abd starting fires. The goal being to give ab excuse for police to disperse crowds.
I know many don't believe me but veteran protesters under this. Go to a protest and find out for yourself.
* Mental health (otherwise nonviolent)
* Animal problems
This alone could reduce deaths dramatically. I witnessed an incident where the cops were called about a stray dog. They shot it. When you have a gun, every problem looks like a target.
I think it should also be made clear who has priority at a 'scene' firefighters, paramedics, or police?
Personally I think it's implicitly assumed that it is police that have that authority. I believe this should be flipped so that medical and fire officials have authority at the scene of an incident, not police.
In the case of George Floyd, then the paramedics would have had the authority to get those three cops off the guys back possibly in time to save him.
We need to hold these officials accountable.
Blaming the police is like blaming the soldiers in a war.
It's the regional ELECTED leaders responsible for the budgets and operations of the police departments who are the problem.
----
Last night I went into uptown at around 7:00 p.m. to do my part to help keep the peace.
Our city had already had a peaceful and powerful protest earlier that afternoon with a message of love and justice and it was important that the evening protest stayed safe and civil.
At the beginning there were roughly 1,500 people. That’s about half the number who were at the afternoon protest. The evening group was also much younger. I’d put the average age at about 24.
That meant the tone was audibly different. The conversations I had were different. It was a more personal perspective from people who weren’t just marching for others - they were also marching for themselves. There were more people in this crowd who felt that this issue directly concerned them and their friends, and you could hear that in their voices.
The leaders of the protest had met earlier that day with CMPD to discuss how to ensure the event was safe. As a result, the leaders placed experienced activists at the front of the march, in the middle, and in the rear. They kept the march moving, occasionally stopping for a few minutes to let people re-group, but not letting too much heat build in any one spot.
Alongside real anger and frustration were constant displays of compassion. Lots of people brought water bottles and were handing them out. I saw a woman trip and hurt her leg and the crowd immediately stopped and tended to her.
Law enforcement was present in various ways. There were some officers in regular uniform walking among the crowd, answering questions and chatting. There were also several officers on bicycles and motorcycles. Most of the police presence was blocking certain streets to keep the march from heading certain directions.
By the time the march got to the police station it had been going for over two hours and it had shrunk to maybe 300 people. About 10 officers stood outside the front door, motionless. The protesters got as close as they could to the police without making contact. One officer raised his fist in solidarity and was greeted with loud applause and cheering from the crowd. At one point someone threw a water bottle at the police and everyone turned around and yelled at him. There were some very tense moments near the police station, but after about 30 minutes the march headed back uptown.
Now it was about 10:40 p.m. The march had been going for over three hours. It wasn’t a coherent group anymore. There were less than 200 people. It had splintered into lots of little groups and there wasn’t any organization that I could see. I thought it was basically over so I started to head back to my car.
At 10:50 p.m. I heard the first flashbang. Then I saw the tear gas. I was two blocks away so I couldn’t tell what, if anything, precipitated its use (although I later read a CMPD statement that bottles and rocks were being thrown).
But the flashbang had a catalyzing and organizing effect on the remaining protesters, who instantly re-formed.
This marked the point of a clear shift in police tactics. Officers lined up shoulder-to-shoulder and walked block by block, toward the protesters, who similarly lined up shoulder-to-shoulder and waited for the police to move toward them.
Officers would then proceed down one block, wait five minutes, use a loudspeaker to tell the crowd to disperse, and then start walking toward the crowd. Then they would use tear gas and pepper bullets, which would cause the crowd to retreat one block.
This continued for several blocks, until eventually the remaining protesters scattered. Nine arrests were made.
I’m not aware of any injuries. As far as property damage, I heard a few reports of a few broken windows, but nothing extensive.
It’s really easy to see one picture or hear a snippet on the news and draw a conclusion about an event like this. What I saw was much more complex, much more human. If it’s one thing we all owe each other right now, it’s looking past the surface and trying to learn a little more about what’s really going on underneath.
What I learned last night is that the tenor of these events can change on a dime. But you can feel it when it happens. I also learned that the vast, vast majority of protesters were there to engage in peaceful, safe protest. Although many of them felt genuine anger, they understood what it meant to channel it productively and what type of conduct would undercut their message.
My thanks to the leadership of this event for working hard to keep everyone as safe as possible.
- Sen. Jeff Jackson
https://mbasic.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=13209956114...
And Hacker News wants to fix the protestors?!
Given police officers are in fact a part of the same society as the people protesting against them, it seems likely that the issues with brutality, and racial prejudice, are not endemic to police themselves, but indicative of problems of the overall society at large.
If people are protesting the symptoms of these broader cultural issues, and not the underlying cause, it seems an inescapable conclusion that any change will largely be ineffectual.
I feel that the difficulty with this, is that noone likes to admit that there are systemic issues in the way their society functions. From a sociological perspective, most people don't want to be beating a drum that runs counter to popular opinion.
Similarly, most people are reluctant to engage in confrontation on an individual level, when encountering behaviour that ultimately leads to these type of outcomes.
Just as importantly, most people are awful at taking responsibility for their role in a problem. People prefer to create a false dichotomy, and position their impact on problems as meaningless, and view solutions as outside their locus of control.
This effectively leads to a kind of tragedy of the commons, where responsibility belongs to everyone and is taken by noone - similar to what we see with climate issues.
To effect meaningful change, it's usually required that both individuals and groups make their voice heard and actually do something. Yet most people go about their lives, and only take action when the collective does, in response to some climax of conditions. This is better than the inverse - of individuals taking action while groups do nothing - yet usually results in neglibile change, if any.
I suspect a part of the problem is that a sizable demographic cares, but only insofar as they care to signal their virtues. Yet when it comes to doing something themselves, the it's a much lower priority. I also suspect most people in this situation engage in a cognitive dissonance that's almost automatic too - and probably aren't even aware that they're doing it.
For example, if you hit a man in the face, cause bruising, lets say that costs $1,000 across the board. $1,000 for any hematoma, $5000 or any broken bone. $25,000 for a GSW, $100,000 for a life-threatening injury, etc.
To take it further, if you discharge a weapon at another human being, the fine is something like $1,000 per bullet, etc.
Additionally, existing laws still apply.
Following the above guidelines, you don't need to prove mens rea. It is just the cost of doing business.
It would be a violence tax at the individual level.
Another thought I had around this was to just fire any police officer that fires their weapon at another human. If they truly believe that their life is in danger, they value their life more than their job.
Either of these things would at least add some actual cost to the idea associated with performing an action with extreme consequences on another human being's life.
You think people who shoot at people are thinking about money?
https://theconversation.com/police-officers-accused-of-bruta...
Why no riots and street violence then?
It also takes just a few rotten apples on the side of the police to make it go violent.
Protesting is largely a modern witch hunt. It lets people blow off some steam, rather ineffectively in the modern protest case, because you don't get to burn anyone alive at the end of it. Enough people long for that witch hunt finale, and that's why protests turn violent so often, it's the modern day equivalent of burning a witch.
I don't know if protestors realize that it is up to them to come up with ways of fixing systemic issues they're upset about (people in power are fine with the way things are, by definition) - burning down your local neighbourhood or yelling out in the streets can only lead to the powers that be going 'ok fine, go find some witches to burn to appease this mob'. It's never going to fix actual systemic issues, but perhaps burning witches is good enough, given our history, and going in circles indefinitely is the way of this species.
Counter point - the Civil Rights Act of 1968. People pay attention when they are forced to. I won't pass a moral judgement as it's not my place, but nothing will change until force is applied. I think that is the lesson history teaches.
History written in textbooks tends to teach the narrative that was sponsored. Modern pop-history tends to teach what will sell the most copies, so history is teaching us all kinds of selective facts about life.
Regarding force - force needs to be applied for anything to move - that's just a fundamental law of physics :) The question is where and how do we apply force and in what quantities?
My stance is that witch hunting did not solve the issue of witches causing droughts, scientists along with engineers and people willing to work today, for a better tomorrow, solved hunger in many places of the world.
Now imagine somebody that does believe that his or her witch hunt of year 1543 did fix drought for a decade in his/her town. What evidence could you possibly provide to convince them otherwise? They know there was no drought for ten years, they know they burned a witch in 1543. Now if there is a drought ten years later, clearly we just didn't burn enough witches!
This is the difficulty in dealing with people who rely on emotion, not cold hearted rationality, to solve problems. Cold hearted rationality has its dangers too and one can argue until the cows come home that we may have been better off never industrializing, never inventing agriculture and sticking with hunter gathering, at one with nature and all. Not me, I like hot showers, anti-biotics and all the other modern amenities too much. I'm in the rationality over emotion camp. The people out there protesting I'm guessing are in the other camp and that's totally fine with me.
Protestors don’t have the authority to police themselves, but you seem to want to trivialize their cause because you disagree with the actions of some.
Wanting an accountable police force that does not brutalize those they are sworn to protect is a reasonable request.
End qualified immunity.
The fact that there has been a large amount of violence committed by the police against peaceful protestors and press serves to generally support the cause of the protestors. There is a large amount of video evidence you can see for yourself as well as many protestors have been interviewed repeatedly.
Perhaps listening and reading instead of asserting or injecting your own uninformed opinion would lead to more answers.
Haymarket riots
Black Friday suffragette riots
Martin Luther King Jr riots
Stonewall riots
It wasn’t a “protest” in any comparable way to this.
So what kind of parents/police beat their constituents? Men who are angry and want to assert themselves as macho and in charge. It needs to stop.
they weren't downvoted, whereas my counter comments were
so, it seems this opinion that violence is the way forward is not the minority position
otherwise, plenty of people may not be personally willing to risk themselves by being violent, but are happy to stand by as others are violent
anyways, i hope the protesters look forward to trump 2020, because that is the current trajectory they are pushing
https://facebook.com/fox11la/videos/2620823021579078/
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Z9Al_OCpYFk
Consider why you are so unwilling to admit that bad cops who murder innocents are also the problem.
even if, for sake of argument, bad cops are instigating all the riots and looting, the media optics will make this a slam dunk for trump 2020 and more militarized police
exactly contrary to what we really want
consider this
where do all the people live who are most likely to vote against trump?
the big cities
where are all the riots taking place?
the big cities
if trump stops the riots and saves their livelihood, will this make them more likely or less likely to vote against trump? what do you think?
I'm pointing out two issues: rioting, and the police brutality leading to the rioting are both societal problems. We saw this exact scenario after the Freddie Gray murder. I'm also trying to find out why you're avoiding admitting that both rioting and police brutality are problems.
hard to understand the point of what you are doing
This is what happens when frightened, under-trained, under-experienced, over-militarized, desensitized "police" optimize for the wrong thing and defeat their fundamental mission by becoming an military occupation force of psychopathic a__holes who don't interact with "civilians" except to harass people, rather than a community service of human f__king beings.
Pro-police forces WANT mayhem. It makes people watching on TV afraid of the protests, and it changes the subject away from the widespread peaceful opposition to racist police violence.
> Pro-police forces WANT mayhem ... it changes the subject away from the widespread peaceful opposition to racist police violence.
I don’t think that typical “pro-police forces” want to own the narrative of their cause being racist and violent.
I think they do. Many cops seem to be very racist and very violent. It doesn't seem like they care who knows it. Even when they do care, they might not turn on body-cams which should be a fireable offense and now it finally is in at least one case in Kentucky.
Citation needed. I think most cops are just normal people trying to earn a living.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CAqt_gHgAxk/?utm_source=ig_embed
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-video-appears-show-...
Police swear an oath to uphold the law and it’s ostensibly their job to, when observing illegality, say “hey knock it off.”
Protesters do not swear an oath as a prerequisite to protesting. Protesters frequently do speak out against- and even forcibly prevent- looting and vandalism within their ranks, but if they don’t, it’s not a dereliction of duty in the same way as when cops ignore abuses in their ranks.
Seattle Chief of Police: http://www.seattle.gov/police/about-us/about-the-department/...
St Louis Chief of Police: http://www.slmpd.org/chief_of_police.shtml
Atlanta Chief of Police: https://www.projectq.us/atlanta/atlanta_police_chief_erika_s...
Chicago Chief of Police: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brown_(police_officer)
Oakland Chief of Police: https://climaterwc.com/2019/07/17/san-mateo-police-chief-sus...
People on HN seem to have a cartoon villain view of police, so I thought I'd share a few faces of police leadership in effected communities.
Above, they cherry-picked a few cops that just happen to be the chief of police. It's not that simple.
You don't understand the institutions involved if you highlight these examples. Police, police unions, district attorneys, etc. It's not simple.
Baseless accusation. The protests are mostly in the blue-voting cities, and the GP's list is representative.
[edit]
Here is how it works:
Minneapolis, Chief of Police: nominated (...) by the Mayor of Minneapolis (Betsy Hodges) [1]
Seattle, Chief of Police: [n]ominated by Mayor Jenny Durkan [2]
St Louis, Comissioner of Police: appointed as the 35th Commissioners of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department on December 28, 2017 by Mayor Lyda Krewson [3]
Atlanta Chief of Police: Mayor of Atlanta Kasim Reed announced on December 1, 2016, that he had chosen Shields [4]
Chicago Superintended of the Chicago Police Department: The City Council on Wednesday voted 50-0 to appoint former Dallas Police Chief David Brown to lead the Chicago Police Department [5]
Oakland Chief of Police: Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf announced Monday that she has appointed former San Mateo Police Chief Susan Manheimer as Oakland’s interim police chief [6]
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medaria_Arradondo
[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/carmen-be...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hayden_Jr.
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Shields
[5] https://news.wttw.com/2020/04/22/david-brown-confirmed-chica...
[6] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-Mayor-ap...
Yes, in the cities where most people in this country live.
Where people are most educated.
Where most minorities live.
But sure, them darn demz, at it again.
> The list of police chiefs & other officials is solid.
The list is solid ignorance of the institutions involved. It focuses on race of one part of police leadership and not police violence and the racist actions of many cops. Highlighting police chief race is a racial argument in the least and may be even a racist argument.
I share your concerns over Qualified Immunity (and other problems). The relevant discussions are here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23379910 ("As Qualified Immunity Takes Center Stage, More Delay from SCOTUS")
and here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23386260 (a subthread of this discussion)
[edit]
>It focuses on race of one part of police leadership >Highlighting police chief race
Excuse me? Where are you going with this?
I've updated my post with clear, sourced information on how the police leadership got put in their respective roles, to clearly indicate how it works.
The examples are mostly appointment by the (locally elected) major or by the (locally elected) city council.
Squirmy
The relevant site guideline is to assume that others are commenting in good faith.
I also assume bad faith from you so you can add that to your tattling.
I actually really like the guidelines of this site. @dang and the other administrators do a good job at keeping the conversation mostly civil and the guidelines are great principles and rules to aim for that end.
Maybe if you assume bad faith of a post (anywhere on social media), it might be time to skip over it or take a break.
I'm listening to the RabbitHole podcast[1] right now which is a pretty interesting analysis by the NYTimes of how social media / online content fuels impactful psycho/social impact on participants. I hope you find it interesting.
You don't get the same resources, respect, or pension of the military. If you are let go/fired, you have little chance of finding something comparable close by.
It's not healthy for the psyche to be put into harm's way for an entire career span. There is probably a lot of untreated PTSD going on. It's not surprising that they are very leery of policies that would put them or fellow officers at risk, or be guinea pigs for policies pushed down from above.
People get awkward or remain guarded around police in social settings, so law enforcement tends to fraternize with each other and their families.
None of this makes for an environment that promotes transparency.
I'm not making any judgements for or against any of the events that have transpired. But I have sympathy for everyone involved. I suspect that the police-public dynamic will never be changed without a significant cultural shift in attitudes.
I suspect the impass will be worked around rather than fixed. Quasi-police will take on some law enforcement duties. Technology will intercede in a big way. Our public anonymity is probably already out the door.
I wouldn't be surprised if many looters are tracked and identified even with face masks, even retroactively.
Citation needed.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/1/6/7501953/nypd-mayor-arrests-unio...
Police officers are regularly held up as heroes, and often afforded special privileges in everyday life.
If anything, they are irrationally worshipped.
I'm not saying we get rid of all cops... But I also don't see any reason for them to have an Ironman suit for every officer.
Lots of people do hard society-critical jobs that take an emotional/physical toll at wages far below that of a typical officer. Only one of those occupations has a serious violence problem.
I can’t even imagine a world where there are protests in the streets asking immunology PhD students who have no pension and make 19K a year with a college degree to stop killing people. And there will never, ever be a parade for those folks.
Stop excusing police. They are paid better than most for the job they do, even if most of that comp is back-loaded.
SJPD has been chronically understaffed since at least 2008 when there were large layoffs. The department prefers to hire fewer officers, but work the existing ones longer hours (hence lots of overtime).
I only have a vague idea what police officers make. Generally, I avoid begrudging anyone's salary.
There's lots of extremely brutal jobs that are thankless. People who pick your food. Visit central California during summer where people are picking produce in 100+ degree weather for 10 hours day. It's hard back breaking work.
Being a police officer is a well paid job with a pension where most of your day is filling out paperwork.
Looters and those who bash people's skulls in are opportunists who don't care about change. The ones that want change see their opportunity slipping away.
Actually, have you seen Daniel Shaver's killing? No riot. Outcome: that policeman collects a pension and rests easy at home. So it is established your technique doesn't work.
When the good things don't work, eventually you get the bad things. That's not even through people changing. It's through the people changing. I remember reading in the WSJ or the NYT about one particular time in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's recent history when there was a bit of tension between their young firebrand wing and their older mellower leaders (though both were still religious). At the time, the older leader was in hiding (on account of the military looking for him) and there was a bit of violence so he came out to appeal for peace and was promptly arrested. This had the predictable effect of weakening the mellow side and turning the organization more radical (or so the article predicted).
So you don't have to turn people into rioters, you can just destroy the credibility of everyone calling for peaceful resolutions by dismissing them out of hand repeatedly. Eventually no one will listen to them. And then the only people with power in those groups are the firebrands. A complete own-goal if you're looking for peace.
Especially worth looking at Rep. Joyce Beatty who is a 70 year old black woman who got peppersprayed with the protesters. An elected lawmaker was attacked by the cops. Think about it.
not a happy cycle
Violent Protest: Guy got arrested
It's already achieved more, so I think we're good here. But the truth is that this is out of control of individuals. The system of groups of people responds to the stimulus in predictable ways. This was unavoidable.
Everything you casually take for granted people had to die for.
A government is supposed to be afraid of the electorate (Jefferson). They’ve lost that fear, and you see that trickle down from legislators all the way to law enforcement.
All of this does not mean that the reasonable peaceful path is not effective. It just tells us citizens must take part.
It is yet to be determined if looting and violence can result in change. What is most likely is that the government uses this to justify greater oppression.
It works, and we should keep doing it until the lesson is learned.
"Blacks commit crimes at higher rates than others."
"It's not a police problem, it's a crime problem."
"I don't want to hear this crap when I get home from work."
The inaction of police to reform themselves and elected officials to reform the laws that govern them is incentive to make it much easier for domestic terrorism to thrive.
Just how long do you think the civil rights movement has been a thing? 50 years of doing things the way the white people demanded - peaceful protests, sit ins, black political leaders. Yup, it helped, it went down, but it never solved the problem, and I see no indication that it would have on a reasonable time scale. And the whole time you've got people STILL saying "no not like that. No you can't kneel at a football game. Shut up and dribble. Shut up and sing."
Nah. The money to pay back damaged shops should come straight out of the police budget for two reasons: 1. Failure to stop police brutality. 2. Failure to deescalate peaceful protests, in fact, for doing the opposite and firing on peaceful protesters and driving them to riot.
Absolutely disgusting the videos coming out of the last three days. A few burnt out targets is a small price to pay for popping the eyes of multiple people, for tear gassing little girls, for running over protesters, for letting go white people firing arrows at protesters. The cops are lucky it didn't get even more violent. They're damn lucky nobody snapped after getting shot by paintballs on their own porch and started firing back.
The only thing that may work is to get everyone to use their voice. Historically, probably only a tiny fraction of the population have used their voice. The vast majority of us need to stop being silent.
Let them try...
Consider that the US government deems what we want (no more police brutality) unacceptable, by definition, we need to work outside the system to solve the problem.
It's similar to 2a people I've met that think that somehow the constitution guarantees their right to overthrow the US government if it becomes tyrannical. That's absurd. The US government would never let itself be overthrown. There's no internal system for such a thing.
Fyi this is an example I often see spoken of, and then when it gets linked to it's actually a man that was charging at protesters with a sword unprovoked.
What could possibly give people that impression?
https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/gu3s6j/poli...
That's what I responded to. I'm curious if you truly think the people that I listed want to see their home towns on fire.
When given a choice to protect murderous cops or prevent a fire, they chose to protect the murderous cops. All the cops have to do is go to jail, get a court date, post bail and sit at home. Why can't a cop that murdered someone be that inconvenienced?
Chicago: 88% of police live in city
St Louis: 59%
Atlanta: 14%
Minneapolis: 10% (white officers: 5%)
Seattle: 12%
Oakland: 9%
Also, certainly in Minneapolis—and likely elsewhere—the police chief doesn't seem to have nearly as much control over rank and file officers as the union head does. This story gives more texture: https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/05/minneapoli...
The city has mandated residency requirements for nearly all city employees since the 1950s, but police and some other public workers are exempt, The Philadelphia Tribune reports. Approximately 30 percent of Philadelphia police officers live outside of Philadelphia, according to Acting Commissioner Christine Coulter.
In 2010, the police union won the right for officers who have five or more years of experience to live outside the city limits. Those terms have been in effect since 2012. Firefighters and sheriff’s deputies with five or more years of service were allowed to live outside of the city in 2016.
Their day-to-day experiences, their relationship to the communities they serve, their physical distance from Downtown, the built environment of their own neighborhoods, the socio-economic make-up of their friends and family -- and on and on and on -- could be practically identical, but we'd count them differently in your list.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/gu3qq1/cop_just_ca...
How would you describe the sheriff casually tossing the tear gas grenade as anything but cartoonishly evil? How would you describe his co-workers, holding the line, without even looking twice at his behaviour?
I would consider macing children to be "cartoonishly evil."
Kinda.
In big cities in states with strong union laws, the burden is very high for cause to fire an officer. Even when there is a firing, the officer can appeal and sometimes be reinstated. It opens the department up to liability if they don't wait for the normal "follow the evidence, build the case" flow.
When there are big protests in big cities, the regional police departments actually share officers. I would bet that about half of officers on the riot line in Seattle were actually from surrounding suburbs or from the state police. I don't think Seattle's chief can fire one of those officers; he would have to do an inter-agency thing that I'm sure is pretty complicated.
Also, the chief has to walk a thin line of perverse incentives. He needs the department to be functional and to do that, he can't be seen as making an example of an officer (for "morale" reasons). He also has to consider that police officers will leave a department in droves and the chief ends up with more problems if crime rises due to "bad management" of the department.
There was no looting, no vandalism, no riot, no burnt cars in that area. Nobody was behaving violently. It took ten seconds for a peaceful protest to turn into an assault on the public.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/gv0ru3/this_is_the...
Local news ran this video, cutting the first 20 seconds out, and blamed the crowd on starting violence.
This guy: https://youtu.be/b6cJQ1XBH8M who fits the cartoon villain side of things
There are two public faces to every department anytime an officer-involved story hits the news.
The police chief is a slick salesperson to put the department in the best light and is accountable to the mayor / city council. The union leader is the slimy salesperson who always paints the suspect/chief/mayor in the worst possible light and who constantly repeats the refrain "the job is hard", "we are only human", "followed standard department procedure", etc. There are a number of notable union leaders who are detestable caricatures of cartoon villains.
They have a fiduciary responsibility to protect the union (the members and the dues). They are not accountable to or elected by the public (in their role as union leader).
That said, they don't have to be cartoonish villains, but frequently are because their role is to pull heartstrings for police officers, not for the civilian/victim in the narrative.
"‘Paw Patrol’ Writers Defend Episode Where German Shepherd Cop Shoots Unarmed Black Lab 17 Times In Back"[1]
[1]: https://entertainment.theonion.com/paw-patrol-writers-defend...
Many other countries don’t seem to have this problem, why is it unreasonable to ask police to not kill people?
Violence and crime though will allow the government to justify greater oppression.
How much do officers need to be paid not to shoot journalists in the eyes?
I'm not defending sociopaths with badges, but the $200k doesn't sound outlandish to me, especially if the department is on a hiring freeze. It's expensive to hire talent (which is what a trained officer is) in California.
Claiming "pro-police forces WANT mayhem" paints the situation in a very generalized, unhelpful, us-versus-them light.
There are definitely some pro-police forces that probably want some mayhem, for exactly the reason you state. There's probably others that want mayhem for other reasons. Across the board, however, I'd imagine most pro-police groups of people prefer peaceful protests that don't put officer lives at risk, not to mention all the collateral damage to protestors, buildings, economies, etc. that also could be avoided.
It's entirely possible (and, I'd argue, likely) that pro-police people aren't some homogenous group of schemers. You can be enraged about police brutality, abuse, and misconduct -- and also enraged by violent riots.
They're either murderous or have "lucky" bad aim.
Exceptions apply for swat snipers in hostage situation
Which is the whole point of the protests. If an officer is on a riot line and is murderous but the other officers on the line don't take them out (send them home or prosecute them), then the officers are just selectively enforcing the law (which I realize is a concept in US law enforcement) to the point of being corrupt.
This is the US; you only get to pick one of those.
I am not in favor of rioting/looting but historically, it has been proven effective in some cases to get changes made.
Nelson Mandela was literally a marxist terrorist, yet is often held up as some kind of ideal of non violent protest.
There were 150 riots in the USA between 1965 and 1968, when LBJ was gathering the votes for civil rights.
The Selma march involved police using attack dogs and water cannons are peaceful marchers. It's damned amazing that (perfectly justifiable) violence against police didn't break out. The tools police use now would (and do) make it far more damaging.
I know several people personally who say this exact phrase, yet they mocked the football players who took a knee during the national anthem at games protesting exactly this issue.
Obviously most sane people would prefer an effective and peaceful protest, but there has yet to be one for this particular issue. So I am hardly surprised it has become this violent, especially with members of the police force and the president antagonizing people further. Also, I would add that any protest of great size naturally has people who try to take advantage of it and turn to anarchy. Shutting down such rioters with force seems to exacerbate the issue, as police force is what is being protest—an understandably difficult predicament.
All the meanwhile the police are standing stoically in every single example.
At what point is it appropriate to escalate force against a crowd which is increasingly rowdy and hostile? In every single case, police so far have escalated gradually. First with commands, then coordinated movements, gas, flashbangs, and finally rubber bullets. Regardless of whether the majority of protestors are actually peaceful, in all of these confrontations the police are outnumbered 2-10x. The rioters are turning this into a life or death threat, as unruly mobs are wont to do.
In fact I've seen a decided lack of police brutality. I haven't seen a single case of anyone being beaten. And I also acknowledge that multiple groups have during the day been on camera calming down rioters and protecting the businesses of their communities.
But the narrative that police are being excessive currently is by my multitude of observations totally untrue and it is extremely dangerous for the media to push such an idea, as they have done by repeatedly and consistently claiming that the protests are peaceful while buildings and cars are burning behind them.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Eschew flamebait."
If you consider the rest of this page, you'll notice that most of the commenters support the protests (though of course they are divided, just as people at large are divided) and doing so without breaking the site guidelines. It's actually a surprisingly not bad discussion—at least relative to the extremeness of what's going on right now.
If you care so much, how about petition your local police force to dump their tear gas at the range and stop firing on peaceful protesters, turning a lot of sitting people into a riot.
(Edit: In the event that you honestly don't know which one is the more important topic, right now or pretty much any other time - police frequently murdering black people or some store windows getting smashed and merch stolen - it's the police murdering black people.)
Evidence abounds.
They committed police brutality, at the protests against police brutality. It genuinely boggles the mind.
But what do you honestly expect riots to lead to? Concessions? Or loss of the moral high ground and even more riot gear and tear gas and escalation?
It's just handing the cops a free pass to justify arresting you. And not just arresting you, but charging you with something that could actually stick. Its hard to advocate policy when you're serving a decade in prison for arson and conspiracy.
Crowd control is a science. And you are sort of ignoring the science by claiming that rioters are the cause of the conflict.
Things escalate when someone escalates them. Sometimes that's the police. Sometimes it isn't. And even when it is, you still have to be willing to be provoked. Don't.
We have people in this thread justifying riots as "we tried kneeling at football games" as if there is some kind of reasonable progression from there to looting and burning down churches.
Reacting when violated is a natural reaction. With a group this big you cannot think in individual terms. If provoked there and there is a non-zero chance you’ll see a reaction, you will see a reaction. And now you have a positive feedback loop between the police and protestors that may escalate into riots.
I'm not convinced the rioters care about police violence either. From what I ca see the riots are outside groups with riot and anarchy as an agenda. My right wing friends are blaming George Soros, my left wing friends some nameless white supremacist group. I have no idea what the truth is, and don't expect to find out for months if ever.
No matter how black people try to get their voices heard about police violence, there will be people who doggedly tear those voices down by any means necessary.
We're talking about the fact that 14% of the US population can't call the cops for fear of dying.
It's NEVER good enough for white america. NEVER.
In Minneapolis today due to the videos which were captured even those anti-kneeling americans largely recognize the problem and support solutions. But by allowing the rump to be violent (or equivalently, serruptitiously distribute bricks and gasoline) the activists are losing public support.
Roughly 200 mostly commercial buildings burned in the main shopping area for (working class) Minneapolis over the weekend. The food and pharmaceutical desert is going to kill far more of the poor and marginalized than police violence would have, in a city that already votes D up and down the ticket.
The violence is not necessary, nor productive, nor are the situations comparable.
Expecting the protesters to somehow control everyone in the protest, when the cops fire indiscriminately on people whether they're peaceful or otherwise, doesn't seem like a working system.
Can we please stop making this just about race and recognize we have a general police brutality issue? You do realize cops kill just as many whites as they do blacks. The same police that killed George Floyd also killed Justine Damond.
When you rationalize away the white people who also have been killed, you polarize the issue and give justification to those who are committing violence and looting.
Normalized for population, in the US the rate is 3X for black people, and a white person's expectation to be killed by police is less than the average.
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/08/police-officer-shooti...
or do you want to keep arguing about something besides the point? if so, why?
I think a large rate difference between white and black is meaningful information. Why do you prefer that information not be added?
> Then you would go on to say those particular rates are racist to say.
That didn't happen either. Your expectations are off.
You actually can't, because such studies are based on arrest rates, not the unstudied "amount it actually happens."
Furthermore, something like that can't be pinned on "race," which is already a nebulous concept that exists only as an ill-defined cultural construct, whereas "cop" is a defined entity.
cops have a lawful monopoly on force, and if you cannot trust that will be used justly, then we lose the whole basis of rule by law
Is the idea to make a mess and then police will be "ok guys, we get it now, we will be nice". Obviously you will have to change the laws and this could have been the initial objective through peaceful protests only.
Seconds of thought aren't wasted. Stay in the present. It's only an emergency if you make it one.
Minor issue huh? Video is from the LA riots in the 90s.
The police have taken an oath, have systemic training, and are funded and protected. They should be held to, at minimum, their systemic failures, but probably their oaths and training (which includes constitutional law and appropriate force)
On the other hand, the only thing that protestors have guaranteed to be in common is that they've shown up in a place.
Here's the part you're missing: the protests are holding the police to account, and they're the only way available for the community to enforce basic rule of law on the police. If not for the protests, the officer(s) in question would be getting some paid time off to fund a vacation to the beach. Literally. And that's despite the community already having voted for stricter regulations by clear majorities and not getting them because white votes are counted more in our political system than black ones, and that's despite voter suppression disproportionately restricting black voters' access to the polls.
So the question is how many fires should you let them light? After that they became very aggressive and used the year gas and batons and rubber bullets to take over the area and force the protestors to retreat back a few blocks. Later on the looting a few blocks away from the police escalated and it does seem like it could have been partially motivated by the violent tactics from before. But if you look at the amount of arson and destruction in Minnesota recently when there was no real police presence, it seems like the result was worse.