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Comment by daft_pink | Hacker News Reader

I lived through the BLM protests in a liberal city. They let them destroy everything, then they called in the National Guard to stop looting that already happened.

Everyone’s okay with peaceful protests, but they should call in the national guard and prosecute people for violence. You might hate Trump, but in my previous experience, it’s the residents of the most liberal districts that suffer all the consequences of this nonsense.

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Sorry, shattered most of the windows of the central business district, destroyed virtually every grocery store and pharmacy to the point of an almost total loss, carried away most anything of value that could be reasonably carried away on foot from any retailer or small business, vandalized tons of private property/vehicles. Lit tons of police cars on fire.

I don’t still live there. Honestly, it convinced me right or wrong that the only reason I’m able to live in the city was because the police are there to sort of enforce the laws and that there is a certain percentage of the population that will steal everything as soon as they think there is an opportunity. Compare that to the suburbs where you could leave valuables out in your yard and no one would take them convinced me that I would rather raise a family in a stable mostly crime free environment.

Every grocery store in a whole city? That's bonkers, which one?

Could you show me evidence of your first claims? That still seems like an overstatement.

>shattered windows

Yeah, I could see most of the first floor windows being broken

>destroyed groceries and pharmacies

Wait virtually every, and a total loss? I’m skeptical.

>stole lots from businesses

Sure, I don’t doubt it, though how widespread this was across cities is worth asking.

>vandalized

Don’t doubt this at all.

>lit police cars on fire

Sure, yeah, but how much does that add up to? A few cars per city wouldn’t be much in the grand scheme.

What are you trying to get at?

Here’s some indicator of damages. 1500 damaged businesses in Minneapolis alone: https://www.newsweek.com/businesses-year-after-floyd-1596610

And typical estimates are a couple billion in insurance claims (I think nationally?)

Are you just arguing about if it’s “a lot” or not. Thats entirely subjective and not worth debating.

The original way it was put is that “they were allowed to destroy everything” and the national guard was brought in after the looting had already happened. That’s the picture I’m responding to and contesting because I don’t think it’s true in most of the country. Maybe Minneapolis and a small number of other places?

You're making it sound like the "violence" started in a vacuum. Let's not forget where the actual violence and unlawfulness originated from – in both the BLM and ICE protests.

> You're making it sound like the "violence" started in a vacuum.

They didn't make any such claim. They were explaining the consequences they experienced as a result of the BLM riots.

It's generally the police that starts being violent. It's a very well known tactic and not done just for fun (though I don't doubt they have fun doing it).

If it’s the city I think you’re referring to, the governor was literally begging the mayor to ask for help from the national guard, and she refused for hours. They would have been deployed long before that. I believe the quote the mayor said at the time was something like “give them room to destroy” and basically gave the rioters the green light.

Edit:

Fwiw, the governor probably shouldn’t have waited for permission. A white man encroaching on the city run by a black woman at the height of Freddie Gray, tough spot to be in.

> where the mayor of the city said that she was going to allow, give protesters room to destroy and wasn't going to stop them.

https://www.fox5dc.com/news/hogan-says-defunding-police-wors...

You men the poor resisdents, because this people dont plunder and burn the mansions in Beverly Hills, where they hire private security and have gated communities.

They burn the small business of honest working people.

I didn't vote for Trump in 2016 or 2024, but I did do so in 2020 specifically because of the BLM riots, which the media incited (through selective reporting of police violence), excused ("fiery, mostly peaceful protests"), and then went so far as to doxx and harass anyone who resisted the mob, or even just those who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, like the fuel truck driver who hadn't been informed that BLM had commandeered an interstate (and didn't want to get Reginald Denny'd): https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/tr...

Glad to see Trump learned his lesson from the first time.

BLM wasnt on the ballot, so your vote for Trump was really just performative.

LA had plenty of local police to handle the scale of the protests (it's something like 88 different jurisdictions in the whole region).

Of the 2000 national guard deployed, only 300 have actually been operationalized.

There was hardly any looting or rioting. Certainly not more than could be handled locally. Trump is doing this to deliberately escalate the situation.

While I think you are right that Trump is doing this to escalate the situation,

> LA had plenty of local police to handle the scale of the protests before

sure, and why didn't they do it this time? I suspect for the same reason: both Bass and Newsom want to escalate the situation as well. And when both sides want escalation that's what we get. My 2c.

Note I edited my post to remove "before". What I meant is at the start of these protests. LA had and continues to have plenty of its own law enforcement available. There is simply no reason to nationalize the guard without consent of the governor.

Trump decided to call out the National Guard in response to one car getting burned. That's something on the scale of a sports riot, not a collapse of law and order. You are making a mountain out of molehill, or falling for the manipulations of the people who are.

All this trump nonsense aside -

It's hilarious to me that we even have the cultural understanding of a sports riot, and it's assumed that it's just not that bad. Just people having a good time, burning up a car and smashing businesses to celebrate (mourn) their team's victory (defeat).

Is that supposed to be funny? Because in a super dry sort of way it's hilarious as a concept.

I guess it needs hundreds of marines, huh? You’re deflecting from the issue as so many others are here in bad faith.

Sports riots following a big game are just not that unusual in developed countries (even in Japan from time to time!), and no, they are not that bad. They are minor transgressions that rarely involve serious injury or loss of life and it's foolish to treat them as existential crises.

Are we watching the same things? It would seem they are. I see videos of LA police shooting reporters (with less than lethal but from a lethal distance) and swarms of cops ignoring 3 mounted officers attempting to trample a guy on the ground. Tons of arrests already. LA police are plenty capable of escalating things all on their own. They arrested a solid 1/4 of the protesters last night and will keep right on doing that, I'm sure.

I think the fact that the LAPD had a press conference where they stated they were prioritizing responding to only certain kinds of crimes and cancelled time off for officers among a whole list of changes, indicates they could use help and adding in federal resources was the correct decision.

Now, did they really destroy “everything”?

Of course. You’ve never heard of the lost city of Neverhappenda?

Oakland had some boarded up windows for a while around then. The destruction of the window of the Chase branch in downtown was indeed complete, I think people might have broken it twice.

Honestly in 2020, I went to an open grocery store, a little bit outside the city center, the next day and I'm riding in the elevator to the grocery store and there is this black elderly man from the poor area of the city riding with me and we get out and it's closed, and he's like "Oh Man, they destroyed all the grocery stores in my neighborhood."

Was literally everything destroyed, no, but I've got photographs of small businesses boarded up with they already looted everything, please don't loot again. There was devastation throughout the city.

After everything happened, national guard trucks showed up and guarded the devastation. If you drive out to the wealthy burbs, it's like nothing happened. They devastated one of the most liberal parts of America. Congrats.

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