The only violence I’ve seen from police that doesn’t seem like an anomaly is violence that protestors incited by starting a conflict with the police.
So, empirically, it seems like the violence is occasional except when you go asking for it and the protestors just have a problem with authority and society at large.
It’s why their complaints are big on individual sob stories but lacking statistics to back them up.
For whom and per...what? Encounter? Mile traveled with them?
> The only violence I’ve seen from police that doesn’t seem like an anomaly is violence that protestors incited by starting a conflict with the police.
That suggests to me that either your perception of provocation or of anomaly is skewed (or that “anomaly” is used in the software sense of “behavior out of line with spec” rather than the more general sense of “behavior out of line with what is normal”.)
> So, empirically,
You just recounted what is, by the terms used, your subjective impression, and termed your conclusion built on that (which go far beyond what is justified even if that impression was undisputed fact) “empirical”.
That’s...not what that word means.
Per arrest for violent crime (where most of the deaths occur), blacks are safer than whites.
I’ve been reviewing the footage from Seattle — and protestors started every instance of violence by first getting forceful with the cops.
Show me any evidence that there’s an endemic problem of violence — because nothing I can find in either statistics about harm or footage from protests suggests there is.
That’s an empiric conclusion: studying the statistics about how often police harm people and comparing them to other sources of risk — which show they’re relatively minor.
Seems the problem is approximately 90 times worse (!) than the UK for example. The UK is somewhat less diverse, but what has a diverse population got to do with it? That might explain some of the killing, but it doesn't justify it.
That's funny, because the majority of the clips I've seen have unprovoked or inappropriate responses from the police. Seattle alone [0] has had numerous incidents. It's trivially easy to see this, to the point that one would have to ignore many incidents to say "every instance" was started by protestors.
I believe that you are not arguing in good faith.
[0]: https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality/blob/master/repor...
The first one is what we should want to happen — a misplaced knee was moved by a colleague. There’s no context to decide if police inappropriately started an altercation. There’s no extended period of a knee on someone’s neck.
The second is police responding to someone on the ground fighting them and physically resisting arrest.
The third is pepper spraying a crowd that was refusing to move and let the police form a line, after someone lunged at the police.
The fourth is completely context free, and while unfortunate that a child was there, it doesn’t give us context to judge.
Your source also is using selective clips, that remove context to focus on emotionally triggering scenes.
Blindly chanting "there's no context" to every single video is problematic at best; it's a dog-whistle for cop apologists at worst.
We have videos of cops shooting projectiles at people on their own private property; cops approaching people who are walking away and just shoving them or beating them up for no reason; cops driving vehicles (or horses) into crowds or towards pedestrians; et cetera. One needs to be adamantly ignorant in order to believe that every single instance has been instigated by protestors.
Saying "protestors started every instance of violence" and now going "wait, we need the context to judge these videos" makes me believe you have zero intent of approaching this from a viewpoint other than one that vilifies protestors and glorifies cops.