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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Having done a fair share of media work on and in German protests myself: the biggest problem is that video evidence can and will be used by cops to go after activists - and that includes material from way outside a riot scene, given that police also look for such tiny details as shoes to (attempt to) identify people. The people at such events have something to lose: careers, families, friendships, years behind bars.

In contrast, in countries like Turkey, Belarus or other dictatorships, where the fear is getting killed regardless of protests, the situation is different - people on these protests want their faces to become public so that they cannot be "disappeared".

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I think this is a really important perspective. Reporting of protests is not neutral, and neither is the police's response.

>and neither is the police's response.

The police is almost never neutral when it comes to protests, not just in their tactics (just compare how easy the far-right gets away with even killing people at protests vs. how anything remotely left-wing is treated) but also in their press statements (e.g. see here for a police lie that activists had set a door knob under live electricity: https://taz.de/Polizei-Falschmeldung-ueber-Tuerknauf/!561005...) or at court.

The worst thing is many people do not realize this and treat police as "privileged sources", especially as many media outlets directly copy police press statements as facts instead of sending their own people to monitor and cross-check - because having "boots on the ground" costs money that too many outlets don't have any more.

> The worst thing is many people do not realize this and treat police as "privileged sources", especially as many media outlets directly copy police press statements as facts instead of sending their own people to monitor and cross-check - because having "boots on the ground" costs money that too many outlets don't have any more.

There’s also the phenomenon of long-term crime-beat reporters taking on the perspective that the police are always correct, due to the implicit bias of reporting on “criminal behavior“. Moreover, such reporters need to maintain a working relationship with police in order to get the facts for their stories and often build friendships with police PR heads and prosecutors.

Go after them for what? Are they doing something illegal?

Cops have plenty of ways of going after people who haven’t committed crimes.

https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/p...

In other words, protestors are harassing, assaulting, and robbing reporters because they might otherwise be unjustly framed for minor crimes.

Or targeted with a “you should kill yourself” campaign like the FBI tried to do against King.

Protestors are people and unlike most places Portland is still active months later.

I would imagine there’s a core cadre of organizers who are no longer able to hide in the crowd, now that things are less spontaneous. Those folks are going to try to protect themselves.

Intimidation, faked/blown-up charges, attempts to recruit spies, witness summons... the list is endless.

> Go after them for what? Are they doing something illegal?

Intimidation, blind (racist) violence, looting, attacking the police and setting property which isn’t theirs on fire.

I’m pretty sure all those things are illegal.

video evidence can and will be used by cops to go after activists

only if there's something to use. If it's you just standing there with a sign, it's useless. If it's you throwing a molotov cocktail, or tailing someone to shoot them, yes, it will be rightfully used.

That makes it no less important to be aware of any bias in reporting. If only journalists that show the protests in a flattering light are allowed to film, then this should be mentioned every time footage from the protests is shown, and any "mostly peaceful" claims can and should be dismissed as unverifiable.

> any "mostly peaceful" claims can and should be dismissed as unverifiable

I honestly thought “mostly peaceful” was a meme at this point.

With cities on fire for months and months, how can anyone take such a claim seriously?

Edit: Twitter seems to agree with me.

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23MostlyPeaceful

According to this report, most BLM protests have been peaceful: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/05/nearly-all-bla...

original report here: https://acleddata.com/2020/09/03/demonstrations-political-vi...

BLM as an organization has existed since 2013-2014. Before 2020, has there been any violence from anti-police-brutality protesting? The protests have been incredibly peaceful for years and years. What you're seeing now is a response to the lack of action boiling over. When voting and peacefully protesting doesn't stop the government executing American citizens in the streets, what do you do next? What's left? When you get thousands of angry people together, it's just going to result in some bad actions, unfortunately. If you want the violence to stop, then stop giving thousands of angry people reasons to gather.

No violence except for the Dallas shootings in 2016:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_poli...

Funny thing, BLM basically disappeared after this and just reappeared in 2020

It pops up during presidential election years. The donations are what is funding the DNC and the Biden campaign. It's an odd thing when you consider that Harris was a prosecutor who was unusually aggressive about putting black people in prison for minor offenses like pot, and that Biden was a senator who pushed to pass the strict sentencing.

I think the deal is that getting a person to donate to an uninspiring political campaign is difficult, but it is easy to add a more-palatable organization in the middle to pass along the funding. It's almost money laundering.

This HN news-story is all about the news we get about this “mostly peaceful” movement being extremely biased.

And you cite those very same news-stories as evidence of this article being wrong. Congratulations.

Also, that guy who only beats his wife when he gets drunk in the weekend is mostly non-violent, so I guess there’s no problem there either then? At least not by your logic?

What a fascinating report. It takes time to name the people wrongly killed by police, detail their deaths, but doesn't mention anyone killed by people who might be associated with BLM. It doesn't bother to so much as give a number of fatalities! Well we know there were at least some: https://apnews.com/864cb5c14ba08b4411a16577042d0773

The same approach is taken to other areas: Violence by police gets described in detail, violence by protesters gets a brief statistic such as "Post-deployment, the percentage of violent demonstrations has risen from under 17% to over 42%".

I must say I was shocked when the report managed to mention how many Rittenhouse shot, but omitted that he was shot at himself, and was on the floor, being hit in the head with a skateboard when he shot the 2nd and 3rd persons. Oh but it did mention Trump failed to condemn his actions - that part was important enough to include.

According to your link, "93% of demonstrations have involved no serious harm to people or property" out of a total of 7,750 demonstrations this year.

Which is one way to say that there have been approximately 542 protests this year involving serious harm to people or property. But sure, nothing to see here. (And by the way, what % of that 93% involved harm that the researchers didn't consider "serious"?)

Next time I see my grandad I'll tell him that there were only 71 bombing raids on London over 8 months of the Blitz, therefore his childhood in that city was "mostly peaceful."

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