Comment by reaperman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reaperman | Hacker News Reader

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The crime was blocking the highway. If there were no police at all, that crime still would have been committed.

I'm all for civil disobedience but at least if I'm not mistaken, when Dr. King organized so many marches and sit-ins he guided his followers to peacefully allow themselves to be arrested -- overflowing the jails and courts was an intentional part of the civil disobedience. He himself was arrested many times. That peaceful action made media coverage of events like the police violence in Selma, Alabama more impactful than they would be otherwise. I grew up in a "violent leftist" city, which was a major hub for the Weathermen and various bombings of law enforcement buildings during the era of "Days of Rage", but the general advice for attending protests/marches in the early 2000's was "bring a check in your pocket to fill out for bail", not "run away from the police and attempt to avoid getting arrested" or "attack the police and burn down the police stations".

The thing to keep in mind about comparisons to the civil rights era is that it was a learning experience for state power as well. Training has changed to avoid the sort of "righteous confrontation" king was capitalizing on. Propaganda is much more sophisticated now, dissipating and denigrating public support, portraying protestors as unruly criminals or unsympathetic radicals both before and after the protests. Not that they didn't try, and to some extent succeed, to do this with civil rights protests but they are much better at it now.

Protest is as sophisticated a conflict as anything else, and tactics are not static but constantly changing on both sides. It's important to keep that in mind, and that also that king's own tactics were considered polarizing and unhelpful by the white mainstream of his time. Only in retrospect do we consider them noble and effective for his cause, but that doesn't mean they necessarily will be effective for other causes, against other tactics.

A large amount changes to policing and police policy has been in direct response to the civil rights movement in the abstract. EG not about its goals and consequences per se, but how to preempt, discredit, and disperse public movements so that nothing of its size and power can emerge again, regardless of the motivating cause.

Since when are highways more important than the first amendment?

1A protects peaceful protests, once you shine the laser into an aircraft cockpit it's no longer peaceful. You can temporarily blind everyone in the cockpit with a single $15 laser.

Nobody implied they were. The first amendment guarantees the right of free speech, but that doesn't give you a free pass to not get arrested when you do break another law.

I could be upset about Hersheys and choose to organize mass theft of their candy bars from the grocery store as a protest, and that would be speech. But it doesn't shield me from the consequences of the crime of theft, nor does it mean that "candy is more important than the first amendment".

> that doesn't give you a free pass to not get arrested when you do break another law

This is covered in the article. Part of the program, after 'boxing in' the protesters, is to indiscriminately arrest everyone regardless of any crimes committed. Charges will be handed off later.

This is a distant relative of the 'I've got nothing to hide' argument in favor of surveillance. In effect, it looks like just being there is enough to get arrested - and this is ignoring the fact that you may actually try to defend yourself when being pushed and prevented from leaving by armed police, maybe while breathing in some tear gas or pepper spray. You may even consider that the goal of the whole operation is to stir up violence, so that everyone has a reason to be arrested...

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