Nobody is trying to quell protests. I don’t know how that misconception is still alive. The problem is the rioting. Nobody would be trying to disperse crowds if everyone was peaceful.
That's not really true. There is an area between "lawful protesting" and "rioting" that's usually called civil disobedience. Civil disobedience as usually understood is peaceful, but it's also by design inherently disruptive.
In Austin, TX protestors blocked the main highway through the city. That was obviously incredibly disruptive, but many people believe the city police's forceful response of shooting less-lethal rounds relatively indiscriminately into the crowd was the exact type of response people were protesting against. A large group of trauma doctors in Austin wrote a paper arguing against using these types of rounds for crowd control due to the horrific injuries they treated: https://www.statesman.com/news/20200816/beanbag-rounds-cause...
I would consider civil disobedience something more like as a policeman to refuse to disrupt a peaceful protest, or illegally publishing data (consider Aaron Swartz, Alexandra Elbakyan, Edward Snowden, or Chelsea Manning), or someone like Oskar Schindler.
The entire intent is for the masses, with no qualifications whatsoever, to make themselves heard in a way that cannot be ignored.
Edit: I am talking about wartime labor mobilization. In addition the government owns gun manufactories too.
> to make themselves heard in a way that cannot be ignored.
You are stepping away from just civil disobedience then. Riots, sieges, or a full scale revolution fit that description better.
You can't just redefine words to suit your fancy because you don't like what the word actually means. That example you give is literally 100% not what civil disobedience means. Civil disobedience by definition means defying government, not your employer.
Equating these acts with "siege" screams bad faith to me, I feel like every example you've given is intentionally misleading or missing the point.
Police, on the other hand, are our paid civil servants. It is their job to remove passion and emotion from the interaction and to deescalate potentially dangerous situations. They have a duty to respond sub-proportionately in a way that resolves conflict unless their life is in danger.
Time and time again we see police responding by escalating tension, passion, and violence. This is a spectacular failure of their duty and huge breach of public trust.
Sorry for being facetious, but the whole point is that people expect police to have some self-control (unlike an animal) and behave better in these situations. If you're a cashier, and a customer is yelling at you, berating you, taunting you, etc. you're expected to try to remain calm and attempt to de-escalate the situation - certainly you're not supposed to attack the person. If anything, police should be held to an even higher standard than this.
No, I would feel safer with a crocodile around actually.
So blocking a road in order to draw attention to some other incident of injustice isn't about how the law about blocking roads is unjust, nor is it even about the some other unjust law. In your example the protest was about the George Floyd killing in which the police officers were rather quickly charged with a crime.
The protesters in your example are indeed "protesting" but I don't think that their tactics are an illustration of civil disobedience, as I understand it.
So if we are to excuse protestors for breaking laws I think there needs to be a different ethical argument that must be made. And that argument has to tackle the problem of which crimes can be excused: disorderly conduct, assault, arson, vandalism, theft/looting, manslaughter? And perhaps it matters how that disobedience is directed? For example, torching the police vehicle of the police force that is implicated in the injustice seems different to me (but still not necessarily excusable) than torching the police vehicle in a city thousands of miles a way from the incident, or than looting your local Best Buy.
For those of you who feel like these types of protests are ethical/warranted/justified, I would ask, what is the limiting principle? What would represent the protesters going "too far"? When would it be appropriate to say enough is enough? When is it no longer protesting and is just criminal behavior?
Again, why are people insisting on redefining words because they don't like their meaning? Chaining yourself to a physical structure like a building or tree, and going so far as to make cutting those chains difficult, is one of the prototypical examples of civil disobedience. The whole point is to make it difficult for police to arrest and remove the protestors in those situations.
But those tactics are very different than what is going on and I think it is quite easy to distinguish between that sort of thing and rioting.
If you followed the nightly protests in Portland OR with any closeness it'd be abundantly clear. Examples just in the past 20 days:
- police pulling down mask to pepper spray protestor in the eyes while pinned to the ground: https://twitter.com/_WhatRiot/status/1292012255714787330
- police randomly puncturing a support vans tires, they have done this on multiple occasions for no real reason: https://twitter.com/ScottHech/status/1291711270903844867
- police beating and kicking an unresisting protestor: https://twitter.com/1misanthrophile/status/12959623991035453...
- more police jabbing protestor with batons: https://twitter.com/danielvmedia/status/1292228819588452359
You see enough of these videos and you appreciate the cops and just vindictive and angry at the prospect of losing "power". It doesn't matter what protestors do (and they most they've done to directly threaten officers is thrown water bottles and apples and flares into an empty police building), police will use any reason (or none) to beat protestors.
* As far as I know these videos have resulted in NO reprimands to officers, might as well be standard operating procedure as it continues to happen nightly
> Today I watched a police officer in kenosha wisconsin get knocked unconscious with a brick. The fellow police officers picked him up and dragged him away - while the crowd changed "Fuck the police" and recorded it.
The idea that the worst the protesters have done is throw apples at the police is so crazy I don't even know how you could be that deep in a bubble
If you want to conflate places to strengthen a case then you need to dive in to what happened at Kenosha and the lack of police response to that tragedy or any of the others.
If you want to bring up how "protestors were asking for it" by showing up to protests then we got to ask if police are asking for mass nation wide protests by actively resisting change and harming black lives.
Portland where there’s been continuously rioting, looting and attack on civilians for three months now.
The police’s job is to provide law, order and security for the people, something Portland currently lacks, and which the police needs to restore.
When anarchists are obstructing that job, they can’t expect not to be handled appropriately.
Also, if you think police can just beat people senseless because they feel challenged then you're just a short step away from text book fascism.
That seems like a massive deflection. Sure, business as usual during the day, but what's happening every evening?
Sure. They're largely peaceful, except when attacking and almost killing civilians[1]. And it's not even intended as a joke. There's some crazy levels of cognitive dissonance going on.
[1] https://twitter.com/RationalTheory/status/129536995058932531...
You have one example versus dozens of examples of police violence. And it's Andy Ngo, who once again didn't actually take the video footage.
You're the one with cognitive dissonance claiming all nights are violently attacking civilians when you have one example. Somehow though most nights police beat protestors or use tear gas and that’s ok by you?
There is no justification for it whatsoever. There is no legitimate cause behind any of it.
Watch the hour long interview with the Portland cop that was going around. It’s good perspective.
In the same vein, I saw store owners starting to shoot at protestors.
I suspect, generally, all parties would rather have police keeping the peace. No one wants a gun battle in the streets as people try to protect their property from looters.
I'm not 100% sure what I'd do in this case, but these are not friendly protests. I'm finding the police remarkably restrained. Even in some of these videos we are seeing, people are taking police officers weapons and / or assaulting a police officer before they open fire.
If you're attacking someone who's armed (police officer or not) you should be prepared to suffer the consequences. (I'm not saying all cases are like this, just mentioning that there's a clear tilt to the coverage here).
If you're attacking someone who's armed (police officer or not) you should be prepared to suffer the consequences.
Conversely, if police departments abuse their authority, shouldn't they expect to be punished by the people they serve, and in a similarly peremptory manner?
By having a brick thrown at their head? No, that not reasonable in the least.
No rational person could think it looked like that, and this would still not be an acceptable response.
This statement is devoid of any explanation as to what types of "change" are important enough to override "other types of civic engagement". The legislative process, voting, representative democracy, the "rule of law" are all designed to avoid having people take matters into their own hands. If you are going to argue that all that should be thrown out it has to be more convincing than just some generic statement that "change" is necessary.
Your argument seems to be that everything possible has been tried to address police violence and that there is no other solution other than to riot.
I could point to various crime statistics to suggest that the problem is not in fact intractable or "fairly common" (while still being a problem to be addressed) but it really isn't worth it. Even if I shared your apparent assessment of the problem, how does it make sense to physically and economically destroy communities in response? How does it make sense to make it impossible to actually "police" in these communities? How does it make sense to drive away anyone with resources from these communities? Why do you even think the people reacting this way are making a principled statement about police violence and aren't just taking advantage of the situation?
The phrase "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" comes to mind but it is entirely inadequate to describe the disastrous sequence of events that is going on in so many communities right now.
In general, rioting is used selectively, targeting official buildings followed by corporate concerns, which extract capital from local communities. Little of the news coverage about Kenosha drew attention to the fact that the largest building burned down Monday night was the WI Dept of Corrections; many commentators prefer to focus your attention on commercial damage in order to push the idea that it's indiscriminate.
You think the mob will stop? You are advocating for a justice system driven by threats from the mob that must be responded to in real time. You aren't even attempting to grapple with the particular facts that are in evidence at the moment in this case, never mind what might be discovered by actually asking questions. You aren't describing a justice system based on the rule of law, you are describing mob rule. It won't end well for anybody. Why would anyone in their right mind be a police office given the framework you describe? Why would anyone choose to stay in that type of a jurisdiction? The logical consequences of your framework would be disastrous for the community. The medicine you are prescribing is far, far worse than the disease.
The reality is that police often shoot and kill with a sense of impunity because they enjoy considerable legal immunity, to the point that the identity of a police officer who carries out a shooting is often withheld from the public. I'm saying that any time a police officer shoots, kills, or seriously injures someone, they should be immediately relieved of duty pending a full inquiry, no matter what the circumstances. If there is a colorable suspicion of misbehavior (eg the shooting was not a case of returning fire or action during the commission of a crime), then they should be subject to arrest like any other criminal suspect, while retaining their full panoply of legal rights like presumption of innocence, access to counsel etc.
If a lot of people don't want to be cops who are subject to such restraints, good. I don't want cops who use force casually. What we have now is a system that throws the book at anyone who takes or threatens life (with far higher sentences than most other developed countries despite little evidence of a deterrent effect) while frequently applying light or no penalties, or sometimes no serious investigation, to police officers who commit similar acts. These inequities are compounded by economic and racial disparities in the application of force, legal sanctions and so on.
Unless you've lived in other countries or have significant first- or second-hand experience (including talking to current and former police officers) this might be hard information to accept.
A core principle of a civil society with the rule of law is the government is granted a monopoly on the use of force to enforce the laws. If someone steals from you, you don't get to hunt them down and kidnap them for 1 year even if the punishment for the crime is 1 year of imprisonment. We explicitly grant police the authority to use force and when they don't use it properly they are subject to exactly the same punishment as you and I. There is no conceptual asymmetry on the use of illegitimate force. Self-defense is another example of this. You can legitimately use force against an attacker in self-defense. If you kill someone in self-defense that isn't murder and isn't an example of a double standard.
> I'm saying that any time a police officer shoots, kills, or seriously injures someone, they should be immediately relieved of duty pending a full inquiry, no matter what the circumstances.
I'm pretty sure this is exactly what happens. The mob isn't waiting more than 30 minutes never mind for a "full inquiry".
> If there is a colorable suspicion of misbehavior (eg the shooting was not a case of returning fire or action during the commission of a crime), then they should be subject to arrest like any other criminal suspect, while retaining their full panoply of legal rights like presumption of innocence, access to counsel etc.
Tell that to the mob and its enablers. We have state governors opining on who was right or wrong just hours after tragic events, without any attempt to understand what really happened. This encourages mobs and rioting.
Same thing happened in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. Some ridiculously vague account on social media regarding an interaction with police and a mob arrives to loot and pillage all night long.
Just a couple of days ago in Mineapolis someone committed suicide while police approached and that triggered more rioting.
We won't survive as a society if every police interaction is interpreted immediately as yet another racial injustice, never mind if every rumor of a police interaction is interpreted that way. Mobs and rioting need to be shutdown hard so we have room for "full inquiry", but there are political leaders who not only won't shut down this activity they are actively encouraging it.
If you're looking for more information, https://twitter.com/MarcSallinger/status/1277063130523348995 is a Twitter thread showing the police using pepper spray and batons to disrupt and clear out said vigil.
So, not so peaceful it seems.
I originally shared the video claiming that police were interfering with a peaceful protest. You disputed that the police were interfering, saying they were marching past. When I shared further evidence that the police were in fact disrupting the protest and hurting people who were participating, you found reason to instead believe that the protest was not peaceful. Consider your biases.
Here [0] [1] [2] [3] are more examples of and news articles discussing police attacking peaceful protesters.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/police-keep-using-fo...
[1] https://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2020/07/20/new-...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/06/police-viole...
[3] https://twitter.com/DavidBegnaud/status/1268716877355810818
I have no idea how people have fallen for the misleading narrative that violence was caused by police. It’s a textbook example of either the naivety of an emotionally charged mob, or incredible social media marketing, or both.
Unfortunately many well-meaning protesters were also swept up in events that were subsumed by antifa/far left groups whose aim was confrontation and violence. For them, the coming backlash against their movement (due to violence) is going to sting.