Comment by distribot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by distribot | Hacker News Reader

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If 10000 people walk down the street, and 10 of them light a building on fire, is it correct to refer to it as a violent protest? There has never been a large demonstration, anywhere, that didn't attract some bad actors and opportunists. I won't say this is bootlicking, but it does seem like a position that never leaves you on the side of popular demonstrations.

15-26 million people participated in the protests in the US last summer. The 1-2 billion in damage[1] is a shocking number taken on it's face, but if 20 million people poured into the street with the intention of causing damage, they would cause orders of magnitude more damage than that. Adjusted for inflation, the 1992 Rodney King riots in LA caused 1.4 billion in damage[2].

The main demonstration in my city last year, which I attended and attracted thousands of people, were totally peaceful in vibe. A group of people burned a bank down in the evening, but it was a totally different group that formed hours after the main BLM march and was 20 miles away.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests

[2] https://www.chicagotribune.com/chi-insurance-civil-unrest-ri...

Yes but people tend to play this statistics game very selectively in order to bolster whatever point they want to make. For example, I could also point out that there are ~800,000 sworn law enforcement officers in the U.S. and about 60 million people have an interaction with them each year. Only a tiny, tiny percentage of these interactions end with an innocent person dying. However it's insensitive to just shrug that off because the number "could be a lot bigger". It's also insensitive to brush off 2 billion in property damages from riots and looting even though the protests were "largely peaceful".

Hmm, really good point, but I still stand by my thinking. I think the expectations should be higher for an organization that is empowered by the state to do violence than for a gathering of citizens. There shouldn't be any expectation that bad actors are just a part of law enforcement in the way that there should be when there is just a group of thousands of people.

And moreover I think that police killings are kind of the top line item because that is punchy, but most activists would say their problem is with the entrenched structures that allow police to behave badly with impunity. It's impossible to sue an officer as an individual for even the most egregious offenses, police unions have fought really hard to protect bad officers and policy, even when people do "win" legal action against the police the bill is footed by the taxpayers, and in general the thousands of bad interactions people have and film that never even get attention. I'm biased, but I think that the system of policing in the country is more corrupted by bad actors than the protests were.

The tiny, tiny percentage of interactions that are fatal account for the largest causes of death for certain groups.

source: https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793

No, not really, and your link shows that. It is certainly too high of a rate and more needs to be done but it's not "the leading cause of death for certain groups". According to the study you cite, for young Black men, police violence accounts for 1.6% of total deaths. For all young men 25-29, here are the rates.

Accidents: 76.6 deaths per 100,000, Suicide: 26.7 deaths per 100,000, Non-police homicide: 22.0 deaths per 100,000, Heart Disease: 7.0 deaths per 100,000, Cancer: 6.3 deaths per 100,000, Police violence: 1.8 deaths per 100,000

Law enforcement is a collection of cohesive bodies who train, take oaths to enforce the law, and follow orders. We are right to demand that every single one of them suffer consequences if they violate the trust they receive.

Protestors are not cohesive groups, and looters are even a step further removed. They're people who take advantage of the confusion of protests.

And anyway, property damage during a protest is older than the Constitution (see: Boston tea party).

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