We should expect police to us less use violence and improve their crowd management and deescalation skills. The increasing militarization of police is a trend that must be reversed. However, we should not neglect the other side of the equation either. This article is, in large part, about just that.
The article points out that many protests in the U.S. went smoothly through the practice of police and protest organizers meeting and jointly managing protests, but that this practice fell into disuse after the 1999 Seattle WTO meeting in which protesters violated the negotiated terms and police responded with violence.
While some recent (and ongoing) protests have turned violent, many didn't. In the coming months we'll have time to do a postmortem. I strongly suspect spontaneous protests without organization will be found to have the most potential for violence, while those with organizers committed to self-policing and, ideally, cooperating with police will be found to have fared much better.
Individual people may be intelligent and responsible, but crowds have their own rules of behaviour and need to be managed. Protests are more dangerous when unplanned or when their organizers give no thought to self-policing.
There will always be organizers who want violence because it reliably brings press coverage and attention to their protests, but social media is also creating new problems. Coordinating a large number of people to show up at the same time and place used to take considerable planning and effort. When you have to work hard just to get the even to happen, why wouldn't you plan how it will unfold as well? Now a couple of tweets or posts on the right reddit subs will suffice. How can police meet with the organizer of a protest when it's really just some dude who had a lot of social media followers and might not even bother showing up himself?
I've been on a few demos that turned violent. Among them the famous one when George Bush decided to pay a visit. In all cases, the organizers wanted to cooperate with the police. They knew who were in the "autonomous bloc" (troublemakers) and would have gladly helped the police zone in on them. In all cases the police didn't care and charged peaceful and violent demonstrators alike.
I find it very odd that the police still cannot after all these years and with all development in surveillance tech distinguish between peaceful demonstrators and rioters. One could almost believe that they have no interest in making that distinction.
Insightful reply. I marched yesterday and police fired rubber bullets into a peaceful crowd because we were blocking a non-essential intersection. On a Sunday.
We refused to leave and fortunately they left and let us have a peaceful march.
There doesn’t seem to be an interest in separating out the extreme minority that protest violently. There had been zero violence or destruction that day. A very well-behaved crowd exercising peaceful civil disobedience met by violence from police. In 2020.
> after all these years and with all development in surveillance tech distinguish between peaceful demonstrators and rioters. One could almost believe that they have no interest in making that distinction.
The thing is that they can. That's a very deliberate tactic, down to planting of provocators.
If you been watching what's going on around the world, the allegations of that, including provocator planting, followed pretty much every major demonstration event.
It's naive, if not silly, to use that "hey, he started it first!" argument at the time when the fact of confrontation happening is already obvious.
The talk now should not be who started the violence, but how to end it, a peace treaty to say.
There exists an asymmetry in the dynamics of protesters vs police during a protest. Very simple:
Anyone can be 'planted' in a group of protesters to start stirring up trouble (agent-provocateur). Then the police have 'justification' to use whatever amount of force they think is required.
On the other hand, it's practically impossible for a regular citizen to be embedded into a riot police response unit.
Add to that the police have practically no real oversight and investigate themselves (assuming internal affairs counts as police).
One side can't fail (except morally), while the other side always will end up with the shorter end of the stick.
People also can counter plant and plant someone to feign being a first level plant to be able to point out that the violence was instigated by a plant. Both sides can and do do that.
This is a gross oversimplification. I have family members in law enforcement. In most cases it’s very difficult to tell the people apart. People can barely identify a single thief, unmasked, caught on camera, yet somehow they have these god-like powers to identify troublemakers who weave through the crowd of protesters, all masked?
This isn't exactly the same because things have been a little more chaotic in places in Seattle, but a lot of the force I've seen from the Seattle PD has been disproportionate.
Mostly flashbangs, fireworks, tear gas and mace.
A couple of videos associated with incidents in Seattle from tonight are here:
The general characterization I would give is that there have been calm periods, and then moments of intense chaos. In the chaos, protestors have often been throwing projectiles (mostly plastic bottles, occasionally firecrackers; some have claimed bricks have been thrown in Seattle, but I haven't seen it myself).
However, in general I would say that the SPD has repeatedly been the party to _instigate_ the chaos, by launching a round of flashbangs, mace, and pepper spray.
Was everyone wearing masks and practicing social distancing of at least 6 feet? Weren’t we told that the reopen protesters were putting people at risk by protesting from their cars? I don’t disagree with the reason for protest, but if a church can’t be open, even outdoors, and an extended family picnic is illegal in a public park, then I am not sure the rationale for allowing protests now. The first amendment isn’t conditional on the reasons for gathering or speaking. The mayor of Oakland even supported the protests held there while just recently maintaining that “non-essential” businesses couldn’t open. I am just trying to reconcile why a small restaurant in Oakland can’t be open, but thousands of people marching in a massive group is somehow allowed. And it seems, politically speaking that a similar demographic that was just days ago telling everyone to stay home to protect us from the plague suddenly changed their public health tune as soon as something they care about was the issue.
Are the lockdowns optional now? Are they situational depending on the politics of the event? Because it sure seems like it. Georgia got hammered for reopening too early, but nobody had much to say about Atlanta having massive protests over the past days. Either the lockdowns are unnecessary or they are necessary and people are putting public health at serious risk with these “large gatherings.”
I wish we could reboot 2020. It’s a g-damned mess.
Nobody likes that these protests are likely to lead to increased transmission. It's a truly terrible choice. People are making that choice because these protests get to such a fundamental problem in our society that they are still worth it, despite the cost. And, as has been mentioned, mask usage is high, and these protests are outside. It doesn't eliminate the risk, but many, many people are still trying to minimize the public health risk.
So, yes, context matters. I would absolutely argue the value in the being part of the strongest push against police brutality in decades, that just might result in systemic change, is incredibly more worthy than virtually any other activity. It does not mean there is no public health cost. It does mean it is a tragic choice to have to make.
The police officers with him, who were watching him kill someone and were keeping a lookout to allow him to kill someone in peace, have not been charged with anything. Additionally, it is not just this incident. There have been many, many incidents of unarmed, often non resisting black people being killed by police and few (if any) actual consequences to police for doing it equivalent to if a civilian did the same.
Police officers are humans, believe it or not. Some of them are bad and that will always be true. Regarding your unnecessary insult at the end: Grow up.
The problem is with how these incidents are dealt with when they happen. Ordinary citizens could expect jail time for doing something like this, and that threat helps to protect black people against these bad people.
In this specific case, it looks like the police officer will face justice. But that only happened after the huge public outcry, and it didn't happen in countless other cases even when there was a big-but-not-as-big outcry. In many cases, not only have the officers escaped trial, they've actually kept their jobs!
I think that because this incident was so clearly visible, the video capturing what was so obviously murder, that it was a concrete platform to start a movement on. In many other cases, there was at least an attempt by the victim to defend themselves, or parts of the video that left holes in the context of what was going on. This one was a slaughter, and no one could find a justification for it.
Salience and specific evidence is a necessary but insufficient condition for these kinds mass outrage conditions. In the end the final trigger is obvious only in retrospect.
As a less politically sensitive topic for most Americans, I point to the Arab spring uprising as a good example. Tensions had been rising for decades, but the final trigger was when Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor, lit himself on fire to protest the local police stealing his possessions & threatening his livelihood. A tragic event, for sure, but after decades of brutality and continual tragedy, who could have possibly predicted that that would be the final straw?
Yeah, I think this is it too. In particular, this case was so clear cut that it enraged white people who were perhaps more passively supportive in other cases.
Work. Volunteer. Take care of your family. Vote. It's a bit of a bad timing for protests right now - easily exploited, will likely result in negative change.
It is not a good idea to protest on the streets right now. It is selfish to protest on the streets. First - it spreads COVID. Which kills people in thousands. Second - it prolongs shelter-in-place and associated damage. Third, likely increases the possibility of re-election of the current president.
But in the meantime, we now see videos of cops following humvees through residential neighbourhoods and shooting at unarmed people on their own property.
As a result, people are more concerned about police brutality than they were a month ago, rather than less
Of course, because there are at least 5 types of protesters, all with different goals. There is no way to control this salad peacefully.
1. Peaceful protesters against police brutality (including peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters).
2. The radical wing of the Black Lives Matter, who believe that the time of peaceful protests is over and that the only way to change the situation is to use violent methods, especially directed against the police.
3. Marauders and looters: who leverage the protests to rob shops, destroy and set fire to cars and buildings. These people do not give a shit about any other groups.
4. Anarchists and Antifa: their goal is to stir up arbitrary rule, to destroy the system using extremely violent methods. They are catalysts of chaos and their main goal is to create chaos that will lead to the arbitrariness and anarchy of the crowd.
5. White supremacists and extreme right-wing radical groups. They're catalysts for chaos. To make things a little simpler, their goal is to "anti-advertising" any African-American civil rights movement against police brutality and racial riots in the United States.
Ok some huge generalisations going on here, people can have many facets to them, so a peaceful protestor might become part of the radical wing after watching their friends get attacked by police when peacefully protesting.
When has antifa ever been archistic?. They are anti-facist, they dont want to bring down the state, unless that state is a Fascist one (I know Trump is bad but the USA is not a facist state currently).
So pigeonholing people is pointless and no one needs to control anything. Control implies a hierarchy, a hierarchy means you can go after the leaders, the point now is to raise so much awareness that you cant just go back to how it was last week.
> a peaceful protestor might become part of the radical wing after watching their friends get attacked by police when peacefully protesting.
The radical wing protesters are all well prepared. There is no way to identify them, they wear bandanas, cover their faces as much as possible. Peaceful protesters are barely covering their faces - basic face-masks to prevent the spread of the virus.
As for the antifa, they are taking the civil rights movement hostage and trying to create chaos on these protests by framing peaceful protesters and peaceful African-American activists.
A lot of violent protests are organized movements. They "advertise" on websites similar to Craigslist and offer $25/h on average. Police is well aware of all of that, which is why they have to act fast. This whole thing is no longer about George Floyd and police. It's much broader. A shit ton of people see this as an opportunity to reach their own goals hiding behind BLM, police lawlessness and so on.
P.S. English is my second language, so when I say control, what I really mean is to make sure peaceful protest stays peaceful. It's needed because not everyone is smart enough to understand that stealing laptops from stores is not normal.
>A lot of violent protests are organized movements. They "advertise" on websites similar to Craigslist and offer $25/h on average.
That needs a citation, seriously, even if English is your second language you must know that is a bold claim. Who's paying this $25 per person, how do the logistics of organising a group like that happen? I mean trump pays actors to turn up to his rallies, but they aren't going to get arrested or killed.
Occam's razor though says that they really are just fed up of people of colour being harassed and killed by the police that's why they are protesting, that's why there are so many of them. sure it's co-opted by a some people, or small groups, for financial gain, but these aren't huge global cabals, they are criminals who see an opportunity to exploit.
There was a video circulating of a streamer who tried to instigate trouble at a peaceful protest and he was called out on it by lots of those around him.
If you have ever been in one of these protests you would know that the spark is almost always a police charge or other offensive action like tear gas.
Also remember a riot is not looting, a riot is just defcon 5 on the protest scale, and some people will use that as an opportunity to loot, same people who would loot after a flood or a hurricane or an earthquake. That's doesn't mean the riot is wrong.
Agreed. Honestly, I couldn't find the Craigslist listing when I wrote my previous message, I would LOVE to show it to you.
Police needs a reform. It's not questionable. But there are many other problems and angles to this whole situation. There is no single truth and it's important to consider all of these issues wearing each group's shoes, including the police.
And did those arrest and charges come before or after multiple days of protests? At this point the protests have snowballed into a larger frustration over police conduct (and I'm sure other issues), which only gets reinforced with each instance of force being used on those who are assembled peacefully.
Seriously? They let him slowly kill a dude right next to him! This isn't a situation where he just whipped out a gun and instantly shot someone, that kind of thing would be hard to stop in time, they had literal minutes where they could've stepped in, and chose not to.
I've participated in law enforcement hand to hand and incapacitation training sessions (as a Marine). At least in those trainings, it was very clearly taught what techniques were safe and effective, how to use them, and we practiced them on each other literally hundreds of times. If you've ever had a blood choke or constrictive choke applied to you, you immediately understand what it's like, and what dangers it presents. The officer charged knew what he was doing, without a doubt. The officers around him had a moral and legal requirement to stop him to avoid being complicit in this murder; they chose to help in the murder instead.
In the military, I would have been convicted of a war crime had I done this to an unarmed and incapacitated enemy combatant; even in ignorance, even if it had been a mistake, even if I was tired and had a bad day. I'd hope our police force would be held to a higher standard dealing with our own citizens than a soldier or Marine dealing with an enemy of the state.
The question isn’t whether failing to stop a crime makes you an accessory, it’s a question of whether or not performing perimeter security for a crime makes you an accessory.
Because the parent poster's comment is dead, I'm responding to yours. Yes, obeying unlawful orders from your commanding officer is a violation of the UCMJ, and you will be criminally charged for doing so unless it can be demonstrated through strong evidence that you could not have known the order was unlawful. You are simply responsible for your own actions, as is everyone else (including the police).
If this is true and every office on the scene was that misinformed, it's still a systemic problem that requires a complete overhaul of the way police are trained and hired. This won't be fixed by punishing a few bad apples and then pretending the problem is solved.
What's the chances that of a sample of officers who responded, those 4 are the only ones who would have let this happen?
The idea that kneeling on a restrained human’s neck for 9 minutes isn’t something they knew could lead to the severe injury or death of that person would be laughable if it wasn’t so chilling to hear you defend.
If I owned a martial arts studio and I let a student do that, I’d face criminal & civil liability. Why shouldn’t trained officers of the law be held to at least that standard?
If you did 1/2 of what the other cops did, you’d already be in jail pending trial. If you’d done 1/10th of that to a cop, you’d be lucky to survive your arrest.
Part of the outrage is how blatantly unequal the treatment of cops and and civilians accused of crimes are. It’s especially galling because not only are they given the power of the state, they are also given extra rigorous training in the safe application of force. If anyone should have reasonably known that kneeling on someone’s neck would be lethal, it would be the cops.
Oh, and all the bystanders who clearly recognized what was going on. Apparently they’re more wise to the dangers of kneeling on a restrained human’s neck than the police are.
They’re authorized to use necessary violence; kneeling on a handcuffed man’s neck was not a justifiable application of force. I genuinely cant believe I have to explain that.
You say that as if that is what should have happened and its all ok. He was sacked, whoop de do. He should have been arrested, that he was arrested 3 days later means they could have arrested him immediately but if this hadnt kicked off he would likely still be patrolling now looking for his next victim.
One officer did the killing, three others let him do so, as it was a slow killing. Four out of the four present were complicit; think about what that likely implies about the rest of the police force, statistically.
And they did it even as people yelled at them and were recording. How many more officers might do it if nobody was watching? That's the truly scary thought.
Where were/are the rest of "the police" to denounce, arrest and charge, and update policies and practices to prevent this from happening... every. damn. day.
What do we have instead? 3 other "the police" standing by watching and not doing a thing. Being accessories to murder, that they would gladly arrest anyone else for doing the same. Followed by days of police brutality towards peaceful protesters, "the police" showing their itch to start shooting, throwing 'white power' signs and grinning, etc...
Yes, I and about 90% of the crowd wore masks. Yes, we did our best to keep 6 feet but not always, hence the masks. People were walking around with hand sanitizer to share.
A global pandemic is awful, but it does not alleviate us of our civic responsibility.
Was it uncomfortable and difficult? Yes. Am I glad I went? Hell yes. Black lives matter.
Plus, it's awfully hard to avoid spraying spit and snot on everyone around you when you're getting tear-gassed. I know, I've been cs-gassed many, many times. The police are not helping the situation with this tactic.
> but it does not alleviate us of our civic responsibility.
The protests haven’t worked though for the last 20 years or so. IMO it’s more important to vote and promote change than to block traffic.
People remember how you made them feel more easily than what you actually said. Preventing them from getting somewhere is a great way to just piss people off.
It’s no wonder that the protests over the last 20 years haven’t worked to garner more support considering that those who do participate are treated with violent retaliation. Maybe if those of us begging to be heard were allowed to speak, and scream and chant, it would inspire more people to unite, organize and vote.
Is it even worth going through the ways in which US democracy is broken? From the electoral system itself all the way down to extremely obvious voter suppression efforts (often specifically targeting black people), you really can't be too surprised that people do not feel that their voices are being heard.
IMO the media was not talking about income & wealth inequality before OWS. OWS forced it on the agenda and changed the very language we use to describe it: “the 99% vs the 1%”. That’s a big deal.
I'd say it raised a lot of awareness, which is exactly what protests are for. Protests don't create laws, they raise awareness. Based on that awareness, people vote and change laws.
Well none of the things the protesters wanted (broken up banks, more taxes for the rich, arrested bank execs, more social entitlements, etc) came to fruition.
I believe protests were working, but progress has since been reversed. Police militarization is controversial. The previous administration made efforts like 'Smart on Crime' and federal laissez-faire approach to marijuana enforcement.
Many of these issues were reversed in an attempt to be tough on crime again with a big push from the AG in 2017. Tensions have been stoked by things like a pardon dealt out to a sheriff who violated a court order relating to racial profiling. I have a hard time believing these acts aren't having their intended effects.
You've got it backwards. Voting and promoting change is what has not worked. Economic damage is likely to be the only thing that's going to persuade the elites to throw the working class a bone. You're witnessing the anger of the masses in its most pure form here.
Exactly how is destroying low income housing, small businesses (many of them minority owned) and peoples places of employment going to persuade "the elites"?
If a large enough share of your income is returns on capital to both meet your expenses and increase the store of capital, or you have a sufficient store of capital that depleting with your expenses would take lifetimes even though it isn't growing after expenses, you can plausibly held to be in the haut bourgeoisie, the elite of capitalist society. If you are an intellectual worker with a modest amount of stock held through a retirement fund, your probably between the proletarian intelligentsia (in the working class, if among the better working conditions and higher pay of that class) and the petit bourgeoisie (the capitalist middle class), but not at all elite.
I don't think we're there yet, and I think we can still use the ballot box to effect change, but fear of a socialist revolution and mob violence was one of the catalysts behind the new deal.
So if you can't understand how hurting the pocket books of "the elite" can encourage them to compromise, you haven't been paying attention to history.
History says that mob violence is probably more likely to lead to a dictatorship than to another new deal, but you're being willfully ignorant if you don't acknowledge the existence of a potential chain of consequences that starts with "damaging companies' bottom lines" and ends with policy change.
If you're black in the US, there's just no correct way to protest. Street protests get painted as riots (and often turn into riots due to excessive police response fanning the flames), quiet personal protests are claimed to be disrespectful (since when is kneeling a sign of disrespect?), speak up and they get told to shut up. There's no way to win.
There are many of them. They dont get media coverage. They "miss the cutoff" for debates. The party doesnt give them a chance. Even so called "liberal media" do hit jobs on them.
Then, people who are complacent complain no one is trying.
>> You just don’t like the priorities of everyone else so you’re claiming it hasn’t worked.
That bit is correct. Yes, it does work -- for some. But the masses that are angry are whom it didn't work for. When it starts working for the other 90% people wont be as angry.
As per normal, absolute numbers can be misleading to very smart humans when we have trouble intuiting about vast numbers like "100 million". If the goal is to convey scale accurately, its generally recommended to default report population related measures as per capita percentages. That doesn't mean other measures can't be relevant, but the choice really should be very carefully weighed in order to convey accuracy, not to increase shock value.
The fear is that this number (0.026%) will seem too low, which is why we're trying to use numbers like 100,000 in order to convince people to continue acting safely. The real message is: this number is so low BECAUSE we've all been working hard to keep it this low. That's a hard message because its nuanced, but its not misleading. I don't know if its as persuasive, its probably not, but that doesn't make "100,000" not misleading when used for shock.
0.026% is a number that means "most people don't know anyone well who died of covid19", and "many people aren't even directly acquainted with anyone that died of covid19". That's because the social distancing is working.
If it weren't working, based on covid19 survival stats, the human feeling would be "most people are directly acquainted with one or two people that died of covid19". That's a very different feeling. TBH, its still not exactly "black death in the middle ages" type of feeling, but the direct human impact would be MUCH larger.
WITH social distancing, at the present death rate, Covid19 in the US is killing about 1/4 the number of people daily of Cancer+Heart Disease.
WITHOUT social distancing (i.e. run amuk), based on "when hospitals were overwhelmed in some italian cities" survival rate, it looks like it'd be daily killing about 2x Cancer+HeartDiesase.
So social distancing is having big impact, and a really good job everyone, we are gaining a LOT of saved lives for our sacrifices.
All that said, I do wonder if 2x the daily deaths of Cancer+HeartDisease tips into "unthinkable to even openly discuss the tradeoff between quality of life and safety" territory? At what death rate do we consider completely changing the world as we know it? 0.00001%? 0.00001%? 0.001%? 0.01%? 0.1%? 1%?
And at what death rate do we surpress discussion of NOT making the tradeoff as too dangerous (risking thoughtless noncompliance)? 0.001% 0.01%? 0.1%? 1%? 10%?
Lets say you were one of the leaders of a small fishing village without mass media (i.e. without big numbers), and somebody convinced you that you had a choice:
1) Everyone stays in their huts for 6 mos to a year with all the impacts and suffering that entails
OR
2) An extra person will die this year (beyond the usual 3 who die every year). It could be anyone, but you're told its most likely to be somebody who would die in the next 5 years.
Does that seem like a no brainer? It doesn't feel like one to me. That would be a hard decision to me. I think I'd go for sitting in the huts, but if somebody wanted to discuss the decision with me.... I think that would be pretty reasonable. If the whole village wanted to get together and really talk it out and vote rather than just letting the leader(s) make the call, I think that'd make a lot of sense.
Personally? I think I'd vote "everyone stays in their huts" but I would absolutely NOT vote "can't be openly discussed because the discussion is too dangerous".
Should we become more risk averse as population grows because the numbers of deaths become so staggering? Or is percentage deaths a more relevant measure?
If you have 10000 people in your medieval media sphere, and ONE PERSON DIES EACH YEAR from an ox cart accident, we probably don't stop using ox carts. What if there's ten billion people in your media circle and therefore A MILLION OX CART DEATHS PER YEAR, should we therefore abandon ox carts?
I don't feel 100% on the answer, maybe the answer is something like.... we should spend the same percentage of resources avoiding unnecessary ox cart deaths as we would at the small scale? That would be a lot of money toward better ox carts, but we wouldn't shut down the world because OMG ONE MILLION either.
The rate seems small because you're apply it across the whole population. So, your number 2 choice is not quite accurate. The question is are people ok with many of their parents and grand parents dying this year?
> 0.026% is a number that means "most people don't know anyone well who died of covid19"
My wife's grandmother had COVID-19. At 80 years old, she was a lucky one and was asymptomatic. She's in a nursing home and many people around her did die though. I have 3 other friends who lost relatives to COVID-19. Even at the low population rate, it's rather stunning anecdotally.
It wouldn't change the number you know, it would just change who it is. Its more like 'you're pretty unlikely to know a youngish person who dies of covid19' (of course, we have large anecdata sample sizes on the internets.... therefore its very likely that many people on here know somebody youngish who died from covid19 complications, but still a small percentage).
"I know a few people who know somebody who died" sounds consistent with what you might expect from 0.026% if everyone communicates with about a hundred people... crudely (and wrong, but order of magnitude): 0.00026 * 100 * 100 = 2.6 = "a few".
I phrased it pretty carefully, but I agree it didn't immediately clarify that mostly the victims will look pretty old.... just bebcause "people who are likely to die within several years" is going to be dominated by people over 70. FWIW a few different measures of "likely to die within 5 years" looks like one of the simplest single-index predictors of covid19 survival, much better than just age. If you're 40 and likely to die before 45 due to a serious health condition, Covid will be roughly as dangerous to you as if you're 82.
> An extra person will die this year (beyond the usual 3 who die every year). It could be anyone, but you're told its most likely to be somebody who would die in the next 5 years.
The death rate is not an equally weighted distribution over the whole population. In fact, it's very weighted towards middle age and up, with younger people dragging it down. So in your example it's likely to be more than an extra person in the typical age of older parents and grandparents.
If the young had political power, the response would be a lot different, but because the wealth/power lie with the elderly, the current response is predictable. Fascinating times
Not to go off on a tangent, but that article looks at deaths per capita and then ignores the R0. The reason the COVID deaths per capita are as low as they are (and still bad) is because of lockdowns. Pointing to what happened with lockdown mitigations in place to claim that a lockdown isn't needed is misleading at best.
The article also uses 60k flu deaths as the average baseline which is incorrect. The 60k number was a particularly bad flu season. Last season flu deaths were ~34k [1]. This season could be much lower because of the lockdowns.
Comparing COVID to the flu is hard, and really should have never been done. Without taking into account the respective IFRs, CFRs, R0, etc... any comparison is going to be severely lacking. It's also hard to get accurate numbers while in the middle of the pandemic. I hope as things open up that COVID just becomes a memory. Unfortunately, that doesn't look like the case so far.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html I'm not really sure how the author got to a 60k average unless 2007-2009 was really bad. The years on the CDC site only have 1 season greater than 60k. Errors like this do bring all of the statistics into question.
I have no idea, but I wouldn't be surprised to see those portions of Europe "back in the hut" again in December. That said, it does seem like if you're on the lookout, have very low case numbers, and are doing strong contact tracing, "sitting in the hut" is unnecessary except to regain control if you have a surge.
I said we're back to normal, but I wasn't 100% fair: our borders are still semi-closed. We'll probably have another surge if we restore travel in the future from countries where Covid is active.
All in all I think it was a very small price we paid to be back on the tracks in only two months. Some companies are getting out of Kurzarbeit already (government help).
When you have a disease killing more people than malaria despite the massive lockdowns, there is no legitimate way to have a conversation.
And in case you think 'yeah but the lock downs don't work' look at Vietnam: they are the first country to have local transmission outside China, and they started anti-pandemic measures in December. Results? 95 million people, 329 caught the virus, 0 deaths as of today. Not 329 thousand. 329 people. That is what this could have looked like in most of the world, if the virus had been taken seriously and if our politicians cared about human life.
There are things that it is pointless to discuss. Fire is hot, water is wet, covid19 is one of the worst diseases to hit the world in 50 years and lockdowns and isolation are an absolute necessity to prevent it becoming an even bigger tragedy.
Of course there are people in the world who, genuinely or out of other interests, try to contest all sorts of things. The earth is flat, man made global warming is not happening, the earth is 6000 years old etc. That doesn't mean we need to seriously entertain these ideas just because some people do so, or claim to do so.
Yes, failing to care about a disease killing hundreds of thousands of people, and failing to protect yourself and loved ones, does seem like a good reason to end a friendship.
Good for you in being somewhere with zero violence in looting, while here in nyc, entire neighborhoods (soho, herald square etc) has been ransacked and cops run over to death. National guard cannot come soon enough to put away these perpetrators in jail.
Here's an idea, for whatever it's worth: Address the incentive to riot instead of attempting to assign full control and liability to one element over another.
For all the obvious, on-the-nose proof that reactive states differ from proactive states, I find it very odd that people are still folding their arms and brandishing smug expressions for their equivalently useless ideas as soon as someone else's idea yields a critical failure.
Critical thinking is not an art, nor a science, nor difficult. It just requires someone to maintain a consistent curiosity and skepticism for the utility of information. If someone tells you cats climb trees, you should automatically think, Not all cats can climb trees and How useful is this to me?. And if you have a cat, you might sequentially think, Do I have any trees that my cat could climb? and How much of a tree should I trim to prevent my cat from climbing it? and maybe Do I have a way to retrieve my cat from one of my trees? and so on and so forth. So, someone please explain why, given the seriousness everyone attributes to the lockdowns, to police brutality, etc. Just... why are you doing the equivalent of hearing that cats can climb trees, and then you think, My cat would never climb my trees, because my trees aren't cat-climbable trees, so that makes my cat, my trees and myself better than other cats, trees, and cat owners?
Critical thinking is complicated and the subjects don't fit well in poster boards or chants, the results of critical thinking don't fit in with worldview discrimination "Does this idea fit in with my alignment or not"
> In all cases the police didn't care and charged peaceful and violent demonstrators alike.
FWIW, German police regularly used undercover, black-clad, violent agents as a pretext for breaking up peaceful protests. It's probably an established tactic. But the situation in the USA looks very different (from here), violent protesters appear to be a small minority of the problematic people, most of which are just criminals using the opportunity to loot.
This is something that really concerns me, because it's such an incredibly effective way to undermine any sort of demonstration. Are there any effective countermeasures to agent provocateurs that anyone knows of?
From what I understand it’s actually untrue- the media are just more likely to film and show destruction rather than peaceful protests. In Minneapolis there were both massive peaceful protests and looting, but the property damage was covered more than the protesting. Given that the argument for looting is that people care more about property damage than about the protection of black lives against police oppression, this only further evidences the argument for property violence in response to human injustice...
> "Ich weiß, dass wir bei brisanten Großdemos verdeckt agierende Beamte, die als taktische Provokateure, als vermummte Steinewerfer fungieren, unter die Demonstranten schleusen. Sie werfen auf Befehl Steine oder Flaschen in Richtung der Polizei, damit die dann mit der Räumung beginnen kann.
Translation: "I know that we insert undercover agents as tactical provocateurs, as hooded(disguised) stone throwers, among the protesters during large controversial protests. They throw stones or bottles at our command towards the police so it can begin the evacuation".
The majority of protesters are not provocateurs of course. You just need a few of those, or even one, to justify a brutal police response against peaceful protesters.
> In all cases, the organizers wanted to cooperate with the police. They knew who were in the "autonomous bloc" (troublemakers) and would have gladly helped the police zone in on them.
How many organizers are there compared to participants? How are the participants supposed to know the police intrusion has been agreed to? How do you know there aren't participants who would choose to align themselves with the "autonomous bloc" over the police? Assuming all "good"(work with organizers) demonstrators work together, how would you give notice without giving the "autonomous bloc" ample time to disappear into the crowd? It isn't like the demonstrators are surrounding the rioters and/or opening a path for the police.
As for using tech to track rioters, perhaps it is far from good enough in protest situations. I imagine it is hard to get a hold of enough data to train for that situation. Perhaps the police have been prevented from using it. I know Clearview AI tech has already been banned in a number of places.
Did you ever go to the police to find out what you could have done differently to prevent the indiscriminate charge?
Life imitates art when it comes to tech; it's a hydra of an ouroboros[1] eating its own tails with its many heads. We did this to ourselves?
It’s already happening in India and China. I’m sure it’s happening here too, with an added startup component with the example of Clearview AI. The big companies get in on the action too:
‘There are many companies that offer facial recognition products and services, including Amazon, Microsoft and FaceFirst. Those companies all need access to enormous databases of photos to improve the accuracy of their matching technology. But while most facial recognition algorithms are trained on well-established, publicly circulating datasets — some of which have also faced criticism for taking people’s photos without their explicit consent — Ever is different in using its own customers’ photos to improve its commercial technology.‘[2]
'In the 1998 Hollywood thriller Enemy of the State, an innocent man (played by Will Smith) is pursued by a rogue spy agency that uses the advanced satellite “Big Daddy” to monitor his every move. The film — released 15 years before Edward Snowden blew the whistle on a global surveillance complex — has achieved a cult following.'
It was, however, much more than just prescient: it was also an inspiration, even a blueprint, for one of the most powerful surveillance technologies ever created. So contends technology writer and researcher Arthur Holland Michel in his compelling book Eyes in the Sky. He notes that a researcher (unnamed) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California who saw the movie at its debut decided to “explore — theoretically, at first — how emerging digital-imaging technology could be affixed to a satellite” to craft something like Big Daddy, despite the “nightmare scenario” it unleashes in the film. Holland Michel repeatedly notes this contradiction between military scientists’ good intentions and a technology based on a dystopian Hollywood plot.'
'In 2006, the cinematically inspired research was picked up by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is tasked with US military innovation (D. Kaiser Nature 543, 176–177; 2017). DARPA funded the building of an aircraft-mounted camera with a capacity of almost two billion pixels. The Air Force had dubbed the project Gorgon Stare, after the monsters of penetrating gaze from classical Greek mythology, whose horrifying appearance turned observers to stone. (DARPA called its programme Argus, after another mythical creature: a giant with 100 eyes.)'[3]
> I find it very odd that the police still cannot after all these years and with all development in surveillance tech distinguish between peaceful demonstrators and rioters. One could almost believe that they have no interest in making that distinction.
I have been in the middle of protests when I worked for Reuters and the difference between peaceful and violent is very tiny. I was in the no-man’s land between the KKK and the New Black Panthers in the wake of the James Byrd Jr. lynching and it went from frenetic but peaceful to riot in 8.3 seconds. Actual combat is a a lot less ambiguous and disorienting. Not defending police or condemning them, but when an airborne brick heads your way, it’s a pretty tall order to expect immediate and accurate identification of friend or foe.
It is fascinating to me how left wing protests seem to frequently degrade into violence. Recent case in point was the reopen protesters. I don’t think a single shot was fired by the crowd, nor were any buildings burned or looted. The Charlottesville, VA protest by the extreme right wing however is a counterexample — but it’s an exception that proves the rule. The Tea Party protests were never violent. In almost every large-scale protest that has left and extreme left wing elements, looting, fires, and violence is a foregone conclusion. It’s historical record.
It’s really tragic because pretty much all Americans were outraged about Floyd’s death, but as soon as looting, fires, and violence starts, then a large portion of the population now starts discussing and being angry about that rather than the core issue.
> I have been in the middle of protests when I worked for Reuters and the difference between peaceful and violent is very tiny.
Can you spot the difference between an African and European swallow? I bet you can't. But a professional bird watcher could tell them apart in a second.
Same thing with protestors. When I was active I could easily tell the difference between someone potentially violent and someone peaceful. Woman with a stroller - probably peaceful. Person in all black with a large backpack - potentially violent. Admittedly, this was many years ago but I don't think rioters are any harder to spot these days.
Thing is, most riots are planned and not spontaneous events. Troublemakers infiltrate the crowds and try to cause confrontations with the police. The police reacts with heavy handedness causing those who are peaceful to sympathize with the troublemakers. More of them join the troublemakers side causing more confrontations and eventually it spirals out of control.
The simple solution to this problem is for the police to target the troublemakers and to let the peaceful protestors be. It actually is that easy because organizers almost always knows who the troublemakers are and would share that info with the police. But the police isn't interested. I suspect that is because by and large they love riots just as much as the rioters.
> When I was active I could easily tell the difference between someone potentially violent and someone peaceful. Woman with a stroller - probably peaceful. Person in all black with a large backpack - potentially violent.
Wait for it...
> The simple solution to this problem is for the police to target the troublemakers and to let the peaceful protestors be.
You are suggesting that the police should profile individuals based on their appearance?
I think you are purposefully misreading the comment. There are ways to differentiate, mom with kid, old man vs. young guy in black clothes with a backpack.
I think I know what you want to imply, but did you note the complete absence of race or colour in OPs comment? And alos the completely different circumstances, crowd control vs. standard law enforcement?
I am not purposefully misreading. I am reading. I was gobsmacked by how ironic the proposal was and felt compelled to point it out. To show that this stuff is hard even when folks are entirely well-meaning.
I did notice the absence of race or color and you will note my comment does not include any notion of race. You added race. I did note judging by appearance. You added age, out of nowhere.
Using appearance to treat people differently is profiling, though not always racial profiling. Should non-racial profiling be okay? To your inclusion of age, should we treat gatherings of youth differently than gatherings of the elderly?
The GP says "...for the police to target...". No distinction is made between crowd control and standard law enforcement.
It reads to be that you’re being purposely obtuse. Any security is going to take into account the appearance of a person. Undoubtedly you understand what that means in practice in America—-that appearance has been boiled down to just race: “be on the lookout for a black man.” It’s lazy and should be called out so that police are forced to do work and learn the difference between a non-violent angry person and a violent angry person in a crowd.
That's a "gotcha" question and it tells me that you are not interested in the subject - only in trying to expose me as a hypocrite. But I never expressed support for the idea that the police should treat everyone exactly the same at all times.
Could the organizers arrange for citizens arrests of the troublemakers by the peaceful majority? Like asking them to leave and having them restrained by the peaceful majority if they refuse?
> ...as soon as looting, fires, and violence starts, then a large portion of the population now starts discussing and being angry about that rather than the core issue.
If true, then it’s sad that loss of property is such an effective distraction to facing down centuries of systemic oppression. On a more conspiratorial note, this seems like a good counter strategy for the people who ostensibly would rather the masses focus on property damage than laws, statutes and police training.
On a separate note, the historical record of protests is mostly disseminated through MSM, which has a profit motive for click/read bait. So it’s truly hard to know the extent of violence occurring in recent protests. The citizen record (captured through Twitter, Instagram, TikTok) seems overrun with police violence against protesters and the media record seems overrun with pictures of looting and burning buildings. How does one truly grasp the extent of either?
On a more conspiratorial note, this seems like a good
counter strategy for the people who ostensibly would
rather the masses focus on property damage than laws,
statutes and police training.
Yes. This is an age-old and (unfortunately) extremely effective technique. "Agent provocateur" is the term here.
There's a lot of direct and circumstantial evidence pointing toward exactly that sort of thing happening during this current time of unrest.
There are plenty of incidents during the current protests that, and I'm going phrase this very mildly for HN's sake, certainly invite... uh... speculation as far as whether or not there are agents provocateur at play.
Moving away from speculation and into the realm of hard facts, this sort of escalation is an explicitly stated goal of some movements. Example:
You are trying to sound objective by comparing protests but frankly you sound downright foolish.
You're comparing protests about systemic racism and murder to protests getting hair cuts and lowering taxes.
Of course one side's protests usually break out in violence. They are protesting the very fact that they are inordinately subject to widespread state-sanctioned violence.
I wonder if it's related to the fact that the protestors a few weeks ago were carrying lots of guns openly. I genuinely wonder what would happen if a majority the people protesting today were all carrying AR-15's
I wondered about this. If all the people protesting started building arsenals like we saw a couple weeks ago, would that lead to gun control finally happening?
Honestly, it is funny to me that the group most dedicated to standing up and fighting against a tyrannical government and refuses to believe that the military would be called in against peaceful protesters is still standing on the sidelines and watching the violence unfold. The day they realize that they and the BLM movement are mostly on the same side for this issue (anti government heavy-handedness) will be the day that these protests start getting seriously scary.
Like you’ve noticed, it appears to me that the state responds with much more violence to protests explicitly against violence than protests about other issues. I wonder why that is?
There's a big difference in protesting because you're being taxed too much (in you opinion) and protesting because people with your same skin colour are being systematically targeted by police and killed for no reason.
There's plenty of bad actors looking drum up violence as well. At the very least you get the kind of person who starts fights in a bar for the sport of it. Police can work with organizers to do something about it or they can choose to let it boil over.
"Let" sounds a bit too passive for a lot of what's happening though.
I guess my point was that at a police brutality protest, you have protestors facing police which is instantly adversarial and a form of counter protest if cards are played poorly. If you have a reopen rally per the example up-thread, you're (very generally speaking) not going to have quite the animosity between them and those securing the area. And combine that with the fact that someone not wanting to rush and reopen is likely to stay at home per state instructions.
>It is fascinating to me how left wing protests seem to frequently degrade into violence. Recent case in point was the reopen protesters. I don’t think a single shot was fired by the crowd, nor were any buildings burned or looted.
thats very interesting. The difference seems to be in initial reactions of the police to peaceful protests. With lockdown protesters, police showed up in soft clothes and didn't initiate violence on the protestors.
Regarding the much more serious issue of police brutality, police responded very violently to the initially peaceful protests. They were the ones that escalated things. Very interesting overall, and I think the obvious answer is that left wing causes seem to offer critiques that are much more incisive and dangerous to the government.
> much more incisive and dangerous to the government.
Why the "government"? I don't think the police automatically defend the interests of the currently-elected politicians. In the absence of distinguishing evidence, I assign much higher priors to them defending their own interests.
"the government" is much more than simply the currently-elected politicians. The currently elected politicians simply operate certain positions within the government.
In many areas, rural and urban, with corruption and machine politics, police, sherrifs, and their unions are one of the blocs mayors and councilmembers avoid being on the opposite side of.
> The Charlottesville, VA protest by the extreme right wing however is a counterexample — but it’s an exception that proves the rule.
It's not any kind of exception. Protests involving the klan and the Nazis have often been extremely dangerous.
Aside from that, the point you're making is trivial in an obvious way that you really ought to understand. Violent right wingers are not typically on the protesters' side in American demonstrations, Nazis and KKK notwithstanding, because they are on the side of the police.
Think about what these ideological categories mean for a moment and you wouldn't normally expect leftists to put on riot gear and bust heads for the man, or for conservatives to go out and violently oppose the status quo.
> It is fascinating to me how left wing protests seem to frequently degrade into violence.
This is just you being selective in how you view things due to your personal politics. I live in Portland and for the last couple summers we had to deal with Joey Gibson and his band of goons repeatedly attempting to incite violence at protests. It's a core view among modern white supremacists that they will rise to power atop a race war that they instigate. And let's not even start talking about the 2A crowd that shows up to everything armed in an attempt to intimidate people.
It's a bit much to ignore all that just because you wanna take a jab at left leaning politics you disagree with.
> In almost every large-scale protest that has left and extreme left wing elements, looting, fires, and violence is a foregone conclusion. It’s historical record.
Well, because one is made by enemies, vs friends of the power? One expects retaliations, and prepares to counterattack, and another don't because they don't even know why they should?
Every time when the revolution happens, and the power is toppled, its topped by a greater power, which means one with bigger guns, and heavier fists.
We're not allowing governments to do the proper, necessary surveillance to control and prevent crimes in general, including ones at demonstrations/protests. Whenever these ideas start popping up, someone always finds some "privacy" concern that spoils a lot of tech-answers to crime and violence, including here on HN.
I find it very saddening as the victims of these crimes end up being victims that are ignored by "privacy" advocates and proponents, as if "privacy" is a bigger concern than violent crimes.
The original violent crime - the murder of George Floyd - was filmed in public. That is the kind of violent crime that needs to be controlled to stop the cycle of riots.
>The article points out that many protests in the U.S. went smoothly through the practice of police and protest organizers meeting and jointly managing protests, but that this practice fell into disuse after the 1999 Seattle WTO meeting in which protesters violated the negotiated terms and police responded with violence.
Beyond the general history, this is a big ask of the protesters when one of the primary motivators for this specific protest is distrust of the police.
It's a big ask when politicians have been acting like they can ignore protests which is what the past, hell, decade or so has really been like.
The political class had collectively decided they understood protests, that people would turn up peacefully, shout some slogans and then go home.
But that's not what a protest is. A protest is a clear and specific message "this is how many people took time out of their day, free time, time off work to come and represent themselves for an issue - do you think it's wise to ignore them?"
> It's a big ask when politicians have been acting like they can ignore protests which is what the past, hell, decade or so has really been like.
Decade? More like century. The labour demonstrations in the 19th and 20th century were ignored until they got militant. Nothing's changed since then in the US.
I disagree that any responsibility should fall to the protesters.
The right to protest is baked into the first legal document the country as a political entity wrote. For the last 250 years politicians and cops have had the knowledge that Americans care a great deal about their right to stand in front of a statehouse and shout to their heart's content. They should create their own policies to deal with that fact. If that means ensuring no roads go near the statehouses, that there's ample space around popular protest spots, hell that there's guaranteed public restrooms in those areas, so be it. It also means that cops should have 250 years of collective knowledge in how to deescalate... But instead they've always gone the violent route (remember the 60s, when young black people were being shredded by police dogs?)
Now that being said, black lives matter in particular suffers from (in my opinion) a lack of leadership and organization. Over the weekend I wanted to attend protests. I have 100 surplus masks and shitloads of water bottles I wanted to give out. But after a straight hour of searching on every social media platform I could conceive of (as well as Google and just asking on Twitter) I found nothing but out of date websites, with articles from the beginning of the black lives matter movement.
If I want to donate money, I can choose between several different variations of the name "black lives matter," with no way to verify that these are representative organizations, or where the money goes.
During the protest (I just turned up at city hall and hoped for the best - it happened to work out), I didn't see any sort of leadership. Sure some local community leaders turned up, but nobody that represented any sort of modern iteration of a black rights movement.
Far be it from me to tell people how to best accomplish social goals - in my opinion raw, unfettered, and disorganized rage is a perfectly valid outlet for the people against the crimes of the American police system. I just feel like organization could only help.
Now that being said, black lives matter in particular suffers from (in my opinion) a lack of leadership and organization.
A universal problem with "leaderless movements" is that they quickly devolve to the lowest common denominator level. Anyone can put out their slate and call themselves an "activist" and it's inevitable that some dim person will come along and try to make a name for themselves by taking things farther. Put that person into a crisis situation with quickly gathering flash mobs, and what should we expect?
Then, on top of that, add on extremist opportunists who decide to exploit the situation, with the goal of destabilizing social order. A "leaderless movement" has all of the biomass of a huge national organization, but none of the immune system and command/control to counter such organized exploiters.
in my opinion raw, unfettered, and disorganized rage is a perfectly valid outlet for the people against the crimes of the American police system.
No. Outside of a protest, the worst actions we've seen would be crimes and qualify the perpetrator as a bad person. Just because they're in a protest doesn't change that. Would you feel that way if they came and burned your house or business down?
Evil is evil. Violence is violence. Another's evil is no excuse to perpetrate your own. Especially if it falls on innocent bystanders.
> Would you feel that way if they came and burned your house or business down?
Yup, and I have the receipts to prove it: my motorcycle was vandalized in Oakland during the protests. A small price to pay for unsung voices being heard.
You say violence is violence, yet I bet you have no problem with criminals being put in jail, i.e. their freedoms being violently removed from them.
You say violence is violence, yet I bet you have no problem with criminals being put in jail, i.e. their freedoms being violently removed from them.
The state should have the monopoly on violence. Then, instead of everyone doing violence, we have certain, appointed people given the responsibility who can then be trained and monitored. This is part and parcel of the Rule of Law. Certainly, this system isn't perfect. But you only have to live in a country or region without Rule of Law to know that it's much preferable to improve the system, than to abandon it.
Yup, and I have the receipts to prove it: my motorcycle was vandalized in Oakland during the protests. A small price to pay for unsung voices being heard
Are you going to speak for the elderly woman who was beaten by a 2x4, or her husband who was beaten when he came to protect her? Are you going to speak for the independent owner of the vintage clothing store in LA who was preparing to re-open and had his windows smashed and his inventory stolen?
Can you determine who will pay, and what "price" they will pay?
Have you ever criticized someone for their callous opinions on these matters, because it doesn't affect them so much? Well, perhaps the tenor of your opinion is connected to your not being affected so much.
Your circumstances just happen to afford you that privilege.
Well shit it isn't, it results every year in people being murdered in cold blood, nobody being arrested for it despite the perpetrators being known, and the majority of the population is apparently utterly fine with this - even you are merely saying that this situation "needs improvement", like you're marking homework. "The police only murdered one person in cold blood today rather than two, have a cookie!"
I've had a friend in an EU country have the police break their bones and leave them locked up without medical treatment for weeks, because they were an Eastern European refugee. This is what "Rule of Law" looks like - it looks like entire populations being utterly terrorised by a sanctioned force that they have absolutely no power to stop.
Law is a bunch of words on a piece of paper, it has no power to rule. We leave that to organisations (the police, prosecutor's office, courts and prisons) with a history and present of institutionalised racism and no accountability to the communities they terrorise.
Well shit it isn't, it results every year in people being murdered in cold blood, nobody being arrested for it despite the perpetrators being known
After the George Floyd incident, everyone was in agreement that this should stop. What's happening with the violence and the vandalism is just muddying the waters. It's almost as if the purpose isn't to make things better, but to foment a race war to destabilize the USA.
> After the George Floyd incident, everyone was in agreement that this should stop.
No, they really weren't - or at least not in any way that might lead to actionable results, like building systems that do not give cops the power to murder people without accountability. The same as all the other times the police have murdered people. It's not like this is a new thing that people are just waking up to.
No, they really weren't - or at least not in any way that might lead to actionable results
Can you substantiate that, or is it just your opinion? You can justify the imposition of your opinion on everyone? (Through violent intimidation?)
like building systems that do not give cops the power to murder people without accountability
This has happened, incrementally. Can you design a system, ground-up that will work as well as the current one? I suspect that's far more likely than iterating on the current one. That's also an opinion.
Do you have statistics that show that? Are more cops charged and imprisoned after murdering unarmed people every year, or does the number of unarmed murdered people go down, at all? People who die mysteriously in custody?
It's getting off topic, but it's worth pointing out that all the examples you're about to drum up may not have rule of law, but they certainly have "law," in that they have someone holding a monopoly on violence and the willingness to use it to meet their ends.
I think that's an important distinction to make between such a place, and a place of anarchy or a commune, which aren't necessarily places that don't have "rule of law" and aren't necessarily hubs of raw violent chaos.
So your solution to "people are evil and violent" is to... give a bunch of people carte blanche to be evil and commit violence with no accountability or recourse available to their victims?
> what exactly is your counter proposal? the united communes of america?
That doesn't sound too bad to me.
> people are evil and violent
It seems that isn't the really the case, it seems only a small minority of people are, but unfortunately violence allows aggregation of power which allows more violence which allows...
> anarchist want to destroy the current system flaws and all for a vacuum of justice
Not aware of any anarchists that want whatever a "vacuum of justice" is.
You know as well as I do that there are alternatives to a contemporary legal system that are not a bunch of roving warlords. The current system is not the only system that can possibly work.
Theorising on alternatives to the contemporary Western legal system have been done for the last century by leftists, and a lot of that gets put into practice on a small scale where it can be. I've been involved in some of it myself. Part of the goal is to prevent creating permanent organisations, such as the police and the court and the prisons, that have a structural incentive to protect themselves against a community trying to hold them accountable.
In fact, note that the concept of a jury is intended to work this way (although is missing many elements, and exists under the permanent organisation of the court) - a temporary organisation gathering to find justice, then dispersing.
Unfortunately it's difficult to tell the exact outcome of implementing any of it on a wider scale, as the times leftism has actually been in power have largely been during times of war where a lot of theory was thrown out the window, or using leftist messaging to implement something closer to a dictatorship. All we know is that a lot of it works when implemented in our own communities.
why dont you think the dictatorship is the outcome of implementing at scale? e.g. if private property must be eliminated to have a commune, and most people wont give up their private property willingly, what other way is there to eliminate private property at scale except via dictatorship and martial law?
This is the consequence of corruption, loss of trust and loss of civil society. And I see no ethical or moral incentive for the second class to participate, because it's a lie that the rule of law applies equally. It's a farce. Just admit what it really is, rather than keep lying about it.
The notion that peaceful protest will be respected? The president and vice president have asserted it. Yet both of them castigated Colin Kaepernick's peaceful protests. They don't have any respect for peaceful protest. Kaepernick was subject to ridicule, his livelihood destroyed, and threatened with ejection from his own country, for his peaceful protest, by the sitting POTUS.
Amy Cooper insists she's not a racist. But used her whiteness as a weapon, and a black man's blackness as a deficit, knowing full well with her threat against him that this same racial animus would be applied by the police. That's why she made the threat. What's more striking about the story? Her lie about the events that were to have transpired? Or her truth? White power. White power. White power.
There is no good reason for thinking people to respect American rule of law from an ethical or moral standpoint. Only respect it the same way black Americans, minorities, poor have come to: fear of its power.
The system isn't just imperfect. It isn't what it purports to be. And it isn't accountable. Why defend it? Where's even the pride in defending it? Where could legitimacy even come from?
> Are you going to speak for the elderly woman who was beaten by a 2x4, or her husband who was beaten when he came to protect her? Are you going to speak for the independent owner of the vintage clothing store in LA who was preparing to re-open and had his windows smashed and his inventory stolen?
Sure, I will - it's a shame that the cops refused to follow the science on the subject and deescelate protests. Instead they chose to fire on peaceful protesters and kick off a riot.
It's not like this kind of shit isn't studied. What article are we commenting on right now? This information has been available for a very, very long time.
So, to everyone that has been harmed by the police, directly (having their eyes shot out, being choked to death), or indirectly (property damage due to an avoidable riot), I think the police should be held responsible.
> > Are you going to speak for the elderly woman who was beaten by a 2x4, or her husband who was beaten when he came to protect her? Are you going to speak for the independent owner of the vintage clothing store in LA who was preparing to re-open and had his windows smashed and his inventory stolen?
> Sure, I will
Easy for you to say. You are in the privileged position of only having lost some body work on your motorcycle. Do you really think they'd consent to your "speaking for them?"
it's a shame that the cops refused to follow the science on the subject and deescelate protests. Instead they chose to fire on peaceful protesters and kick off a riot.
The bad people here are the extremists who are egging on the violence, while creating the devious tactical position of making it very hard for the police to distinguish who is who.
So, to everyone that has been harmed by the police, directly (having their eyes shot out, being choked to death), or indirectly (property damage due to an avoidable riot), I think the police should be held responsible.
Yes. And how about someone speaks for you, as you say you would for others? You are going to pay for the inventory of the shop. You are going to pay for the medical bills of the shop owner and his wife, plus pain and suffering. How about that?
> Then, instead of everyone doing violence, we have certain, appointed people given the responsibility who can then be trained and monitored
What if those people don't do it according to the law or in a just manner? We just all say: "oh well, they have a monopoly on force, so nothing to be done"?
You probably think it was quite rude to separate from the British at all. Perhaps we should go back to being a colony, since the separation was actually a complete violation of the crown's monopoly on violence!
> You say violence is violence, yet I bet you have no problem with criminals being put in jail, i.e. their freedoms being violently removed from them.
When you commit a crime and violate someone's freemdoms (the primary being right to life, liberty, property), you forfeit your own. When you kill someone and take their life, you steal or destroy property, you are now in debt to society. By living in a society you agree to its rules and when the rules are broken a price must be paid to deter others from breaking them.
Just because someone broke the rules, doesn't mean that everyone else gets to. The police officer was in the wrong. He was arrested, and charged. He will pay for what he did.
Be the change you want to see. Protest in a way that doesn't harm others. Many lost business and their livelihoods due to the destruction. What did they do to deserve that?
Police brutality is a systemic issue. Peaceful protest over the years haven't changed the system. Charging that one officer doesn't solve it either.
The Police reaction to these protests clearly shows systemic reform is needed. Peaceful protesters and reporters have been tear gassed, shot, and arrested. They don't deserve to be tret like that just because others decided to vandalize and loot.
That's a pretty bold claim. Do you have any statistics to show police are by and large using disproportionate force?
> Peaceful protest over the years haven't changed the system. Charging that one officer doesn't solve it either.
There are bad people in society. That doesn't mean the whole system is bad. Of course there is room for improvement, and action should be taken to remove those who are not fit to serve.
> The Police reaction to these protests clearly shows systemic reform is needed. Peaceful protesters and reporters have been tear gassed, shot, and arrested. They don't deserve to be tret like that just because others decided to vandalize and loot.
I agree that peaceful protesters don't deserve that. But let's get this clear, it was violent rioting that was occurring. In that situation, how are you to quickly separate the two groups?
> In that situation, how are you to quickly separate the two groups?
You're not to quickly do anything. Most countries claim to have the right an assumption of innocence for a reason - they believe, very strongly, that committing violence towards an innocent person is worse than letting a guilty person get away with whatever they were doing. Property can be rebuilt, for the most part; people's lives, not so much.
To put it bluntly - if a group of people robs a bank in the middle of the business day, you don't tear gas and shoot at everyone inside it.
That's what the government says, but not what they actually do. Here in Hong Kong, police fires tear gas directly into people's (tiny) apartment just for opening the window to take a peek outside.
I could be completely wrong, but the number of potential rioters (actual rioters + protestors) likely outnumbered police. The scale is so much larger and potential for damage and destruction is huge (over 200 businesses looted/destroyed in Minneapolis) that it is I believe of the highest priority to disperse the crowds as quickly as they can.
It is citizens job to be compliant. It is the government's job to enforce compliance.
I'm sure there was things the police could do better, but no one died at the hands of the police (after protesting started). The same can't be said for the protestors/rioters.
> It is citizens job to be compliant. It is the government's job to enforce compliance.
That sounds an awful lot like a dictatorship, not democracy. In a democracy, it's the citizens' job to keep their Government accountable - when the population says that the right to a presumption of innocence is paramount, they create a Government to ensure that right.
What you are suggesting is that the population does not believe that the right to a presumption of innocence is paramount - that it is ok to risk life, liberty and limb of innocent people to go after a criminal. That's maybe fine (although I'd argue ethically wrong), but stop teaching the opposite to your children. If you taught your children that the police and courts were out to kill them or lock them up indefinitely for nothing they have any control over, maybe they'd correctly be a little more terrified from an early age - and maybe they'd campaign to change that. Funnily enough, one demographic does get taught that, and others the opposite - because that's how it works out in practice.
The police have literally blinded people, including journalists, permanently, by the way. And potentially have killed people - "In Louisville, David McAtee, 53, the owner of a well-known barbecue business, was shot and killed early Monday. The authorities said that officers from the Louisville Metro Police Department and National Guard soldiers opened fire in response to a gunshot as they tried to disperse a large crowd after a curfew had gone into effect. It was not immediately clear if Mr. McAtee had been killed by the police or someone in the crowd, the authorities said." Of course, as always when the police kill people, body cameras were not on.
Maybe I misunderstood what you meant when you wrote "Government says one thing so we're compliant, and then does another when it suits it". I never said people don't have the ability to change how the government enforces compliance, simply that they are the ones who do.
Many people have died at the hands of other rioters as a result of the protests.
I'm not saying that people needed to loose their eyes, but they were out after curfew which was enacted because they wanted people to go home due to the violence.
Who exactly are these "many people"? I haven't been able to find a source on this. When I checked yesterday, three protesters had been killed by people unrelated to the protest, and two people had been shot by some people driving around in a car (cannot work out how/whether that is related to the riots).
There's a lot of energy being put into making this sound like it's more violent than it is, again, so that you agree with it and stay compliant. When the Government does something violent that goes against the reasons it was created, you should not be compliant. I'd hope that you would agree that the Government cannot unilaterally execute people, and that just sitting there while it does so is... completely immoral.
According to this article [0], more than 20 were killed over the weekend in Chicago, when the previous max in one day was 10. Average people killed per day is about 2. I think it's safe to say the majority of those were due to the riots. That doesn't count numerous other cities where deaths occured.
> I'd hope that you would agree that the Government cannot unilaterally execute people, and that just sitting there while it does so is... completely immoral.
No of course I don't want the government executing people. But the death of George Floyd was the result of actions from one man, not of the entire government. I think you would be hard-pressed to find any member of the government that didn't see an issue with what happened.
Regardless, it doesn't make sense to brutalize looters. They did this shit during hurricane katrina too - people stuffed into a stadium desperate for aid, people trapped on roofs, and the national guard comes in guns ablaze against looters. It's madness to put "property rights" over human lives.
Oh well, the liquor store is getting looted. Sucks that you can't deal with that because there are protests because you are murdering black people. Fix the bigger problem before worrying about property.
Showing an avg. 50% fatality rate on police shootings. You can compared this to other countries, which have the same statistic at something like 5-10% and it's not like these countries are overrun by mass shootings or terrorists. Some might actually says its the reverse :D
All of the videos from the last few days is still being sorted, but from what I've seen the violence from police against protesters far outstrips that of protesters against random people or cops. I'm in fact only aware of several incidents, and all of which were easily justifiable - a man firing a bow at protesters, an idiot screaming the n-word at protesters, and a man charging at protesters with a sword.
So whenever people say "but riots!" I can't help but question the priorities - can't that wait until after we figure out the police brutality thing? You're only hurting our efforts here, and helping the cops justify the unjustifiable.
> from what I've seen the violence from police against protesters far outstrips that of protesters against random people or cops.
How? As far as I can tell no one was killed at the hands of the police (after protests started). Just in Chicago at least 17 people were killed during the protests.
Note that shooting someone isn't the only form of violence possible. Escalating by firing rubber bullets or tear gassing or driving your car into peaceful protestors are all violence, and I've seen tens, maybe a hundred examples of that at this point.
From your article: "the police and National Guard were shot at first and that the shots that killed McAtee were fired in response", and that they weren't part of the protests.
It seems rioters exhibited a disproportionate amount of violence compared to police though.
Peaceful protesters and reporters have been tear gassed, shot, and arrested. They don't deserve to be tret like that just because others decided to vandalize and loot.
This is exactly what extremist groups exploiting the protests want. The extremists want to foment violence between the protesters and the police. The situation plays into their hands, because the police have no way of distinguishing who is who.
The circumstances are not normal. Rule of Law has broken down. By continuing the protests, peaceful protesters are creating cover for looters and violent perpetrators. Those protesters who are willfully exploiting this situation to "pressure" the authorities are having evil done for their goals.
There needs to be another kind of lockdown to prevent the spread of the contagion of violence, the contagion of chaos, and the contagion of injustice.
It's been the clear pattern of Antifa and other far left groups. Sowing chaos and preventing discourse is what they've been doing more and more for several years now.
>> The police officer was in the wrong. He was arrested, and charged. He will pay for what he did.
"He will pay for what he did." You seem to have certain knowledge of the future. Dismissively saying everything will be OK does not actually make it happen.
I'm only going from past experience: If anything is learned from the many times this story has played out in the past, the cops wont wont pay. In fact, until an independent investigation: the cops were well on their way to freedom:
"The criminal complaint said that the autopsy “revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation.” Mr. Floyd, the complaint said, had underlying health conditions, including coronary artery disease and hypertensive heart disease."
Literally that just happened with the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, right before George Floyd's murder. Extreme conflicts of interest. These events back-to-back really set the bonfire alight. The immediate outrage over George Floyd's murder, ensuing demonstrations, and demands for charges to be filed probably helped motivate charges actually getting filed promptly. That's definitely not a guarantee however!
Not seen news come out of people's homes destroyed. If we're going to participate in a damages competition, though, let's do that - the cops shot out a couple people's eyeballs, but only after of course kicking off this whole thing by murdering black people with no consequences. There, that settles that.
If we're going to participate in a damages competition, though, let's do that
No. The Gandhi movie termed that, "An eye for an eye, making the whole world blind."
How about we condemn evil, and try to make sure there's less evil in the world? Just because you say you're fighting evil, that doesn't nominate you to commit evil, especially if it's in the name of others without their consent. Especially if it's so you can coerce others into seeing things your particular way.
Isn't that what sparked the protests in the first place? Someone who committed evil, in the name of fighting evil?
Can you elaborate? All four of the police officers were immediately fired. The primary officer that was kneeling on him was charged with murder and manslaughter and will go to prison. Likely charges will be brought on the other three.
Lord forbid nobody caught the murder on video. This happens all over America, all the time. Thread is full of links or a quick hop on google will serve you in this regard.
What would have happened if it was citizens? All four would be in jail immediately, if they even get that far without being shot for "resisting arrest" first. At the very least they'd get a beating somewhere between having cuffs put on them and getting into a squad car. We know this from all the recorded instances of police brutality looking exactly as I've just described.
Lost their jobs. Come on. Would you merely "lose your job" if you watched your buddy murder a guy and stood there throughout the whole thing?
> This happens all over America, all the time. Thread is full of links or a quick hop on google will serve you in this regard
I bet there is tons of anecdotal data to support any claim. There needs to be aggregated data that shows it's happening in high enough rates to be a "systemic" issue.
> Would you merely "lose your job" if you watched your buddy murder a guy and stood there throughout the whole thing?
In most countries bystanders are not obligated to assist. So nothing would happen to you?
ah, yes, we’ll use the data collected by the same institutions doing the extra judicial murders. surely they’ve been keeping great notes. and then finally we’ll be able to prove that racism is real to some commenter on hacker news.
I'm not saying there can't be police that are racist or even that racism isn't real. But if anyone claims systemic racism exists, they will have to provide more than anecdotal data to support that.
Floyd used a $20 note that the store owner thought was counterfeit, called the cops, the cops didn't even check to see that if it was a real $20 note before killing him. It was real...
Quick note: according to the owner, it was a 17 y/o employee that called the cops, and the store's policy is to only call the cops in response to violence. The employee was fired, and the other employees received additional training.
> the cops didn't even check to see that if it was a real $20 note before killing him. It was real...
Do you have any sources for that? I can't seem to find any references for that. According to some reports on the incident, the police at one point went into the store not sure what they did there though.
>> I believe the other three will be charged and convicted. At least that what I hope will happen.
Sadly, "belief and hope" hasn't worked for entire swaths of the population. If "belief and hope" worked, we could just "hope" there wont be riots and everything would be merry.
In reality, every two months something horrible happens happens and gets on the news. It probably happens much more than that and isn't on the news. And if it wasn't on video -- it is like it didn't happen.
It is rare to have video. It is even more rare for a charge. Even more for a conviction. I dont think looting is the answer here, but i seriously question the judgement of people who actually think there is no problem of police violence.
Given the total number of interactions with police every year (tens of millions), the number resulting in death is low (roughly 1000 a year). The number of deaths as an accident or unjust is a fraction of that.
Any time a person is killed or treated wrongly is terrible and police should be held accountable. But I believe it is more to do with rotten people than it is a rotten system.
I admire your optimism. As evidence against it: the doctor that performed the autopsy claims there's no evidence that Floyd died of choking, instead blaming "possible narcotics" in his blood stream. No explanation for how the doc knew there were possibly narcotics in his blood stream without knowing exactly what those narcotics were.
>> Can you elaborate? All four of the police officers were immediately fired. The primary officer that was kneeling on him was charged with murder and manslaughter and will go to prison. Likely charges will be brought on the other three.
How is it sustainable that nationwide protests need to happen before an officer is charged for murder? Does that not seem like a broken system?
> A universal problem with "leaderless movements" is that they quickly devolve to the lowest common denominator level. Anyone can put out their slate and call themselves an "activist"...
I appreciate this part a lot. It helps me realize that movements also have brands they need to manage and have similar struggles to companies that are trying to manage brands at various levels of centralization—e.g., the challenge of maintaining brand alignment among distributed franchisees.
> A "leaderless movement" has all of the biomass of a huge national organization, but none of the immune system and command/control to counter such organized exploiters.
I wonder how well leaderless movements can create things. It seems as organizations and movements become less coordinated, less structured in how to resolve internal conflicts and align, that they would be more suited to attacking things or ideas, rather than building them.
This is definitely a known problem, and one which lots of people have spent lots of time thinking about.
As you say, social change movements face many of the same struggles as companies, including maintaining brand alignment and quality control across a network of distributed actors. For this reason, social change movements often adopt (and adapt) the same management tools and techniques that large companies have developed for their operations.
>It seems as organizations and movements become less coordinated, less structured in how to resolve internal conflicts and align, that they would be more suited to attacking things or ideas, rather than building them.
I'm not sure this is true. Leaderless movements can be well coordinated and structured (it's just hard). And poorly coordinated and structured movements aren't really suited to doing anything well, even just attacking things and ideas.
For this reason, social change movements often adopt (and adapt) the same management tools and techniques that large companies have developed for their operations.
Going by the praise he had for his organization and the people helping him, MLK had something like this.
And poorly coordinated and structured movements aren't really suited to doing anything well, even just attacking things and ideas.
When exploited by organized outside forces, they do one thing really well: Create disorder, chaos, and disdain.
I believe it was Thomas Carlysle who said something like, "Revolutions are started by idealists, prosecuted by fanatics, and co-opted by scoundrels."
Tim Pool recently quipped in one of his videos that some copies of the Antifa handbook have explicit instructions to "pretend to be BLM" for cover.
> Would you feel that way if they came and burned your house or business down?
Yeah. My house and business would be insured. No amount of insurance can revive a man, woman or child murdered by police. I'm OK with personal sacrifices in service of justice.
I would happily burn all of my earthly possessions if it meant babies like Bou Bou Phonesavanh were no longer at risk of being critically injured by flashbangs or murdered by stray gunfire.
The tradeoffs between traditional and leaderless movements are a lot like the tradeoffs between centralised and decentralised systems in tech to be honest.
On the one hand, the latter avoid the weaknesses of the former, in that they can neither easily be 'taken over' by outside forces nor provide a single point of weakness for their enemies to target.
And that's useful for both software and protest movements, since it leave a single target for the opposition to go after, whether that's through legal threats, harassment, arrest or assault/murder.
At the same time, it also makes the system prone to abuse by bad actors, since there's no one able to either get rid of them or distance the group from them in general.
Hence the extremists taking over political movements and protests, and the trolls/extremists/criminals becoming an increasingly prominent part of any decentralised community or social network setup online.
This in turn leaves both open to attack from their opponents and the media, who can point at the worst elements and say "See? These people are all evil/sociopathic/crazy/whatever' based on it.
It's like to some degree, avoiding bad actors and running a robust and uncensorable system are fundamentally incompatible with one another, in the same way as usability and security are.
On the one hand, the latter avoid the weaknesses of the former, in that they can neither easily be 'taken over' by outside forces nor provide a single point of weakness for their enemies to target.
In situations where mob mentality can take over and chaos can create a "fog of war" this is not true! Even though most of the protesters want to remain peaceful, the amplitude of sowing chaos, and its potential to spark additional chaos within mass rally situations, are providing extremists that "single point of weakness."
Basically, against an organized opponent that wants to create chaos, mass rallies are kind of like packing together certain isotopes of uranium atoms. Even if most of the units are "inert" (in that most of the people want peace,) if enough individuals with activation potential are densely packed enough, you can still get the chain reaction.
I think it's normal, reasonable and beneficial. If I had a very strong grievance that lead me to protest, I'd be highly motivated to not let others detract from my message or tarnish it. Nut jobs and provocateurs make it harder for me to attain my goals and can in the worst delegitimise my cause entirely
But peaceful protesting hasn’t actually appeared to result in justice for black lives in the past. Black America have had peaceful protesting in Washington DC before it was violently dispersed (so trump could pose in front of a church). We’ve even had mildly disruptive protesting (BLM highway blocking, also violently dispersed). We’ve even had black people not protesting at all (cases of police shooting at people just standing on their own property during Minneapolis curfew).
None of these get more coverage than property violence. None of these got a response from political leadership.
It’s a bad look for the country that the only time our leadership is willing to punish law enforcement relatively mildly (currently the police officer in question is charged for only up to 35 years in prison with his accomplices merely losing their jobs, something statistically has been borne out that they get hired for more law enforcement work in neighboring districts) for killing someone in a terrible and slow manner is when disruption on property happens.
Well, I think these particular protests are raising the following questions:
1. Should there be police at all?
2. If so, can an institution staffed by these particular people ever function correctly?
The more effectively the protesters self-police, the more powerful an argument they make that you could improve society by disbanding urban police departments and letting the protest organizers assume de facto responsibility for maintaining the social order.
Of course, the other end of the violence spectrum is an effective argument, as well.
I'm seeing many videos of police doing things like attacking journalists, beating their own cars so that they can later blame the protestors or videos of police unloading bricks from their pickup.
The problem is not de-escalation, is that the police is behaving in a criminal manner.
What crazy times we live in, that a person only needs to ask for links for cops damaging their own police car and unloading bricks, but can regard US cops assaulting journalists as proven. No reflection on you, but where has America fallen to?
Why did they stop filming the cops unloading bricks video? It’s really not clear what they are doing individually grabbing three or four before the 20 second video ends.
Most of the bigger conspiracies about police being behind everything are usually wrong and show similarities to all conspiracies (they take tiny seeds of truth and amplify it 1000x fold into far bigger schemes).
There was a video of that one agent provocateur cop with an umbrella breaking windows with a hammer, then there were a bunch of 100k tweets blaming them for burning down all the buildings.
I get police use an awful tactic to stir up violence to try to end large unsanctioned with protests quickly before worse damage happens - for some cynical ends justify the means. But it amazes me that people don’t realize just how many people show up to cause violence and simply steal things.
And not even just the anarchists and Black bloc who use property damage and vandalism as a tactic since they despite private property, that’s been proven thousands of times and those groups exist in every city, but just the average mob will always have trouble makers and opportunists.
There was even tweets from DSA groups prompting the burning and destruction of property.
Yet everyone is so quick to blame police for everything. It’s seems to strange and cynical to not only take zero responsibility for the wider group but to completely blame their it on outsiders when it’s so obviously not just police.
The only real solution is isolating and dismissing the radical groups as a policy. Just like right wing groups telling Nazis they aren’t welcome, the unions and powerful left wing groups should refuse to protest with black bloc and other violent protestors. I don’t believe they need to actually physically stop them but they need to denounce them early and often, and organizers need to put real efforts in warning people not to engage in violence, theft, and vandalism.
The other half is police cause as much problems as they prevent at almost every single protest I’ve ever been to. Mayors and leaders need to put pressure on police to change their tactics to deescalation and middle managers who don’t stop their lower ranking cops from provoking fights and high ranking police who allow agent provocateurs need to be fired.
There now appear to be police that want violence now too. In my city they’re ignoring looters and tear gassing the protestors. There is no public safety rationale for that.
> We should expect police to us less use violence and improve their crowd management and deescalation skills.
What about american history would lead you to this expectation?
That said, I like the rest of your comment. It’s somewhat disturbing to hear people compare the rage of the crowd with the individual intentions of folk who break windows, raid to bring things home, and set things on fire—you’re allowing one person to derail thousands.
> Protests are more dangerous when unplanned or when their organizers give no thought to self-policing.
Gregg Popovich expressed a similar thought in his interview with The Nation: [1]
”[Protests] are very necessary, but they need to be organized better. It’s frustrating. When Dr. King did a protest, you knew when to show, when to come back the next day. But if you’re just organizing protests and everyone is coming and going in every direction, it doesn’t work that way. If it was nonviolent, they knew to be nonviolent, but this is muddled. More leadership would be very welcome so these incredible mass demonstrations can’t be used by people for other means. We can limit the bad, but only if things are organized better.“
Police are, in the aggregate, racist. They are more violent towards people of color. The marches are led by POC, include large numbers of POC, and are all about calling the police out for their own biases and illegal behavior.
This is simply a fact. It's not only intuitively true based on astute observation of current affairs, but the data trends towards supporting it.
When the organization is decentralized, then the police will need to meet protesters where they are -- communicating with many people in parallel, using the same media.
I don't read that article as supporting the title that descalation leads to less violence. it does discuss evidence for escalation being correlated with more violence. but you can't blanket say that's causal.
These are complex situations that don't follow rules. The mob consists of peaceful protesters, violent protesters and looters. people's membership in any of these groups can be multiple and shift over time.
it's not reasonable for police to make an assessment who is who on the ground because their job is not to be a jury. what is reasonable is that once a gathering crosses the threshold of criminal activity it becomes illegal.
one solution is to just arrest everybody after giving them time to disperse. but to do that you need overwhelming numbers. not always the resources to do that.
you can't just stand there and let people beat you, stab you, lob projectiles at you. you have to respond to that force with force. You also need to protect property again using force.
again unless you have overwhelming numbers you can't engage in hand-to-hand combat or using battons. this strategy cannot be used by itself to bring the crowd under control. so each officer needs a force multiplier some sort of tool that can effect multiple people. it's a given that in such situations any such tool will affect multiple people even those doing nothing violent.
tear gas and rubber bullets are okay tools. but I think there needs to be more. when a patient becomes psychotic and dangerous in a hospital or asylum you don't mace their face. you give them a sedative. instead of CS gas it would be great if there was some sort of sedative gas to just slow people down enough to sap their will to continue.
police have to handle the situations as best they can using the tools they have.
I don't think you can say that big protests are all about the death of one man or the treatment of one group. I think the causes of people's unhappiness here is systemic and this is probably just an outlet where people feel now we can stand up.
the police can't cure the people of their anger no matter what they do.
when I see this chaos, I remember ahow US media lionized what happened in Hong Kong not even 1 year ago, and I can't help thinking of the proverb, people in glass houses....
> it would be great if there was some sort of sedative gas to just slow people down enough to sap their will to continue.
It's called food. If the price of food hadn't just doubled (no sales, low unit prices sold out), and urban supermarkets didn't continue to have bare shelves, we wouldn't be seeing the same level of unrest.
I'm certainly not trying to downplay the longstanding grievances behind these protests. But there are orthogonal reasons causing them to happen at such scale.
> the police can't cure the people of their anger no matter what they do
However, mayors or governors could. Tell AGs to have compulsory investigations of all policce shootings. Charge police officers who don't report corruption or violence with conspiracy charges. Bust police unions which arehelping criminal cops and charge them under RICO statutes.
Actually, what I was trying to say, and I did not say clearly...was I don't think the anger that is driving this unrest is only a result of police violence.
I think it's a lot of anger from multiple causes, economic, the lockdown, and so on. That's why I said, no matter what police do, they cannot cure that.
Tear gas and rubber bullets against, at the start, peaceful protesters. not okay tools. Neither is encircling groups or overwhelming them with larger numbers.
This way of thinking, looking at it as a war-like situation and vocabulary, is what leads to escalation. On the other hand, neither is a completly off-hands approach. Tough call, right? Funny thing, when white guys with masks, tactical vests and AR-15s stormed official government buildings, e.g. in Minisota, police didn't intervene.
And seriously, hand-to-hand combat? Hope you're not a cop.
> Tear gas and rubber bullets against, at the start, peaceful protesters. not okay tools.
Correct from your perspective.
I don't think it was used when the gathering was peaceful unless it was area denial. I think there's some or all of property damage, arson, looting, arming and throwing, before they use those tools.
Interested to see a video with context from the current unrest where that's not the case.
By hand to hand, I mean the stuff that happens when police and gatherers engage at close quarters.
There's lots of these scenes from the HK unrest. it basically is hand-to-hand combat with batons like I said.
"Of course, as Gillham pointed out, negotiating and managing a protest can’t really work if the protest wasn’t organized ahead of time. That goes double, he said, if the topic of the protest is police brutality. It’s hard to negotiate with someone about the best way to demand they be fired."
This point is important. The police can't police themselves, and for a lasting solution to this problem to emerge there'll have to be major structural changes to the way police oversight and review is carried out.
I hope these protests are a turning point that'll lead to such reforms, but I suspect no significant changes will occur. Hopefully I'll be proven wrong.
Police brutality protestors should be meeting with the mayor’s office with representation from the police department and internal affairs, but the chief of police is not in charge. That’s the problem. When official channels fail to the point of Protesting in the streets, you can’t use the same channels to address the situation.
And I don’t mean “you are incapable” can’t. I mean, “You are not allowed” can’t.
These protests and riots are happening precisely because the alternative mechanisms such as the one you are suggesting have failed time and time again.
Here in NYC we have a spineless mayor who has completely given up even attempting to exert civilian oversight on the police since 2014. They have free rein to do whatever they want and to "self-police" themselves, and because of the union violent cops are never fired.
Protests might have been unorganized, but riots most certainly are organized. Torching a police car carries a minimum 5 year sentence. It's not the protesters who are doing that.
Moreover, it is still being "organized". Someone keeps dropping off pallets with bricks. There are agitator leaflets all over twitter. People have been recorded on video handing out cash to "protesters" from a thick wad of bills. Someone is organizing and funding the riots.
We had a peaceful protest in Kansas City on Friday where some police joined in, listened to protestors, took a knee with the protestors, and the mayor joined the protest as well. It was peaceful and all over the news.
The very next day we had several trucks unloading beds of bricks and large rocks throughout the Plaza (where protests were and would be again that night) throughout the day and people were snapping videos of at least two buses full of protesters in the full black getup unloading on the edge of the Plaza a few hours before sundown. That night we had 85 arrests, multiple cars set on fire, multiple officers put in the hospital, and plenty of CS gas in the streets.
After seeing the peaceful protest on Friday, I find it a little bit suspicious that the crowds grew so quickly and things escalated so quickly (and intentionally, by the looks of people dropping of brick caches) just 24 hours later.
We had a peaceful protest in Cap Hill in Seattle, where the police knelt in solidarity earlier today. There was no violence, no looting, no broken glass, and everyone was being peaceful.
After the photo op was done, the police started macing and tear-gassing the crowd. The news then ran this video [1], but with the first 20 seconds cut out, and blamed the protesters on initiating violence.
Were you actually there and see it in person, though, or did you hear it from someone else? Because if it's the latter, it smells like horseshit from a mile away. That's why in a conflict you need to hear _both_ versions of what actually happened and try to be impartial.
1. If I was there, on the front line, you'd just dismiss me as either biased, or unable to see what was going on in other parts of the line. This video has the widest field of view of anyone present.
2. Which particular part of this smells like horseshit to you? The news cutting the clip before airing it? The SPD twitter claiming that the police retaliated to an attack by rocks and bottles? Do you see any rocks or bottles thrown in the first 20 seconds of this video? Who are you going to believe - a cop trying to defend his violent outburst, or your own two eyes? In what universe is what you are observing a defense to an attack? Did you even look at the video?
3. Do you deny the neighbourhood being in good shape prior to this? I can confirm this one in person, by the way. Nothing was looted, windows weren't broken, no cars were burning.
> Which particular part of this smells like horseshit to you?
That the police would tear gas people unprovoked. That just doesn't happen in the United States in my experience, although if provoked, they do not hesitate.
> That the police would tear gas people unprovoked.
Did you look at either of the videos? Do you believe your anecdotal experience, or your eyes? What kind of evidence do you need at this point, to convince you that yes, the police do, in fact, gas people unprovoked?
It is more likely the police are doing this as a sign of their own solidarity with other police officers rather than with the protestors. After all, this entire thing started because of kneeling.
That I do agree with. A lot of other things would be trivial to contrive as well. I would not be surprised if the scenes of devastation we see in the media are far smaller in scale IRL, and we're just being shown the same smashed storefront from different angles to drive clicks.
But at the same time I think peaceful protesters would not burn police cars or loot, seeing how looting does absolutely nothing good whatsoever for their cause. They would especially not burn or loot minority businesses, churches, or low income housing complexes. Someone is very deliberately and efficiently pouring gasoline into this fire IMO, that much is pretty obvious by now.
Of course it does. But politicians who ramp up the rhetoric and threaten to have people killed does not. Flint and Camden and other cities where the police sat down or walked with the protestors have no issues. People connecting to people with understanding rarely results in violence.
I think places where the police still walk a beat (or other regular outreach over a wide area) and get to know the locals rarely have issues with regular people. But cities don't want to spend that kind of money on these things as they would rather not tax people to pay for it. Yet it's an investment in cities' future; otherwise you wind up with this.
"As they would rather not tax people to pay for it"
I think you may be underestimating how much cities dedicate their budgets to police spending:
"Mayor Eric Garcetti's 2020-2021 city budget gives police $3.14 billion out of the city's $10.5 billion. That's the single biggest line item, dwarfing, say, emergency management ($6 million) and economic development ($30 million)." (In fact, LAPD is getting pay raises while LA teachers are getting a pay decrease)
"New York City spends more on policing than it does on the Departments of Health, Homeless Services, Housing Preservation and Development, and Youth and Community Development combined."
"A whopping 39 percent of Chicago's 2017 budget went to police, and still the department got even more money, peaking in 2020 with a 7 percent increase to nearly $1.8 billion."
Note, this is, to the best of my knowledge, solely police, not even adjacent forces like e.g. fire departments or ambulances.
This is off topic for the overall thread, but important for this thread.
> "Mayor Eric Garcetti's 2020-2021 city budget gives police $3.14 billion out of the city's $10.5 billion. That's the single biggest line item, dwarfing, say, emergency management ($6 million) and economic development ($30 million)." (In fact, LAPD is getting pay raises while LA teachers are getting a pay decrease)
The Los Angeles Unified School District boundaries don't match the Los Angeles city boundaries, so comparison is tricky, but the most recent budget available (2018-2019) was $13.8 billion. [1]
In California, school districts are not connected to city government, despite like all the mayors ever always talking about them. Zero of the LA city budget goes to LA schools, because school districts get their money from the counties they're in and the state. I don't know if San Francisco has a county government separate from its city government, so it may be an exception.
San Francisco is unique in the state in being the City and County of San Francisco; city council members are also county commissioners, and the mayor is also county executive.
The broader Bay Area is closer to the LA system, although transit and utilities are more likely to be detached from cities than education.
Personally, I'd love California to try a ballot initiative putting a 10-15%-of-budget cap on police spending in cities. I think it could easily pass, and if NYPD's 2017 strike is any indication, crime rate could actually go down [1]. NYPD ended their strike voluntarily because city officials were recognizing that maybe they weren't as necessary, after all!
I live in a city with a monetarily constrained police force.
It's great. They take the big stuff (violent crime and trafficking in hard drugs) seriously but don't have time to be running BS task forces, procuring military equipment they don't need and sitting around watching for "sketchy looking" people to harass. I'm sure it sucks to be them and they're all over worked but frankly it's great for the people.
Not being seen as jerks gives the local police better freedom of operation than the much better funded state cops who are seen as being jerks who enforce every law to the letter and nobody wants to cooperate with. I kinda feel bad for the state cops because cities like mine are where they stick the fresh academy grads who have no connections or seniority to avoid a crap assignment and then they get locals hating them for doing what the state trained them to do (also goes to show you the conflict between what the state wants and what the people of the city want).
That said, were the Real Crime(TM) to vanish I can see the local police using their newfound free time to optimize enforcement for revenue generation which would be very bad.
Less officers overall and train the remaining officers better. Besides, given that the police already get so much money and we still have problems, it seems like throwing more money at them isn't the answer.
So you want even longer wait times for an officer to respond to your complaint of a stolen car/bike or other “quality of life” crime?
How are people thinking they will get better police service (or any police service) by reducing police budgets? Most of said budget is spent on pensions anyway from the breakdowns I’ve seen. It’s not like cops are rolling in it. Even if you rake in overtime you still have to work during that time.
Why do you need a sworn officer with arrest powers to come out and record your bike's serial number? Most quality of life crime could be handled by the equivalent of an unarmed zoning enforcement officer.
>So you want even longer wait times for an officer to respond to your complaint of a stolen car/bike or other “quality of life” crime?
But even in well funded departments the response is laughable. At best if your stolen item is serialized they will record that number and it will be recovered at a later date when they happen to bust someone for something else and catalog everything they found in the vicinity and their computer system tells them your thing was reported stolen.
>Even if you rake in overtime you still have to work during that time.
The Massachusetts State Police and their 2-5yr recurring "whoops it looks like a bunch of people were getting paid for working overtime that wasn't actually worked, we'll fire someone as a sacrificial lamb and go right back to what we were doing" scandal would beg to differ.
That said, as much as it pains me to defend them, the fact that the job can be easy money for anyone willing to step in line with the organization means that you get people who just want to slack and make easy money or want to over achieve and run a full fledged side business on company time (MSP isn't the only MA gov department where people do this but they're known internally for it) and not the people who want to LARP as soldiers and kick down doors. As a result they don't often wind up receiving allegations of excessive force.
Obviously this is by no means and ideal status quo but it's far superior to having a more violent police force.
Please don't use LA as an example. Its not a city that can be compared to any other because of its weird patchwork nature and stupid geographic boundaries.
I studied Los Angeles history of city planning and urbanism in university, as a minor (not that makes me an expert by any means, of course, but I'm no stranger to LA, plus I've lived here for 6 years) – it's a special city, yes, but it's not fundamentally different from most other large cities in the US, including my hometown, Dallas, so much as just further along the same growth pattern (sprawl and then densification) as most sunbelt cities such as Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Denver, San Diego, and Salt Lake City. (And as far as "stupid geographic boundaries", please see Houston or even San Diego). We could argue about this greater point all day, but nothing makes LA fundamentally special from a city-planning point of view, though it is in my heart :'-)
Regardless, as far as policing goes, NYC's 5 borough/county/city system is _much_ more complicated, which proponents might say justifies their (imo insane) $6 Billion(!) annual budget allocation, but if you compare that to NYC's $34 Billion [1] education budget, it looks a little more reasonable than LA's $3 Billion LAPD budget compared to LAUSD's $7 Billion [2] education budget.
There were reports of planned riots in rural Polk County. Knowing they didn't have the resources to cover wide spread area, the sheriff instructed citizens to shoot anyone who broke into their home. I support this. Telling citizens you can't help them, and they must protect themselves is very different than threatening that the state itself will kill you.
Complete nonsense - if you believe for one second that those “reports” were legitimate or that this was a genuine public safety measure you’re an absolute rube and a mark. This was just an elected official pandering to his electoral base of suburban fascists by validating their heroic-murder fantasies.
I think it's clearly a message to people watching the looting in the cities thinking they can get away with that in a rural area. He says it plain and simple, rural people have guns and they will kill you.
So that people do not waste precious time in a dangerous situation trying to call and/or rely on law enforcement help. I saw this tweet making rounds last night [0].
> But cities don't want to spend that kind of money on these things as they would rather not tax people to pay for it.
I'm certainly no expert in police budgeting, but when you see some police forces literally buying tanks, at least in some cases there must be room for money to be better spent. John Oliver did an interesting story on police militarization after the Ferguson riots following the shooting of Michael Brown.
Thanks for clarifying as I hadn't watched recently and I was misremembering. But certainly there must still be some expense associated with training and maintenance.
You should not underestimate the extent of undercover/false flag instigators of violence at protests. At least here in Belgium this is a practice that is uncovered nearly every time when some violence erupts at demonstrations. The individuals that start the aggression are later photographed to be chilling and changing attire behind police lines.
Usually people at large anti-establishment rallies know very well there is litle to be gained by violence. Those in power otoh know very well how they can turn media coverage spotlights away from the issues and towards any disruptions to discredit or mute the actual grievances.
If media coverage is diverted from the real issue, then why are Fortune 500's publicly posting statements and making donations? Just about everyone consumes social media these days; it would be hard to ignore the grievances of peaceful protestors unless you watched exclusively cable news.
He mentions how society is at its core a contract on how to engage with one another. Everything we do is in some form conforming to that contract and when this contract is violated (like the stores being looted and vandalized), it angers you.
However, to the people who're really affected by this issue at the very bottom of the society - they feel they're being ripped off in the contract and are being cheated every single day. After a breaking point they can feel like they don't really have to adhere to the contract anymore themselves when no one else sticks to it in their oppressed world.
PS - Please note, he's obviously not justifying the lootings, mainly tries to make sense of it and how we got to where we are right now.
if that's the case, then why is that bad and the fact that the most wealthy, corporations, and our politicians get away with their excuses from looting people? their looting is stealing data, not paying their share of taxes, abusing power, etc., and just because they aren't physical acts doesn't excuse them.
but it's because they are the status quo, and they define what's looting or not. i'm not in favor of stealing and violence, particularly because the ones getting stolen from are at the bottom as well, but it sure seems those at the top sure live in a different society and under different rules that conveniently favor their form of "looting".
One is legal (whether you like it or not) the other is illegal. If you don’t like that, vote to have the law changed. No one gets to be a vigilante/looter without legal/social consequences.
I don't think anyone is looking for no consequences, they really don't care anymore.
For example, your idea of voting in the minds of the protestors is laughable. They believe (and I tend to agree) that money controls policy in this nation and the ultra-wealthy have control over policy, therefor their vote doesn't matter.
I was observing the BLM protest in DT Renton today.
The Renton PD seemed to employ a "out of plain sight" approach.
Patrol vehicles strategically placed, a few uniform officers were near occassionally chatting with protestors, and patrol vehicles driving by the scene.
At one point a team of bicycle cops appeared out of no where rode through along side the protestors.
Each "side" seemed to be respectful of each other.
The approach of the Renton Police Department not antagonizing the protestors had it's intended effect--the protestors protested peacefully. In fact, when police vehicles flashed lights, or chirped sirens in support of the protestors, the protestors cheered in support back.
It seems to me that almost every violent protest/riot started peaceful but then police make it violent.
I have seen this so many times where police stay out of the way and everything goes smoothly. I think US police actually want a riot. They want to create violence.
It’s interesting, because I’ve taken a personal firearms course that involved concealed carry in the US and they talk about de-escalation there (I’m pretty sure they have to). I would at least expect the same from police (obviously their training would be much more in depth with all the tools cops get).
The aim is usually to end the protest locally and generally. Often one way to do this is to turn it into a riot. This makes the general population oppose the violence and property damage generally and also disperses the peaceful people on the street locally. Agent provocateur.
Maybe not all of them, but you only need a few people like the over-enthusiastic COD cosplayer cop [1] in management positions to kick things off.
Considering the vast, vast amount of footage of excessive force from the police in the last few days, I think it's likely the police want a riot. If they don't then they're beyond incompetent since they keep causing riots regardless.
You know, humans have a lot of built-in reactions that are very hard to resist in the face of certain stimuli. It's hard enough to get people to talk peaceably in an online forum where we aren't smelling pheromones, feeling an adrenaline rush in reaction to physical threats to our well being, etc. It's vastly harder to stay calm and behave "competently" in the face of that sort of thing.
My ex was career military. One day, I was seriously set off by something and he accidentally got up in my physical space and bumped into me and his military training apparently had prepared him for how to de-escalate in the face of imminent physical violence because I was quite ready to hit him over it. The end result was that I left the house to go cool off elsewhere.
So I've experienced first-hand physical de-escalation tactics and my ex was one of the calmest people I have ever known. I'm the only person he ever raised his voice at (when we were fighting). Most people were incapable of getting a rise out of him.
So I think I have a pretty fair idea of just what it takes to actually de-escalate physical violence when faced with imminent physical violence and most people have neither the temperament nor the training. He had been in the military quite a few years at that point.
I don't intend to argue this further. I've said what I wanted to say. I was surprised my initial comment got any upvotes at all instead of being just stomped into the ground, given the current climate out in the world.
Yes. If police departments properly charged their employees when they break the law, there would not have been protests, rioting, or looting. Trevor Noah's attempt at explaining this is very straightforward but adroit.
Another point: Persona A goes and kill my neighboor, Can I (or is it good to) go out and do whatever a I want? Like rioting, beating people and destroying other people property?
If you have proof that Person A killed your neighbor, and yet they were being protected from prosecution, of course I would support your right to protest. Sometimes the only way to get change is with large public support.
Unfortunately, today's news focuses only on violence and fear mongering. You will eventually realize that peaceful protests have never successfully brought change. You will find yourself screaming into a void, without justice.
Today, the police claim that there are only a few Bad cops but most are Good, and ask us to trust that. There are only a few rioting protestors, but most are peaceful. However, the cops across the US are rioting, beating, and destroying the lives of every protestors. Cleveland PD has banned news media from entering downtown. Seattle PD has fired flashbangs and rubber bullets at news reporters. A black CNN reporter and their whole crew was arrested live to avoid the public witnessing what was to take place.
Nobody disagrees that rioting and vandalism and burglary are horrible acts. But I would rather the people riot if it leads to lives being saved and equal accountability for all citizens.
Yes, three of the four guilty cops are free with no charges, and the fourth is only being charged due to the protests and would not have been otherwise.
This comment can surely not be in good faith. You cannot seriously be suggesting you believe that protesters went to "destroy evertyhing[sic] in every city"?
I'm almost convinced instead of looting, in many cases (at least here in WA) it's some sort of organized crime syndicate working with street level gangs using the civil unrest as cover to commit grand theft.
In DT Seattle, protests turned into violent riots, and many nearby businesses were damaged including looting.
In other WA cities, criminals picked strategic targets (Target, Walmart, and BestBuy) and hit them in multiple locations. In Bellevue, there was footage of cars pulling up to take the stolen possesions and drive away.
That was different than with looting, in which people typical take anything that isn't nailed down.
From afar, it seems to me like the big problem in US policing is a lack of calm professionalism. The de-escalation approach in the article would to me but just one aspect of taking a professional approach where safety and following rules and best practices is paramount (and prioritised over 'winning' against criminals).
I have had to patrol streets in Iraq during the surge in 2007, It was dangerous, but our ROE had escalations rules and everyone patrolled at a low ready with their helmets off. The intent was to make us a boring part of the background rather than an antagonist, and to make us look like we didn't want to be there as much as they didn't want us there.
Cop's look more and more like soldiers and I think you're right about the 'winning' being the main goal.
Where i live, the cops are very tacticool, even though we have effective gun control and hardly any civilian vs police violence.
All i think about is how much my back hurts now from carrying all that shit when I was in the military.
This is one thing I keep hearing from service members, that the rules of engagement are much more stringent and measured in the armed forces compared to standard LEOs.
What were some of the concrete rules/policies that you found effective overseas that could be effective here? I wish we as a society talked in more concrete terms around this topic.
I don't have the ROE cards anymore, but generally there was a 'wartime' and 'police or peace keeping'
In war like operations you'd still follow the rules of war, but generally you were shooting first to take objectives, there was a lot of latitude.
In peace keeping and non warlike, everything was about a force continuum.
- Ie we will patrol with weapons slung over our shoulders, with the weapons at 'action' (cocked but safe) and hands by our sides.
- If things change we actively patrol with our weapons (Still at action)-
- then you get to pointing weapons (action)
- cocking weapons (for direct crowd control, kinda silly because you lose a round at with this action but it makes the point you ain't stuff about)
- Then there's pointing with safety off, and closely followed by firing at people. (A lot is happening to get here in 'police' or 'peace keeping' scenarios)
Also our ROE had specifics such as, if your are engaged by IED or Ambush you can fire when fired upon but you can't fire at suspected targets (Like anyone on a cell phone), you have to confirm the threat. Which is pretty reasonable but in war like operations you may just fire at positions of cover because there could be enemy waiting there and you're generally trying to suppress an area. You don't want to do that in a heart's and minds kinda fight.
Anyway, I can't remember them all and they have probably changed over the last decade. But those are the main points and generally we didn't make the first move. we just waited.
I remember being shouted at by some kids and young guys for like an hour and just waiting them out. It was very frustrating but my rifle and grenades would have just created bigger issues.
Back during the 2007, when you where in Iraq, I always cmpared US forces to European forces and, yes, European police. I thought, back then, it would be best to leave policing to the police. Mainly due to training, when you are trained for war, I assumed you would be more likely to act that way.
Now, it seems that I misjudged it. What say is basically shedding a very bad light at LE in the US, when even the military, in Iraq of all places, had better ROEs for policing than the actual police.
Maybe it is related to looking like a soldier, acting like a soldier, without being a soldier. No idea, all I can say is that I don't like the situation at all. Let's hope nobody is deploying the armed forces.
I have always suspected that US police are shunted into sub-optimal patterns because there are so many guns here that the odds a simple interaction will involve a firearm are much higher than they are in less-well-armed societies. Does anybody know if I'm right about that?
That doesn't mean that they can't do more de-escalation or take other steps, but the high prevalence of guns does seem like it would be a contributing factor.
(I realize this touches a hot topic (guns) but it's an honest question, and sympathetic to law enforcement.)
> will involve a firearm are much higher than they are in less-well-armed societies. Does anybody know if I'm right about that?
Switzerland (disclaimer; I'm Swiss) has also lots of weapons around, but if the police are ever shooting someone it's usually big news with investigations on whether it was really necessary.
From my laymen point of view, police training and holding them accountable to their actions is probably even a bigger factor than gun availability (although this is certainly a factor too). If I'm not mistaken, Swiss police training strongly encourages to back off if someone draws a weapon, trying to keep it cool, talk softly/slowly etc. It seems that in the US, the first hint of a weapon will result in drawn weapons by police and a 'drop your weapon'-shouting-contest; that's at least what seems to often happen in footage that ends up in the news where something goes wrong and someone ends up being dead.
Edit: One of the more memorable examples I saw was a video via NYT, where some guy was being arrested, tried to adjust his pants and was immediately being shot because the officer thought he was going for a gun. This is absolutely unimaginable in Switzerland; I would have to look it up for the facts but I think to remember a case where someone was shot holding (and threatening with) a fake-gun, and the officer who did so went to jail if I remember correctly.
Isn't it quite difficult to get a carry permit for a gun in Switzerland though? Making it not that likely that a random citizen the police officer encounters will actually have a loaded gun.
There is mandatory military service for males, so you actually see a lot of guns being open-carried by people heading home for the weekend on public transport etc.
So the question here is: Would the response have been the same if all the heavily armored folk were black?
As a born and raised American, I'm inclined to think not. I could be wrong of course, but everything that I've seen and experienced growing up and living in the US has led me to believe otherwise.
I want to think that more protestors being armed would make a difference, but ultimately I believe it will just lead to escalation and more deaths by cop (and/or the national guard, as we're finding out in Louisville currently).
"Would the response have been the same if all the heavily armored folk were black?"
There's precedent for this. In the 60s the black panthers open carried in California to protest, of course, police misconduct. Reagan signed in the Mulford Act [1], banning open carry in CA.
If BLM want stricter gun control laws (not sure if they do), all they need to do is arm themselves at protests.
In a historical precedent that doesn't particularly clarify the situation, in 1967 the Black Panthers were able to enter the California state capitol building with guns. [1]
Apparently they were let in, then arrested, then released without charge and their guns returned as they hadn't broken the law. However, they were there protesting against the 'Mulford Act' that intended to disarm them, and it was subsequently passed. So they didn't get shot, but they didn't get what they wanted either, and they did get banned from doing it again.
Of course, there's a lot more detail than I've put into this post, and society was pretty different at the time. Reagan supporting gun control? The NRA as a sporting organisation that supported gun control? And the panthers were Marxist? So I'm not sure it's a very instructive example about how the same thing would go today.
A few of those protestors were chased through a road block and shot at, and one was killed. It is ironic that you are calling the police killing someone handling with "kid gloves" in a thread about deescalation between protestors and police.
(Don't get me wrong, what those protestors did was senseless and the epitome of entitlement.)
> A few of those protestors were chased through a road block and shot at, and one was killed.
This is a highly misleading way of describing the situation.
The police set up a traffic stop to arrest them. They fled the stop. Finicum told the police he wasn't going to surrender and that they'd have to shoot him. He reached for his gun in his pocket, and then he was shot.
If black men were only being killed by police after fleeing arrest, refusing to surrender, challenging the police to shoot them, and then reaching for a gun...then we wouldn't have much of a police violence problem.
Given that one of the subjects of the protests is whether police can murder on mere suspicion of a weapon, I suspect not. The chances of a comparable hypothetical BLM armed occupation being allowed to live are small. If they surrendered they would likely be shot in the back of the head while handcuffed.
Of course you’re right. It’s why people-police statements are constantly pointing out how these guys “put their life in the line every day” in reference to the dangerous criminals out there (while ignoring that most crimes are non-violent offenses, or at least offense that don’t involve a gun). The 2A people want the government to fear its citizen’s (in their mind this somehow prevents tyranny) and then complain when the state responds to violence with fear and violence.
It’s almost as if the American gun lobby wants both sides to need lots of guns and bullets for some reason...
Their aggressive approach is difficult to justify with statistics.
Despite the much higher relative levels, the amount of gun violence in the US still isn't all that high in an absolute sense, and police are not particularly the target of it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests
200 cities have had protests. Out of the probably hundreds of thousands of people protesting, guns have been responsible for one death of an officer (as far as I know)
Unpopular opinion: The newfound delusion that peaceful protests have ever engendered any real change as opposed to their violent cousin is perhaps the nail in the coffin of freedom and democracy.
That's extremely reductive - easy counterexample, the P/IRA completely failed to unify Ireland but their political wing did make progress towards their aims (GFA)
When the military starts shooting civilians, those that are shot become martyrs and the movement becomes explosive. The military will not shoot civilians without extremely good reason - they aren't cops, after all.
Things tend to break down when the leadership gets off on harassing the otherside, add to that a feelings of disenfranchisement and it's a recipe for disaster
Imagine being a cop and having to deal with stuff like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k4L97igDjY They literally save this man's life and he kills the guy who saved his life. Cops don't work in a safe space. Years of working in a violent and hateful environment must take a serious toll on them.
While there's a kernel of validity to what you're saying, cops in every state and every nation have to deal with a violent and hateful environment. The variation in outcomes suggests something else is at play.
Variation of outcome in other countries can be easily explained by low availability of weapons (that the case of most places): policemen are less susceptible to make use of their weapons when people they arrest as low probability of holding one.
While I grant that that is true, and likely a contributing factor, it's worth noting that police have other disabling weapons at their disposal. The ease with which one, and the other, are deployed again suggests that it's not simply a matter of "need to defend one's self against possible violence" differing between regions.
How many videos, at this point, are out in public of police taking out tasers at routine, non-violent traffic stops? Of chemical spraying non-violent protestors? And of shooting unarmed people? The famous photo of the UC Davis photo casually spraying seated students at a campus protest makes the case more eloquently than I can: that was not a person in fear of their life, and we've created a system where that person avoided criminal prosecution (https://humansarefree.com/2014/04/the-cop-who-pepper-sprayed...). When that happens, it seems an offense to logic to reach to "well, our police are more violent because our criminals are more violent." It may be true, but it's outright offensive to their victims not to pause, first, at "...and because their violence goes unpunished." Pointing out the risk they are exposed to is less plausible when we see violence undertaken in non-violent situations, and where they do not see criminal prosecution for wildly disproportionate responses.
How many events have we learned of where unarmed people providing no violent resistance were killed by officers who didn't suspect violence? The death of Eric Garner in NYC involved an unarmed man, stopped by the police for selling single cigarettes, who was pinned down and choked to death, while his hands were up and he was wheezing and begging for air. Those officers were neither permanently removed from duty, nor prosecuted. It's difficult to interpret "slowly choked an unarmed and unresisting man to death" as "acting in response to fears of the violence possible in the situation." Situations like that make it highly unlikely that violent police are a simple correlation to violent criminals, because that would at least suggest that the police violence is constrained to violent and reasonably-possible-to-escalate-to-violence situations. Which isn't what we see riots breaking out over.
Imagine being born into a society that brutally enslaved your ancestors for centuries. And after that ended, the society continued to severely oppress those who look like you in countless ways -- through savage violence, terrible government policies, and pervasive racist cultural norms both blatant and subtle -- even to this very day. Years of living in such a society must take a serious toll on them.
I like to share this video with critics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfi3Ndh3n-g to show how police have to be ready to go from 0 to 100 within seconds in order to not be killed. Notice the first thing the activist notices when he's done with the simulation: "I never realized how importance compliance is."
I watched this video and I think it presents a skewed perspective on things to lead you towards a certain outcome. I think it's worth questioning the underlying assumption throughout that video, which is that guns need to be involved in these scenarios at all.
In the first scenario, if someone chooses to randomly shoot a police officer then nothing can be done. This is generally true throughout society. If people choose to randomly shoot others they can mostly succeed. This is not an argument for an officer having a gun, but for less guns to be involved in society in general. Even if the activist or newscaster had a gun drawn from the beginning the outcome easily could/would have been the same.
In the second scenario, there's no reason for a gun to be involved over something less lethal like a taser or a baton. This is essentially a misdirect after people are freaked out from the first scenario.
In the third scenario, again why is a gun involved? Similarly a taser or baton would get the job done. Or actually using other tools like handcuffs rather than shakily pointing a gun at someones back, which is begging for an accident.
All of this to me ironically paints a picture of guns unnecessarily escalating situations, rather than the point they were trying to make.
Also watching that video, the cops were grabbing at his waist where there was a gun, If the guy was just saved by firefighters he may be in an altered state so antagonizing him about carrying seems pretty reckless.
I'm not excusing the criminal. He made a choice, but the power of video. Other cops should learn from it. Could that situation have ended safely with some other approach.
That second voice, "lift up your shirt".
it stopped being a conversation with 1 officer and became two people giving orders to 1 guy.
I assume from the shooter's perspective the cop wants to search a him, and he knows he has an illegal firearm on him. Depending on the state and his status as a repeat offender, he could be facing life in prison for that. So, suddenly murdering the person who is going to put you in jail for the rest of your life seems like a zero sum game to a sociopath.
> So, suddenly murdering the person who is going to put you in jail for the rest of your life seems like a zero sum game to a sociopath.
"you win and I go to jail forever / I win and you die" actually literally is a zero-sum a game. People fight/support wars over even completely unrealistic fears that they might one day lose even a bit of their freedom.
Maybe you mean that deciding not to voluntarily lose that zero-sum game makes someone a sociopath. And, tbh, in that situation, I would rather surrender than kill (for a lot of reasons, both moral and practical). However, I also wouldn't call someone a sociopath for deciding to kill in order to avoid a life sentence. "Live Free or Die" is literally the motto of the state of New Hampshire.
If I were about to arrest someone who knew they were going to jail for life, I would go into that situation expecting a life-and-death struggle. Even if that person were a completely balanced and mentally healthy person. Anything less seems a bit naive.
Before you downvote this comment, please consider that this is literally true.
In 2018, 150 US law enforcement officers died due to work related reasons. There were about 690,000 officers employed in America at that time. This means 21.7 out of every 100,000 officers died due to a work related reasons.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that about 25 out of every 100,000 driver/sales workers died due to work related reasons.
For both jobs, most of the deaths were accidental.
> That, experts say, speaks to a cultural attitude that is endemic to the profession, and is hard to change with new chiefs or rules. Thomson encountered this when he tried to make change in Camden. The police department was so dysfunctional that the city took the unprecedented step of disbanding the force and reconstituting a whole new agency from scratch.
This American Life did a story about a new chief trying to reform the Firehouse culture in Amsterdam in order to combat discrimination:
I didn't know that any city had reconstituted their police department. But Camden did, in 2012.[1] They fired all their cops and started over with new ones.
I lived in Mexico City downtown for 15 years. If you don't know if there is a problem anywhere in the country, people would come to Mexico City main plaza to protest. Many peaceful protests never really achieve anything, others utterly violent neither. I witnessed farmers being beat up by the police, women and kids fighting riot police and building destruction. One common element is that certain police officers are aggressive by nature and suddenly get a free card to hurt people.
I agree with the article, communication is key. In many protests I believe there is a lack of miscommunication in all parties, and others are not well planned or are infiltrated to diminish the reason of the protest. Some groups advocate for violence as the only way to be heard (which in some cases is a valid reason, e.g. fascism) but destroying normal people business vs government Infrastructure I don't think should be permitted
Unfortunately, the theory does not translate into practice or hiring. The military and militarized US police force seem to actively recruit agents who fundamentally misunderstand principles of de-escalation. Whether that be riot police antagonizing civilians or armed forces provoking people abroad.
The standards for these positions must be higher, especially domestically (police).
I remember being in Grand Central Station, NYC, not long after 9/11, and noticed a student sitting on a step — right next to their head was the barrel of a casually dangled rifle, hanging off the shoulder of a cop who happened to be standing next to them.
We’ve become pretty normalized to it, but a militarized police force wasn’t always a thing in America.
The scenes of the WTO protests in Seattle two decades ago, of cops in riot gear shooting tear gas and rubber bullets into crowds of people — those images were pretty shocking at the time. Now it’s a familiar scene, one that is currently playing out in cities around the country and beyond.
It's not entirely surprising, but it has been rather shocking to see the groups, some more organized than others, that have been coming in and inciting these confrontations between police and the rest of the public present at the location.
From what I've seen of videos posted of the vandals and looters in my own and other cities it seems a certain, very small, percentage of bad actors are provoking escalations to the detriment of everybody else. Some of these parties seem to be doing that as a primary goal, others are simply causing the escalations as a side-effect of their actions.
Certainly this doesn't account for everything we have witnessed, such as the NG shooting rubber bullets at people on their porches(srs WTF?), but it has contributed substantially to the escalation IMO.
Police escalating a peaceful protest to a violent one is part of the plan. It's a feature not a bug for police.
They do this to scare regular folks from not participating in protests. Because good and honest people will stay home if they worry about getting hurt.
The goal of the police is to make protests undesirable and that's what they do.
Undercover cops, for example have been video taped in many instances of breaking store windows abd starting fires. The goal being to give ab excuse for police to disperse crowds.
I know many don't believe me but veteran protesters under this. Go to a protest and find out for yourself.
I'm no fan of the police, but I think it's a lot easier to say something should be deescalated when you are miles away in your home and not on the ground with some people throwing objects at you, some of which have in the past included molotovs. Mob mentality is a very dangerous thing, that goes both ways.
I saw a suggestion somewhere else that at least some subset of police responsibilities (e.g., general dealings with homeless people as one example) should be shifted to social workers. Makes sense to me.
I don’t know my brother showed me a very uncivil and awful video of a black man trying to defend his business by telling looters to go away and being beaten and at least knocked unconcious with a pool of blood around his head. There were many other videos I saw where people stood outside their businesses with guns and their businesses didn’t seem to get looted at least. (I know it’s all anecdotal, but at least it says there are cases of the opposite being true.)
Sorry, I should do a better job at explaining why I said what I said. I'll try to do better at that next time. What I meant to imply is that non-violent forces like the social worker or the man defending his business (using pleading and non-violent force) can very easily be met with violent force. Whereas sometimes even the fear of violence is enough to stop the escalation of force. I honestly don't even know if that black man that defended his business lived. I can agree with you police need to be better at de-escalating they and their departments should be striving for that. Maybe training could help? Also at the same time I feel, and I'm not saying this is something that always happens but it's a thing that always happens under the given circumstances, when something isn't de-escalated without force (such as a failed de-escalation by a social worker or non-violent de-escalation by police) it by nature will escalate, so to prevent loss of life sometimes force can be necessary (such as what the police can do). So, leaving the police completely out of it in the first place could be dangerous to the social worker and other parties involved.
One suggestion that has been made is to not call the cops at all for certain kinds of emergencies:
* Mental health (otherwise nonviolent)
* Animal problems
This alone could reduce deaths dramatically. I witnessed an incident where the cops were called about a stray dog. They shot it. When you have a gun, every problem looks like a target.
I think it should also be made clear who has priority at a 'scene' firefighters, paramedics, or police?
Personally I think it's implicitly assumed that it is police that have that authority. I believe this should be flipped so that medical and fire officials have authority at the scene of an incident, not police.
In the case of George Floyd, then the paramedics would have had the authority to get those three cops off the guys back possibly in time to save him.
The police (particularly police unions) are very politically powerful with their endorsements and contributions to politicians. Many mayors across the country are afraid to discipline their police departments.
I'm going to copy/paste the experience of a local state senator from Facebook because, well, I found it insightful and relevant to this article. This is from NC State Senator Jeff Jackson. He represents a district in Charlotte.
----
Last night I went into uptown at around 7:00 p.m. to do my part to help keep the peace.
Our city had already had a peaceful and powerful protest earlier that afternoon with a message of love and justice and it was important that the evening protest stayed safe and civil.
At the beginning there were roughly 1,500 people. That’s about half the number who were at the afternoon protest. The evening group was also much younger. I’d put the average age at about 24.
That meant the tone was audibly different. The conversations I had were different. It was a more personal perspective from people who weren’t just marching for others - they were also marching for themselves. There were more people in this crowd who felt that this issue directly concerned them and their friends, and you could hear that in their voices.
The leaders of the protest had met earlier that day with CMPD to discuss how to ensure the event was safe. As a result, the leaders placed experienced activists at the front of the march, in the middle, and in the rear. They kept the march moving, occasionally stopping for a few minutes to let people re-group, but not letting too much heat build in any one spot.
Alongside real anger and frustration were constant displays of compassion. Lots of people brought water bottles and were handing them out. I saw a woman trip and hurt her leg and the crowd immediately stopped and tended to her.
Law enforcement was present in various ways. There were some officers in regular uniform walking among the crowd, answering questions and chatting. There were also several officers on bicycles and motorcycles. Most of the police presence was blocking certain streets to keep the march from heading certain directions.
By the time the march got to the police station it had been going for over two hours and it had shrunk to maybe 300 people. About 10 officers stood outside the front door, motionless. The protesters got as close as they could to the police without making contact. One officer raised his fist in solidarity and was greeted with loud applause and cheering from the crowd. At one point someone threw a water bottle at the police and everyone turned around and yelled at him. There were some very tense moments near the police station, but after about 30 minutes the march headed back uptown.
Now it was about 10:40 p.m. The march had been going for over three hours. It wasn’t a coherent group anymore. There were less than 200 people. It had splintered into lots of little groups and there wasn’t any organization that I could see. I thought it was basically over so I started to head back to my car.
At 10:50 p.m. I heard the first flashbang. Then I saw the tear gas. I was two blocks away so I couldn’t tell what, if anything, precipitated its use (although I later read a CMPD statement that bottles and rocks were being thrown).
But the flashbang had a catalyzing and organizing effect on the remaining protesters, who instantly re-formed.
This marked the point of a clear shift in police tactics. Officers lined up shoulder-to-shoulder and walked block by block, toward the protesters, who similarly lined up shoulder-to-shoulder and waited for the police to move toward them.
Officers would then proceed down one block, wait five minutes, use a loudspeaker to tell the crowd to disperse, and then start walking toward the crowd. Then they would use tear gas and pepper bullets, which would cause the crowd to retreat one block.
This continued for several blocks, until eventually the remaining protesters scattered. Nine arrests were made.
I’m not aware of any injuries. As far as property damage, I heard a few reports of a few broken windows, but nothing extensive.
It’s really easy to see one picture or hear a snippet on the news and draw a conclusion about an event like this. What I saw was much more complex, much more human. If it’s one thing we all owe each other right now, it’s looking past the surface and trying to learn a little more about what’s really going on underneath.
What I learned last night is that the tenor of these events can change on a dime. But you can feel it when it happens. I also learned that the vast, vast majority of protesters were there to engage in peaceful, safe protest. Although many of them felt genuine anger, they understood what it meant to channel it productively and what type of conduct would undercut their message.
My thanks to the leadership of this event for working hard to keep everyone as safe as possible.
As an outsider watching from across the Atlantic, I am astonished at what is being posted in these comments. There are hundreds of videos on social media of wanton police violence towards peaceful protestors. Of course there are non-peaceful protestors (and I do not defend them) but they are responded to in incidents of heavy handed violent escalation. Bellingcat have collected more than 100 reports of protected media representatives being beaten, blinded and brutalized by police action. This is all happening during unrest caused by police brutality.
In America there is a culture of rushing to find center ground between two points regardless of what the points are. So now they rush to make false equivalence between large groups of many kinds of people protesting in public and a professional militarized force with government funding.
I've noticed that many people create a distinction between the police and the rest of society - as though they're separate to and apart from normal people.
Given police officers are in fact a part of the same society as the people protesting against them, it seems likely that the issues with brutality, and racial prejudice, are not endemic to police themselves, but indicative of problems of the overall society at large.
If people are protesting the symptoms of these broader cultural issues, and not the underlying cause, it seems an inescapable conclusion that any change will largely be ineffectual.
I feel that the difficulty with this, is that noone likes to admit that there are systemic issues in the way their society functions. From a sociological perspective, most people don't want to be beating a drum that runs counter to popular opinion.
Similarly, most people are reluctant to engage in confrontation on an individual level, when encountering behaviour that ultimately leads to these type of outcomes.
Just as importantly, most people are awful at taking responsibility for their role in a problem. People prefer to create a false dichotomy, and position their impact on problems as meaningless, and view solutions as outside their locus of control.
This effectively leads to a kind of tragedy of the commons, where responsibility belongs to everyone and is taken by noone - similar to what we see with climate issues.
To effect meaningful change, it's usually required that both individuals and groups make their voice heard and actually do something. Yet most people go about their lives, and only take action when the collective does, in response to some climax of conditions. This is better than the inverse - of individuals taking action while groups do nothing - yet usually results in neglibile change, if any.
I suspect a part of the problem is that a sizable demographic cares, but only insofar as they care to signal their virtues. Yet when it comes to doing something themselves, the it's a much lower priority. I also suspect most people in this situation engage in a cognitive dissonance that's almost automatic too - and probably aren't even aware that they're doing it.
I think for demonstrators, yes, de-escalation is the key. However, for the Antifa/domestic terrorist groups that exist only to smash property and cause violence, they should be arrested on sight and prosecuted.
Why not make universal laws that apply to anyone that can be proven to injure another human being with economic deterrents?
For example, if you hit a man in the face, cause bruising, lets say that costs $1,000 across the board. $1,000 for any hematoma, $5000 or any broken bone. $25,000 for a GSW, $100,000 for a life-threatening injury, etc.
To take it further, if you discharge a weapon at another human being, the fine is something like $1,000 per bullet, etc.
Additionally, existing laws still apply.
Following the above guidelines, you don't need to prove mens rea. It is just the cost of doing business.
It would be a violence tax at the individual level.
The hypothetical policy wouldn't replace existing laws, it would just be an additional tax on violent behaviors that apply to cops, criminals, school children, etc.
Another thought I had around this was to just fire any police officer that fires their weapon at another human. If they truly believe that their life is in danger, they value their life more than their job.
Either of these things would at least add some actual cost to the idea associated with performing an action with extreme consequences on another human being's life.
Yes, I think people who at shoot people consider the consequences to their immediate actions, like everyone else. Unfortunately, there is rarely a significant cost to the individual cop in most acts of police violence, and many are more likely to shoot a second time.
This is an interesting story; however, much of it seems predicated on the idea that the police want things to be safer, which seems false. There seems like a open determination to make things worse - to be confrontational as possible and demonstrate their impunity. All the people making "you'd think they'd manage to not do police brutality at the rally about police brutality" jokes are missing the point - the overtness IS the message.
But if the police are trained to use violent force... just how does that work? The fact that police will never really be of service to a suicidal person (who can point a toy gun at them, and then they shoot him/her- granting the individual's wish to end his/her own life) comes to mind. (Oh, yeah, don't commit suicide!)
It takes just a few rotten apples on the side of the protestors to make it go violent.
It also takes just a few rotten apples on the side of the police to make it go violent.
Protesting is largely a modern witch hunt. It lets people blow off some steam, rather ineffectively in the modern protest case, because you don't get to burn anyone alive at the end of it. Enough people long for that witch hunt finale, and that's why protests turn violent so often, it's the modern day equivalent of burning a witch.
I don't know if protestors realize that it is up to them to come up with ways of fixing systemic issues they're upset about (people in power are fine with the way things are, by definition) - burning down your local neighbourhood or yelling out in the streets can only lead to the powers that be going 'ok fine, go find some witches to burn to appease this mob'. It's never going to fix actual systemic issues, but perhaps burning witches is good enough, given our history, and going in circles indefinitely is the way of this species.
>It's never going to fix actual systemic issues, but perhaps burning witches is good enough, given our history, and going in circles indefinitely is the way of this species.
Counter point - the Civil Rights Act of 1968. People pay attention when they are forced to. I won't pass a moral judgement as it's not my place, but nothing will change until force is applied. I think that is the lesson history teaches.
Well it depends on where you think we ought to be going - then we can then decide what history is teaching us :)
History written in textbooks tends to teach the narrative that was sponsored. Modern pop-history tends to teach what will sell the most copies, so history is teaching us all kinds of selective facts about life.
Regarding force - force needs to be applied for anything to move - that's just a fundamental law of physics :) The question is where and how do we apply force and in what quantities?
My stance is that witch hunting did not solve the issue of witches causing droughts, scientists along with engineers and people willing to work today, for a better tomorrow, solved hunger in many places of the world.
Now imagine somebody that does believe that his or her witch hunt of year 1543 did fix drought for a decade in his/her town. What evidence could you possibly provide to convince them otherwise? They know there was no drought for ten years, they know they burned a witch in 1543. Now if there is a drought ten years later, clearly we just didn't burn enough witches!
This is the difficulty in dealing with people who rely on emotion, not cold hearted rationality, to solve problems. Cold hearted rationality has its dangers too and one can argue until the cows come home that we may have been better off never industrializing, never inventing agriculture and sticking with hunter gathering, at one with nature and all. Not me, I like hot showers, anti-biotics and all the other modern amenities too much. I'm in the rationality over emotion camp. The people out there protesting I'm guessing are in the other camp and that's totally fine with me.
Protests are an opportunity for those in power to fix things before the protests escalate. They were fine with things as they are now it has escalated. Burning witches might not be enough this time.
This doesn’t seem to be a question in good faith, but in the event you genuinely don’t understand: the protests are about police brutality and violence.
Protestors don’t have the authority to police themselves, but you seem to want to trivialize their cause because you disagree with the actions of some.
Wanting an accountable police force that does not brutalize those they are sworn to protect is a reasonable request.
End qualified immunity.
The fact that there has been a large amount of violence committed by the police against peaceful protestors and press serves to generally support the cause of the protestors. There is a large amount of video evidence you can see for yourself as well as many protestors have been interviewed repeatedly.
Perhaps listening and reading instead of asserting or injecting your own uninformed opinion would lead to more answers.
I've learned the hard way to not engage beyond an initial probe for dialog. There's significant portion of the population that leans authoritarian and that will reject any threats to that authority.
It's a fools errand to try to convince most people to change their minds on any matter, and doubly so for those within the aforementioned group.
You’ll want to remove Boston Tea party from that list. Extremely non-violent event. They broke one pad lock, didn’t steal any tea, and bought the yard a new padlock the next day.
It wasn’t a “protest” in any comparable way to this.
“That evening, a group of 30 to 130 men, some dressed in the Mohawk warrior disguises, boarded the three vessels and, over the course of three hours, dumped all 342 chests of tea into the water. ... The property damage amounted to the destruction of 92,000 pounds or 340 chests of tea, reported by the British East India Company worth £9,659 worth, or $1,700,000 dollars in today’s money. The owner of the two of the three ships was William Rotch, a Nantucket-born colonist and merchant.”
perhaps if i saw protesters actively stopping violence and looting instead of just spectating and filming and cheering, as well as comments supporting violence getting flagged on hn
otherwise, plenty of people may not be personally willing to risk themselves by being violent, but are happy to stand by as others are violent
anyways, i hope the protesters look forward to trump 2020, because that is the current trajectory they are pushing
consider why you are making assumptions about what I believe?
even if, for sake of argument, bad cops are instigating all the riots and looting, the media optics will make this a slam dunk for trump 2020 and more militarized police
exactly contrary to what we really want
consider this
where do all the people live who are most likely to vote against trump?
the big cities
where are all the riots taking place?
the big cities
if trump stops the riots and saves their livelihood, will this make them more likely or less likely to vote against trump? what do you think?
Why do you keep bringing up Trump? Ignore the election for a second.
I'm pointing out two issues: rioting, and the police brutality leading to the rioting are both societal problems. We saw this exact scenario after the Freddie Gray murder. I'm also trying to find out why you're avoiding admitting that both rioting and police brutality are problems.
why are you asking loaded questions? it is almost as if you are not interested in having a discussion, but would rather post talking points that i already agree with
hard to understand the point of what you are doing
OR: If the police were more Sheriff in The Andy Griffith Show and less Captain America meets Commando.
This is what happens when frightened, under-trained, under-experienced, over-militarized, desensitized "police" optimize for the wrong thing and defeat their fundamental mission by becoming an military occupation force of psychopathic a__holes who don't interact with "civilians" except to harass people, rather than a community service of human f__king beings.
Folks - don't be obtuse. Police commanders know exactly what will happen when they escalate with tear gas and rubber bullets.
Pro-police forces WANT mayhem. It makes people watching on TV afraid of the protests, and it changes the subject away from the widespread peaceful opposition to racist police violence.
Please don't post flamebait to HN. This comment was by far the most flamebaity top-level post in this thread, which predictably led to by far the shittiest subthread. That's not cool. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting to HN? Note these ones:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Eschew flamebait."
If you consider the rest of this page, you'll notice that most of the commenters support the protests (though of course they are divided, just as people at large are divided) and doing so without breaking the site guidelines. It's actually a surprisingly not bad discussion—at least relative to the extremeness of what's going on right now.
It's crocodile tears. Police chiefs knew all along about the deplorable amount of racism and casual violence on their forces, they just chose to ignore them. Now the political winds are shifting and they have to go along to keep their jobs.
Change does not require looting and beatings does it? Wouldn't looting and beatings simply give the police more power, and be counter productive against making police more accountable?
Looters and those who bash people's skulls in are opportunists who don't care about change. The ones that want change see their opportunity slipping away.
Yeah that's what people said for twenty years. So people wrote letters and went to court and the media. Turns out that didn't work.
Actually, have you seen Daniel Shaver's killing? No riot. Outcome: that policeman collects a pension and rests easy at home. So it is established your technique doesn't work.
When the good things don't work, eventually you get the bad things. That's not even through people changing. It's through the people changing. I remember reading in the WSJ or the NYT about one particular time in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's recent history when there was a bit of tension between their young firebrand wing and their older mellower leaders (though both were still religious). At the time, the older leader was in hiding (on account of the military looking for him) and there was a bit of violence so he came out to appeal for peace and was promptly arrested. This had the predictable effect of weakening the mellow side and turning the organization more radical (or so the article predicted).
So you don't have to turn people into rioters, you can just destroy the credibility of everyone calling for peaceful resolutions by dismissing them out of hand repeatedly. Eventually no one will listen to them. And then the only people with power in those groups are the firebrands. A complete own-goal if you're looking for peace.
Regardless of the effectiveness of peaceful protests over the past 20 years, violent ones are even less likely to see change. Those already on the fence or against the issue will just use it as an opportunity to dismiss it all as thugs interested in chaos, no matter that the majority are peaceful.
Can't dismiss it now. Every major corporation and most congressional lawmakers are now pushing for reform.
Especially worth looking at Rep. Joyce Beatty who is a 70 year old black woman who got peppersprayed with the protesters. An elected lawmaker was attacked by the cops. Think about it.
i would say it is short term gain, but longer term police and businesses will just leave black neighborhoods leaving them even more broken and poverty stricken, meanwhile the politicians will keep them on welfare and drugs to bring in the vote
It's already achieved more, so I think we're good here. But the truth is that this is out of control of individuals. The system of groups of people responds to the stimulus in predictable ways. This was unavoidable.
> Change does not require looting and beatings does it?
Just how long do you think the civil rights movement has been a thing? 50 years of doing things the way the white people demanded - peaceful protests, sit ins, black political leaders. Yup, it helped, it went down, but it never solved the problem, and I see no indication that it would have on a reasonable time scale. And the whole time you've got people STILL saying "no not like that. No you can't kneel at a football game. Shut up and dribble. Shut up and sing."
Nah. The money to pay back damaged shops should come straight out of the police budget for two reasons: 1. Failure to stop police brutality. 2. Failure to deescalate peaceful protests, in fact, for doing the opposite and firing on peaceful protesters and driving them to riot.
Absolutely disgusting the videos coming out of the last three days. A few burnt out targets is a small price to pay for popping the eyes of multiple people, for tear gassing little girls, for running over protesters, for letting go white people firing arrows at protesters. The cops are lucky it didn't get even more violent. They're damn lucky nobody snapped after getting shot by paintballs on their own porch and started firing back.
They will not listen just because a couple thousand people break windows and light things on fire. They will instead tell us there is no choice but to make this more of a police state.
The only thing that may work is to get everyone to use their voice. Historically, probably only a tiny fraction of the population have used their voice. The vast majority of us need to stop being silent.
You don't understand the power the government can wield if there is "justification" for it. The only way to have the government serve us instead of control us is to be loud, in the majority, and peaceful. At least in a country like the US.
What you're saying hinges on the people never stepping outside the bounds of what the US government deems acceptable.
Consider that the US government deems what we want (no more police brutality) unacceptable, by definition, we need to work outside the system to solve the problem.
It's similar to 2a people I've met that think that somehow the constitution guarantees their right to overthrow the US government if it becomes tyrannical. That's absurd. The US government would never let itself be overthrown. There's no internal system for such a thing.
The US government will also never fall to external forces, unless we are nuked. Their power far exceeds what most of the general population can imagine. The only way to change life as a citizen is to get the majority of the population on your side and to be loud. And if you get criminal or violent for no reason (there's a difference between directly fighting against police brutality and beating a small business owner senseless because he doesn't want you robbing him) the government will easily squash you.
> (there's a difference between directly fighting against police brutality and beating a small business owner senseless because he doesn't want you robbing him)
Fyi this is an example I often see spoken of, and then when it gets linked to it's actually a man that was charging at protesters with a sword unprovoked.
It's not just about what the US government deems acceptable, it's about what the US people deem acceptable. There's a breaking point where the general public will start demanding that looters be shot as a matter of pure self-defense - and as you can see in right-leaning media outlets, some people are already there.
The police and police wives in my family were the loudest mockers of the kneeling protests, which were perfectly quiet and peaceful.
"Blacks commit crimes at higher rates than others."
"It's not a police problem, it's a crime problem."
"I don't want to hear this crap when I get home from work."
> Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. -- John F. Kennedy, 1962
The inaction of police to reform themselves and elected officials to reform the laws that govern them is incentive to make it much easier for domestic terrorism to thrive.
Getting mocked was its method of operation. Politicizing a sporting event is controversial and controversy brings media coverage. The fact that it got a lot of media coverage meant that it was doing something.
If the change hasn’t happened yet, what other options are left? Looting? Probably not. Protests until meaningful reform occurs? Might help if nothing else has.
A government is supposed to be afraid of the electorate (Jefferson). They’ve lost that fear, and you see that trickle down from legislators all the way to law enforcement.
The electorate induces fear by holding the ability to give and take power from the government. They make their demands known by being loud. The vast majority of us have been guilty of being silent when our neighbor is desperately imploring the government for change. I am guilty of silence, and I regret it and will make my demands known.
All of this does not mean that the reasonable peaceful path is not effective. It just tells us citizens must take part.
It is yet to be determined if looting and violence can result in change. What is most likely is that the government uses this to justify greater oppression.
“If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness.” - Victor Hugo
The lesson will not be learned. The only thing that will happen is that even more excess force will be justified, and our civil liberties will go away in the name of order and safety.
Hundreds of videos have emerged of police brutality over the past few days. In how many of those videos do you see "good cops" taking down those bad cops committing acts of brutality?
Almost never. I myself have only seen two videos where this has been the case, out of hundreds!
Police racism and violence is an issue, but it becomes egregious when the rest of the police force just stands by.
Are there any videos or stories at all over the past few days?
There have been reports in some cities of the actual good cops here and there taking part in the protests and actually looking like they want to improve things in their communities, but I haven't heard of anything where the police have intervened on cops that were escalating violence and brutalizing protesters.
It would be a pretty big turning point in the protests if this is actually happening
There’s a video of a cop pushing a kneeling woman and then a black woman police officer yells at him for a little bit, that’s about it. I guess you could count the video of a Seattle cop telling another cop to take his knee off of a protester’s throat.
> I guess you could count the video of a Seattle cop telling another cop to take his knee off of a protester’s throat.
Yeah but that only happened after the crowd was screaming at them to take their knee off. I doubt that would have happened if it weren't for the protestors and the optics of doing literally exactly what kicked off this latest protest to begin with. If those cops were alone and making that arrest a month ago I highly doubt the other cop would have stepped in to move his knee.
You are arguing a completely different point than your parent/thread.
You are saying "there exist police departments which are friendly with the protesters".
The thread you are replying to isn't talking about protests; it's discussing the absence of evidence where police officers actively intervened and stopped the excessive use of force by a fellow officer.
In the USA, a civilian doesn't have the right to defend themselves from an officer under any circumstances in most states. A very few states allow you to shoot to defend yourself (even from officers who don't present themselves as officers) under very narrow circumstances. Any way you cut it, police are given benefit of the doubt when interacting with suspects but the cheaper internet-connected cameras get, the more evidence that we should probably revisit that long-held doctrine.
Yup, and then there's other videos of cops marching with protesters... Straight into the waiting arms of the national guard, where protesters get boxed in, shot at, and arrested.
The police in Columbus, Ohio marched with protesters earlier today, minutes ago they tear gassed legal media observers despite their plainly identifying themselves. Countless more examples. It’s PR.
The only one I've seen was where two cops were restraining someone while being filmed. One of the cops had his knee on the arrestee's head/neck, and after some time his partner (administering cuffs perhaps) noticed it and wrenched his knee away.
I think I saw that one; they took the knee away because it was on a white guy's neck, wasn't it? We've already seen what happens when it's a black guy's neck
In this case, the knee was there regardless and the colleague recognised the "bad optics" (as they say). Looked like natural behaviour from the first cop rather than "I'm trying to prove we kneel on all necks" too.
Probably because it was boilerplate. When people show up in threads with a pre-existing list of links, that's not conversation, that's talking-points. HN threads are supposed to be conversations.
Gotta love a three-hour old account trying to convince people that police racism and violence isn't real. Are we twitter now @dang? The astroturfing hasn't been subtle lately.
We've banned that account for breaking the site guidelines. But why are you breaking them yourself? Insinuations about astroturfing without evidence are not allowed, for reasons I've explained extensively (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). And obviously you shouldn't be responding like this or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23386438. Doing that helps nothing; it only makes this place even worse.
The guidelines specifically ask you not to feed egregious comments by replying (a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls), but to flag them instead. Other users did that, and so the GP comment was rightly flagkilled. If you had done that instead, that would have happened sooner.
I'll read them today. Apologies for making the forum worse, I'll try to change. I've been struggling with a lot of anger surrounding this issue lately. Maybe it'd be best if I took a break from HN for a while.
How did I break site guidelines? The comment I was replying to made wildly exaggerated claims about police violence and racism. I am simply trying to improve the quality of discussion by focusing on what the evidence actually allows us to conclude.
I understand that for controversial topics many people have deeply held beliefs and so experience a strong emotional reaction if they are questioned. It is easier to dismiss someone as a "troll" rather than examining why they hold these beliefs.
This was admittedly my lowest quality comment, but it is hard to see what was objectionable about the previous three comments, which were almost instantly flagged. The statistical evidence points to a very small role for racial bias in explaining differences in the use of deadly force by the police. What's wrong with pointing that out when it is directly relevant to the discussion?
The police could stop the protests instantly by changing how they deal with racist officers and officers who kill people. They would rather escalate the situation than make these changes.
Being a police officer is a difficult, thankless, dangerous job, yet critical for a functional society.
You don't get the same resources, respect, or pension of the military. If you are let go/fired, you have little chance of finding something comparable close by.
It's not healthy for the psyche to be put into harm's way for an entire career span. There is probably a lot of untreated PTSD going on. It's not surprising that they are very leery of policies that would put them or fellow officers at risk, or be guinea pigs for policies pushed down from above.
People get awkward or remain guarded around police in social settings, so law enforcement tends to fraternize with each other and their families.
None of this makes for an environment that promotes transparency.
I'm not making any judgements for or against any of the events that have transpired. But I have sympathy for everyone involved. I suspect that the police-public dynamic will never be changed without a significant cultural shift in attitudes.
Being a police officer isn't a dangerous job, it isn't even in the top 10 of most dangerous jobs in the US. No one thanks the 7-11 clerk for the danger they put themselves into so you can buy a Slurpee at 2AM in the morning. No one thanks the crab fisherman who risk their lives so you can enjoy "all you can eat" snow crab legs at Red Lobster.
There's lots of extremely brutal jobs that are thankless. People who pick your food. Visit central California during summer where people are picking produce in 100+ degree weather for 10 hours day. It's hard back breaking work.
Being a police officer is a well paid job with a pension where most of your day is filling out paperwork.
From a quick Google search, this article lists sherriff/police officer at 14th most dangerous job: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/careers/2018/01/09/work...
The most common cause is intentional injury by another person.
The police, like everyone with power needs accountability. But I don't know if being overpaid is the core problem.
I guess this is just another one of those problems that almost every other western democracy has figured out that is simply impossible to fix in the US.
It's probably a given that other western democracies have less police-related violence. Which countries have the best systems?
I suspect the impass will be worked around rather than fixed. Quasi-police will take on some law enforcement duties. Technology will intercede in a big way. Our public anonymity is probably already out the door.
I wouldn't be surprised if many looters are tracked and identified even with face masks, even retroactively.
Police are praised as heros and, when you count the pension, make 5x more money than the typical immunology PhD student (without whom we would likely literally be entering a new multi-century dark age).
Lots of people do hard society-critical jobs that take an emotional/physical toll at wages far below that of a typical officer. Only one of those occupations has a serious violence problem.
I can’t even imagine a world where there are protests in the streets asking immunology PhD students who have no pension and make 19K a year with a college degree to stop killing people. And there will never, ever be a parade for those folks.
Stop excusing police. They are paid better than most for the job they do, even if most of that comp is back-loaded.
I couldn't believe when they found the salary of the San Jose policeman that shouted "fuck you bitch" at a protester it turned out to be something like $250,000. Like holy fuck I thought bayarea frontend engineers were paid a lot, god damn. Dude looked 25 years old!
At the risk of sounding like I'm defending a guy I think should have been fired for conduct unbecoming an officer, I looked at the breakdown of his compensation. To be accurate, his totalcompensation (not just salary, but includes health benefits and probably things like reimbursements, uniform, etc); last year was closer to $230k. The $250k was the previous year. Remember that police unions have strict employment contracts where all of their overtime must be paid (they don't just make salary and work a variable number of hours).
SJPD has been chronically understaffed since at least 2008 when there were large layoffs. The department prefers to hire fewer officers, but work the existing ones longer hours (hence lots of overtime).
Definitely not excusing any behavior by the police. But if you lump all officers, departments, and cities together you are never going to get anywhere with reform.
I only have a vague idea what police officers make. Generally, I avoid begrudging anyone's salary.
Cops have guns and close to complete immunity to do whatever they want. They've been getting more and more militarized in the last couple of decades. They really, really don't need you to defend them.
There are two public faces to every department anytime an officer-involved story hits the news.
The police chief is a slick salesperson to put the department in the best light and is accountable to the mayor / city council. The union leader is the slimy salesperson who always paints the suspect/chief/mayor in the worst possible light and who constantly repeats the refrain "the job is hard", "we are only human", "followed standard department procedure", etc. There are a number of notable union leaders who are detestable caricatures of cartoon villains.
After re-reading this, I think I left out some detail about the purpose of the Union leader.
They have a fiduciary responsibility to protect the union (the members and the dues). They are not accountable to or elected by the public (in their role as union leader).
That said, they don't have to be cartoonish villains, but frequently are because their role is to pull heartstrings for police officers, not for the civilian/victim in the narrative.
How would you describe the sheriff casually tossing the tear gas grenade as anything but cartoonishly evil? How would you describe his co-workers, holding the line, without even looking twice at his behaviour?
Seattle PD maced a child and the officer who did it faced no repercussions. Is the Chief of Police a toothless position? The only other conclusion is that maybe GP should consider removing Seattle's Chief as a supporting example.
I would consider macing children to be "cartoonishly evil."
In big cities in states with strong union laws, the burden is very high for cause to fire an officer. Even when there is a firing, the officer can appeal and sometimes be reinstated. It opens the department up to liability if they don't wait for the normal "follow the evidence, build the case" flow.
When there are big protests in big cities, the regional police departments actually share officers. I would bet that about half of officers on the riot line in Seattle were actually from surrounding suburbs or from the state police. I don't think Seattle's chief can fire one of those officers; he would have to do an inter-agency thing that I'm sure is pretty complicated.
Also, the chief has to walk a thin line of perverse incentives. He needs the department to be functional and to do that, he can't be seen as making an example of an officer (for "morale" reasons). He also has to consider that police officers will leave a department in droves and the chief ends up with more problems if crime rises due to "bad management" of the department.
And earlier today, SPD invited, met with, and knelt in solidarity with a group of peaceful protesters at the East Precinct on Cap hill. Once the photo op was done, they started macing and gassing the protest.
There was no looting, no vandalism, no riot, no burnt cars in that area. Nobody was behaving violently. It took ten seconds for a peaceful protest to turn into an assault on the public.
If the Chief's are good, why aren't the cops good? And more specifically, why are their peers complicit when one "makes a mistake", which is an incredibly generous statement when the incident involves losing a human life. Pointing to a few good eggs doesn't bless all of them.
Nostromo, I'm the CEO of Nickelodeon, and I want to thank you for sharing this. I've directed my team of animators to re-work their characters to better match reality. The people shooting at you in real life should be in Paw Patrol too!
Also, certainly in Minneapolis—and likely elsewhere—the police chief doesn't seem to have nearly as much control over rank and file officers as the union head does. This story gives more texture: https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/05/minneapoli...
I'm a broken record on this, but this is yet another example demonstrating that it's basically impossible to compare cities along political borders. "Chicago" covers 234 sq/mi at the center of Chicago, whereas "Minneapolis" covers about 54 sq/mi of the center of Minneapolis, so an officer in Minneapolis and one in Chicago could be living and working in nearly identical environments -- they may, for example, both be living in an old, majority white inner-ring suburb a couple miles from Downtown and policing a majority black area they have no history in -- and the Chicago officer would be counted as living in Chicago, but the Minneapolis officer would not be counted as living in Minneapolis.
Their day-to-day experiences, their relationship to the communities they serve, their physical distance from Downtown, the built environment of their own neighborhoods, the socio-economic make-up of their friends and family -- and on and on and on -- could be practically identical, but we'd count them differently in your list.
The city has mandated residency requirements for nearly all city employees since the 1950s, but police and some other public workers are exempt, The Philadelphia Tribune reports. Approximately 30 percent of Philadelphia police officers live outside of Philadelphia, according to Acting Commissioner Christine Coulter.
In 2010, the police union won the right for officers who have five or more years of experience to live outside the city limits. Those terms have been in effect since 2012. Firefighters and sheriff’s deputies with five or more years of service were allowed to live outside of the city in 2016.
What that ellipsis elides completely changes the meaning of the quote. The pro-police forces referred to don't necessarily include the commander. If the original person was talking about the police, would they not have used the term "police forces" instead? The fans aren't the team.
> I'm curious if you truly think the people that I listed want to see their home towns on fire
When given a choice to protect murderous cops or prevent a fire, they chose to protect the murderous cops. All the cops have to do is go to jail, get a court date, post bail and sit at home. Why can't a cop that murdered someone be that inconvenienced?
Painting everyone with that same brush is not constructive. There are systemic issues to be dealt with here, but that doesn't mean every cop in the system is a murderer waiting to happen.
While true, from a game theory point of view you should be making the assumption that they are villainous. Likewise, you also need to assume that every interaction the deal with can result in them being attacked. From that position you can then start to create reasonable legislation and rules to protect both sides.
Baseless accusation. The protests are mostly in the blue-voting cities, and the GP's list is representative.
[edit]
Here is how it works:
Minneapolis, Chief of Police: nominated (...) by the Mayor of Minneapolis (Betsy Hodges) [1]
Seattle, Chief of Police: [n]ominated by Mayor Jenny Durkan [2]
St Louis, Comissioner of Police: appointed as the 35th Commissioners of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department on December 28, 2017 by Mayor Lyda Krewson [3]
Atlanta Chief of Police: Mayor of Atlanta Kasim Reed announced on December 1, 2016, that he had chosen Shields [4]
Chicago Superintended of the Chicago Police Department: The City Council on Wednesday voted 50-0 to appoint former Dallas Police Chief David Brown to lead the Chicago Police Department [5]
Oakland Chief of Police: Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf announced Monday that she has appointed former San Mateo Police Chief Susan Manheimer as Oakland’s interim police chief [6]
It's the cops on each force they cherry-picked. The fact that they are chief of police means nothing, but that you don't understand the institutions involved and how they work. This stuff is in front of SCOTUS and congress right now. It's not simple and it is very broken.
> The list of police chiefs & other officials is solid.
The list is solid ignorance of the institutions involved. It focuses on race of one part of police leadership and not police violence and the racist actions of many cops. Highlighting police chief race is a racial argument in the least and may be even a racist argument.
This is a pretty cynical post, but I'm not going to downvote/report it.
I actually really like the guidelines of this site. @dang and the other administrators do a good job at keeping the conversation mostly civil and the guidelines are great principles and rules to aim for that end.
Maybe if you assume bad faith of a post (anywhere on social media), it might be time to skip over it or take a break.
I'm listening to the RabbitHole podcast[1] right now which is a pretty interesting analysis by the NYTimes of how social media / online content fuels impactful psycho/social impact on participants. I hope you find it interesting.
I am pro-police and I do NOT want mayhem. The ideal protest in my eyes is a peaceful, effective one. One that causes real change -- like increased oversight, accountability, altered training, etc -- in the general police population: one that fixes the very real problems we've seen with police for years and continuously improves law enforcement for years to come.
Claiming "pro-police forces WANT mayhem" paints the situation in a very generalized, unhelpful, us-versus-them light.
There are definitely some pro-police forces that probably want some mayhem, for exactly the reason you state. There's probably others that want mayhem for other reasons. Across the board, however, I'd imagine most pro-police groups of people prefer peaceful protests that don't put officer lives at risk, not to mention all the collateral damage to protestors, buildings, economies, etc. that also could be avoided.
It's entirely possible (and, I'd argue, likely) that pro-police people aren't some homogenous group of schemers. You can be enraged about police brutality, abuse, and misconduct -- and also enraged by violent riots.
When you see protestors with rubber bullet wounds to the head, there are police actively trying to kill protestors. Every training video says to shoot at the legs to prevent death. We really need to purge police departments of these people who view themselves as enforcers who dish out punishment.
Police are trained to shoot for stopping power. A head shot on a target is a missed shot. There is no excuse for the number of rubber and pepper shots that have been above center mass.
They're either murderous or have "lucky" bad aim.
Exceptions apply for swat snipers in hostage situation
Which is the whole point of the protests. If an officer is on a riot line and is murderous but the other officers on the line don't take them out (send them home or prosecute them), then the officers are just selectively enforcing the law (which I realize is a concept in US law enforcement) to the point of being corrupt.
We should be very clear though that civil disobedience and disruptive protest is absolutely not the same thing as violence and looting. In Austin TX protestors blocked the major highway through downtown, which is obviously very disruptive, but IMO did not warrant cops shooting rubber bullets/bean bags indiscriminately into the crowd.
And yet there are dozens of filmed examples in the past couple days of police using unprovoked violence against peaceful protestors and other innocent civilians. There are quite obviously a lot of police officers who do in fact want and enjoy when they can legally employ violence against people.
> The ideal protest in my eyes is a peaceful, effective one.
I know several people personally who say this exact phrase, yet they mocked the football players who took a knee during the national anthem at games protesting exactly this issue.
Obviously most sane people would prefer an effective and peaceful protest, but there has yet to be one for this particular issue. So I am hardly surprised it has become this violent, especially with members of the police force and the president antagonizing people further. Also, I would add that any protest of great size naturally has people who try to take advantage of it and turn to anarchy. Shutting down such rioters with force seems to exacerbate the issue, as police force is what is being protest—an understandably difficult predicament.
Hardly. The civil rights movement is an excellent example of civil opposition done peacefully and effectively. It helped that there were many strong leaders in that movement across the country. Right now the energy is chaotic and undirected, without a strong voice of leadership to act as both the vanguard of the protests as well as the negotiators of change.
The one that involved the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. which led to riots in several of the nation's cities that eventually (but directly) led to the Civil Rights Act of 1968 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_assassination_riots )?
I am not in favor of rioting/looting but historically, it has been proven effective in some cases to get changes made.
> The civil rights movement is an excellent example of civil opposition done peacefully and effectively
There were 150 riots in the USA between 1965 and 1968, when LBJ was gathering the votes for civil rights.
The Selma march involved police using attack dogs and water cannons are peaceful marchers. It's damned amazing that (perfectly justifiable) violence against police didn't break out. The tools police use now would (and do) make it far more damaging.
The civil rights movement had a substantial amount of violence and change only started to happen because there was a very serious threat of it escalating. Purely peaceful protesting has almost never worked and most of the examples people cite (India's independence, anti-apartheid etc.) include a large amount of historical revisionism.
Are you joking? Do you not realize that most people are reasonable and do not want distress and despair? Do you fall out of that overwhelming majority?
Yes. Don't let anyone become an officer. Raise officer pay and benefits. Also, give credit to the police have done well and are well intentioned, which must be throughout the majority of the population, otherwise the US would have become unlivable decades ago.
It's not unreasonable. It is the right thing to do. Everyone who has been silent must speak up. That is the only way politicians will know they will be voted out of office if they don't comply with appropriate legislation. I have been generally uninvolved and I regret it.
Violence and crime though will allow the government to justify greater oppression.
The published California LEO pay is in "total compensation", which includes benefits and maybe retirement contributions. Police work hourly, not salary, so probably not too difficult to have a base pay of $100k and some overtime to get to total comp of $200k.
I'm not defending sociopaths with badges, but the $200k doesn't sound outlandish to me, especially if the department is on a hiring freeze. It's expensive to hire talent (which is what a trained officer is) in California.
> I don’t think that typical “pro-police forces” want to own the narrative of their cause being racist and violent
I think they do. Many cops seem to be very racist and very violent. It doesn't seem like they care who knows it. Even when they do care, they might not turn on body-cams which should be a fireable offense and now it finally is in at least one case in Kentucky.
You say “most” which implies that you agree that some police are racist and violent “bad apples.” Why, then, do the “good cops” not speak out against the bad cops? Surely they could use their overwhelming numbers to get rid of the racist and violent bad apples?
Why don't the "good protesters" speak out against the looters? Why do you demand the cops do what you wont do? (maybe you personally do but most protesters are not speaking against the looters). Often times it's dangerous to speak up or separate groups entirely. I'm sure the oakland police department is less racist than some random cop Jackson, Mississippi.
Bad analogy. You might as well ask why firefighters don’t pull teeth. It’s not their job.
Police swear an oath to uphold the law and it’s ostensibly their job to, when observing illegality, say “hey knock it off.”
Protesters do not swear an oath as a prerequisite to protesting. Protesters frequently do speak out against- and even forcibly prevent- looting and vandalism within their ranks, but if they don’t, it’s not a dereliction of duty in the same way as when cops ignore abuses in their ranks.
In a large enough group, you can find "many" people who are whatever you want to generalize the whole group as. Using your logic, saying "many" of the protesters are looting and attacking police and innocent bystanders is completely true. You're picking words that you know are deliberately misleading to push an agenda.
That's a video of George Floyd being murdered by cops. Do you even know what we are talking about? The cops are violent. They could de-escalate instead of use violence. The agenda is talking about this article https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/de-escalation-keeps-pro...
Police are not the only ones who have the incentive to escalate. There are clearly people (likely political anarchists) who mingle with the crowd with the specific intent of escalating and causing mayhem.
I've been monitoring some 20 streams for 3 days straight and in almost every case the protests begin with hours of protestors within inches of police' faces screaming, belittling and dehumanizing the cops, with frequent disparaging references to homosexuality, gender, race, and physical stature.
All the meanwhile the police are standing stoically in every single example.
At what point is it appropriate to escalate force against a crowd which is increasingly rowdy and hostile? In every single case, police so far have escalated gradually. First with commands, then coordinated movements, gas, flashbangs, and finally rubber bullets. Regardless of whether the majority of protestors are actually peaceful, in all of these confrontations the police are outnumbered 2-10x. The rioters are turning this into a life or death threat, as unruly mobs are wont to do.
In fact I've seen a decided lack of police brutality. I haven't seen a single case of anyone being beaten. And I also acknowledge that multiple groups have during the day been on camera calming down rioters and protecting the businesses of their communities.
But the narrative that police are being excessive currently is by my multitude of observations totally untrue and it is extremely dangerous for the media to push such an idea, as they have done by repeatedly and consistently claiming that the protests are peaceful while buildings and cars are burning behind them.
I agree that it seems like in most cases the cops are escalating in a controlled and thought out manner. Yeah of course the cops are going to tear gas protesters when they are throwing rocks and launching fireworks (literal explosives!) at the cops. But there is also many examples of cops misbehaving, like the people who were shot with rubber bullets while on their own porch! I think the issue comes down to there being 600 different police academies and 1000s of police departments in the US each with different training and policies. Maybe standardization of these policies would help?
We've banned this account for repeatedly posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
In his defense, all technology is an instrument of political and ideological battle. If the site admins really want to enforce that guideline, then we should not be discussing current events here.
I hear you, and I've been modded myself. But the guidelines provided a damping effect that allows for conversations to occur which would quickly spin out of control otherwise.
I agree, I take issue with the guideline on its own, not that it was applied in this case. Although I think this could be better justification for the flagging of that comment:
>Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
You might be misreading that guideline. It's not trying to exclude political discussion—only one form of it.
Technological and political topics overlap (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). That's why politics has never been excluded from HN (other than an experiment we once briefly tried and quickly rolled back). Maybe your formulation of that overlap is the right one, maybe others are better, but they all point to the same fundamental, which we agree on. HN has always, or nearly always, hosted a certain amount of political discussion (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 for some history).
The distinction that guideline attempts to draw is not "political vs. apolitical", but rather between two different forms of discussion: discussion whose purpose is communication and discussion whose purpose is battle. These are remarkably different in practice: one seeks to hear and learn from the other, one seeks to defeat and destroy the other. People are generally in very different states when they're doing those two things. It's not primarily a distinction of views; whatever your views are, you can either do battle or do communication about them, depending on what state you're in and what your intention is.
By now, we have a lot of experience with moderating the site according to this distinction, and if there's a better way to do it, I'd love to know what it is. If you want to take a look at past explanations, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... are good entrypoints. If after reading that material, you or anyone still have a question that hasn't been answered yet, I'd like to know what it is. And if you know a better way for HN moderation to relate to political topics, I'd really like to know what it is. Just make sure you've familiarized yourself with the material first, because if it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've answered many times already why it won't work.
Thanks for the clarification. It was non-obvious to me at first reading, but I can see the interpretation you outline now.
>And if you know a better way for HN moderation to relate to political topics, I'd really like to know what it is.
I would point out the /r/AskHistorians and /r/PoliticalDiscussion communities, which are surprisingly civil (at least for reddit). The latter community has guidelines for what makes a successful submission: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalDiscussion/wiki/posts . Both are mainly question driven, which I find refreshing. When we are reading news articles or research, the discussion can be extra reactionary and hyper-focused on the source and author, minor gaps in a study's coverage, or the specific circumstances of the story.
Could we please stop calling “protesters” all the people looting jewelry stores, Target, Nike, etc? These are not protesters, these are looters. Police should use any means at their disposal to protect lives and property from looters and rioters.
By the same token, can we please stop calling "police" all the people bashing in heads, punching journalists, planting evidence, instigating violence? They are not police, they are violent thugs. Protesters should use any means at their disposal to protect their own lives from violent thugs.
The police have taken an oath, have systemic training, and are funded and protected. They should be held to, at minimum, their systemic failures, but probably their oaths and training (which includes constitutional law and appropriate force)
On the other hand, the only thing that protestors have guaranteed to be in common is that they've shown up in a place.
But they literally are police--that's the difference between these two arguments. Police can be held to account through voting and policy shifts, individuals cannot without community enforcement.
Murdering people in cold blood is part of policing?
Here's the part you're missing: the protests are holding the police to account, and they're the only way available for the community to enforce basic rule of law on the police. If not for the protests, the officer(s) in question would be getting some paid time off to fund a vacation to the beach. Literally. And that's despite the community already having voted for stricter regulations by clear majorities and not getting them because white votes are counted more in our political system than black ones, and that's despite voter suppression disproportionately restricting black voters' access to the polls.
Imagine one of the bystanders when George Floyd was killed had responded like this. The police are killing him, so a bystander -- or maybe even more than one -- pulls out a gun and starts shooting at them in George's defense. Imagine the kind of conversation we'd be having now.
Absolutely and I don’t think that any reasonable person will have any problem with those. I can’t speak for all the places in US but my observations in San Jose (both personal and through FB/media) is that police was cool with peaceful protests. I saw a few times police and protesters hugging each other, doing fist bumps, etc.
From my experience a protest usually becomes exactly as violent as the police initiates. In every protest I’ve attended the police is always the most violent actor.
Could we please not waste a second of thought on the relatively minor issue of broken store windows until we sort the issue of cops indiscriminately killing black people?
If you care so much, how about petition your local police force to dump their tear gas at the range and stop firing on peaceful protesters, turning a lot of sitting people into a riot.
Sadly it’s expected here. We all know PoC are sorely underrepresented in tech. We are a reflection of the problem at hand - the result of years and years of systemic racism and sexism.
It's not a minor issue. It detracts significantly from the really issue at hand, making it nearly impossible to engage with protestors in a dialog as the small number of folks intent on violence and looting take all of the resources and attention, severely undermining the point of the protests, especially because it provides those disinclined to sympathy for the real issue to paint all with the same brush and so dismiss them.
Before it was looting, it was that kneeling at a football game distracts from the game. Before that, it was "no, no, protest will never work, you need to get more black people elected! Try to get a black president maybe!" Before that, it something else equally absurd.
No matter how black people try to get their voices heard about police violence, there will be people who doggedly tear those voices down by any means necessary.
We're talking about the fact that 14% of the US population can't call the cops for fear of dying.
Kneeling during the national anthem at football games should have been an issue between the players and the NFL, but the kind of people who attend football games disapproved of it.
In Minneapolis today due to the videos which were captured even those anti-kneeling americans largely recognize the problem and support solutions. But by allowing the rump to be violent (or equivalently, serruptitiously distribute bricks and gasoline) the activists are losing public support.
Roughly 200 mostly commercial buildings burned in the main shopping area for (working class) Minneapolis over the weekend. The food and pharmaceutical desert is going to kill far more of the poor and marginalized than police violence would have, in a city that already votes D up and down the ticket.
The violence is not necessary, nor productive, nor are the situations comparable.
Expecting the protesters to somehow control everyone in the protest, when the cops fire indiscriminately on people whether they're peaceful or otherwise, doesn't seem like a working system.
But hopefully you care about one much, much more than the other. They are not comparable in terms of needing discussion at this moment in history.
(Edit: In the event that you honestly don't know which one is the more important topic, right now or pretty much any other time - police frequently murdering black people or some store windows getting smashed and merch stolen - it's the police murdering black people.)
I can't actually tell which one you're trying to say is more important right now. The case for "riots are the bigger problem right now" being that there is a whole lot more rioting and looting happening right now than there usually is, whereas the amount of police violence is currently significantly below the typical level (as a result of the coronavirus and everyone staying inside, but still).
I’m not so sure you can pin causality here. Anecdotally, the protests I’ve visited in the past have always been exactly as violent as the police initiates. A peaceful police usually means a peaceful protest in my experience. A violent police—on the other hand—can sometimes cause a violent protest, and even a riot.
Crowd control is a science. And you are sort of ignoring the science by claiming that rioters are the cause of the conflict.
> Anecdotally, the protests I’ve visited in the past have always been exactly as violent as the police initiates.
Things escalate when someone escalates them. Sometimes that's the police. Sometimes it isn't. And even when it is, you still have to be willing to be provoked. Don't.
We have people in this thread justifying riots as "we tried kneeling at football games" as if there is some kind of reasonable progression from there to looting and burning down churches.
Like I said, crowd control is a science. Even if you have violent actors at the protest, it is still a failure of crowd control if the whole protest turns violent.
Reacting when violated is a natural reaction. With a group this big you cannot think in individual terms. If provoked there and there is a non-zero chance you’ll see a reaction, you will see a reaction. And now you have a positive feedback loop between the police and protestors that may escalate into riots.
The premise "many assholes are cops" doesn't need a lot of new evidence. There is more than enough existing evidence.
But what do you honestly expect riots to lead to? Concessions? Or loss of the moral high ground and even more riot gear and tear gas and escalation?
It's just handing the cops a free pass to justify arresting you. And not just arresting you, but charging you with something that could actually stick. Its hard to advocate policy when you're serving a decade in prison for arson and conspiracy.
Riots have a history of escalating (often by someone with an agenda), my family and town was worried last night that they would come here (several arrests were made), and do real harm. That is they might be less now but from store windows to killing people is not that big a stretch.
I'm not convinced the rioters care about police violence either. From what I ca see the riots are outside groups with riot and anarchy as an agenda. My right wing friends are blaming George Soros, my left wing friends some nameless white supremacist group. I have no idea what the truth is, and don't expect to find out for months if ever.
Is it? Is it wrong to remove someone's freedom of movement... After they assault someone? Removing someone's freedom of movement (jailing them) is Wrong, after all.
How are you going to fix police brutality with more brutality? What is the end goal anyway, the state won't be defeated and the #1 group suffering are the people who lost jobs, homes, and loved ones.
Is the idea to make a mess and then police will be "ok guys, we get it now, we will be nice". Obviously you will have to change the laws and this could have been the initial objective through peaceful protests only.
> Could we please not waste a second of thought on the relatively minor issue of broken store windows until we sort the issue of cops indiscriminately killing black people?
Seconds of thought aren't wasted. Stay in the present. It's only an emergency if you make it one.
> "until we sort the issue of cops indiscriminately killing black people?"
Can we please stop making this just about race and recognize we have a general police brutality issue? You do realize cops kill just as many whites as they do blacks. The same police that killed George Floyd also killed Justine Damond.
When you rationalize away the white people who also have been killed, you polarize the issue and give justification to those who are committing violence and looting.
> You do realize cops kill just as many whites as they do blacks
Normalized for population, in the US the rate is 3X for black people, and a white person's expectation to be killed by police is less than the average.
and you could do the SAME thing with black people and homicide and aggravated assault rates. Then you would go on to say those particular rates are racist to say. Are you ready to stop rationalizing away the deaths that everyone is facing and stop arguing over skin color and start talking about police brutality?
or do you want to keep arguing about something besides the point? if so, why?
You actually can't, because such studies are based on arrest rates, not the unstudied "amount it actually happens."
Furthermore, something like that can't be pinned on "race," which is already a nebulous concept that exists only as an ill-defined cultural construct, whereas "cop" is a defined entity.
What that statistic shows is that even if some white people can't bring themselves to get angry about police murdering black people they should at least be angry about police also murdering white people.
What that statistic definitely doesn't mean is that people shouldn't be angry about police murdering black people.
It does show however that the police very likely doesn't target people by skin color or that some is disproportionate violence. I am not from the US and I thought the numbers to be higher to be honest.
The 2020 data there is interesting. It's less dramatic than it looks on that graph because they only have the numbers from the first quarter for 2020, but even extrapolating from the quarter to the year, it looks like "number of people shot to death by the police in the United States" has been more than cut in half by the coronavirus.
> I would prefer to look at it by police encounter or by crime or something like that
How would that fix anything? Look at the numbers of white vs black people who were picked for stop-and-frisks (read: number of white vs black people who were suspected of crime) as well as the innocence ratings: https://www.nyclu.org/en/stop-and-frisk-data
If 5% of a population ("Young black and Latino males between the ages of 14 and 24") accounts for 38% of the stop-and-frisk and is innocent 80% of the time, doesn't that sound like targetting? If you look harder for crime from certain demographics, you'll find more crime from them. Replace the targetted demographic with another demographic and you'll find way more crime in that other demographic. But get this - once you target people and get stats on them, you now have "statistics" and "facts" that show you were right and should continue to target them - even though your statistics are garbage collected on unrepresentative samples! This is why per-capita is the best metric to use - any other metric is tainted.
> total number of killings for white on white or black on black is roughly the same despite the 15% number you quoted.
What does this have to do with anything? Just because there are a lot of "black on black" murders doesn't justify the amount of black people killed by cops. Honestly, I don't even care if the officers are white, black, or any other race or ethnicity. It's the victims who matter. Just because an innocent black person is killed by a black police officer, does not mean it had nothing to do with the victim's race, nor does it mean we can ignore how disproportionately policing is applied.
If you adjust by per-police encounter you've already shot yourself in the foot - we know that police stop black people at a far greater percentage than white:
Hahahaha I gotta say I wasn't expecting a gamer statistic poster on HN. At a minimum I'd expect everyone here to understand the difference between "volume" and "per capita."
Statistics can absolutely be racist. Numbers might not lie (except when they do), but they can use some odd definition, use different metrics, or scale different populations differently/unevenly (as is the case here).
When you use any misleading technique on a statistic that obscures the truth, you are lying. When you put up a number to proof a point about a minority that is absolutely not true, that is a lie, and this number is racist.
Why are you linking non-normalized statistics? It is such a basic error to not adjust per-capita that part of me doubts how much you care about the truth.
Of-course these things happened. However, they will never reported by the "progressive" MSM. The HN community has blinkers on because the vast majority (not all) of people here are rich and un-affected by such matters.
Do not take my words for it - Please do your own research.
No, we can't. There's simply no stable state where cities are abandoned to looters for weeks. Someone will inevitably deploy force to reestablish control, and if that someone isn't the government then there's gonna be a lot more indiscriminate killing.
On one hand I agree. I’m sure the majority of cops are good people doing a hard job. But, at some point it becomes a loss of institutional control (to take a term from the ncaa). Everyone needs to be fired and the institution has to be restarted.
That could be. I haven’t given much thought on how to solve the problem. It could also be that we need to kill laws that are protecting police from the justice system.
It astounds me that people persist in this naive, ignorant, and destructive viewpoint even when provided with gigabytes upon gigabytes of video evidence to the contrary.
"Cop" isn't just a job. It's a social contract amongst the police and prosecutorial apparatus.
There are no police for the police. Police rape and murder with impunity. Did you know that cops beat their domestic partners at a rate 5x greater than the general population? Fully 40% of cops are wife beaters.
They can do whatever they want, and taxpayers end up paying the civil suit settlements that follow.
This isn't an issue with some criminal minority. Everyone who wears the uniform is either a criminal directly, or is actively engaged in the criminal conspiracy to hide evidence of the group's criminal activities. The ones that don't play ball are forced out.
If people didn't stop being willfully blind when it came out that Chicago PD has a whole dedicated black site for kidnapping and torturing people prior to trial, they probably won't ever be.
There are no good career cops. The entire concept is rotten to its core, which was created and established specifically to address the risk of property damage by the poor and escaped slaves.
The first letter of ACAB is by far the most important one.
US Police and the US public see the police as enforcers in a caste system where the public is at the bottom, the enforcers are on top of them, with the lords above them.
So the police aren't on the side of the public because they see the public as chaotic animals, to be managed lest they descend into anarchy. That's the general view and you can see that in The Thin Blue Line. In the UK, you can make fun of the policeman and he only wins by being better at banter. In America, that's something you don't want to do if you don't want to find yourself rapidly "disobeying a lawful order".
Ever since I moved to America I realized one thing that I really should have known before. Americans have a culture of strict legalism (see "refused a lawful order", "resisted arrest", "disobeying a police officer") and are consequently culturally strongly predisposed to following authority.
I really should have known this because it's sort of a universal human phenomenon where the thing that you protest that you have a lot of is often the thing you lack the most of. The City of Joy is likely one of sorrow, the City of God is likely one forsaken, and the Land of the Free is likely where you can't legally be in public the way you were born. Still, I do love America, but I have to admit to being disappointed to find that where I hoped to find free spirited people who find restrictions on their freedom unacceptable I instead found a place where the majority actually just wants strongmen and enforcers, just like anywhere else.
Well, hopefully one day I'll find those places, but so far across NC, CO, and CA it's all majority authoritarians wherever I look. It's not that life is hard for me. It's great. It's just that there are lots of authoritarians everywhere and that's harming my worldview.
If you don't want to spread it too wide, I'd welcome a tip. renewiltord@protonmail.com
If you feel like you'd rather not share, I understand that too.
I don't disagree with there being a majority of meddlesome authoritarians in the US. Largely there's a culture of strict rule-following whether or not there's a good reason for the rule.
I live in a little mountain town outside of Boulder, CO. The contrast between the anti-authoritarian libertarians, cowboys and hippies in my small community and the "yuppies" just 15 miles east in Boulder is palpable.
Rugged individualism is very much alive here. I have friends that live in small cabins without running water, who heat with wood and live very simply and freely. They just don't make as much noise as the authoritarians.
> all lawsuits are settled with funds from police pension funds
I like it most.
> police go to jail
> officers who do not report other officers go to jail
> bosses/chiefs etc who are aware of abuses of power and brutality and do not arrest those officers go to jail
All these "go to jail" stops at the "qualified immunity". And no politician yet was willing to do anything about it.
We need to demand to end this "qualified immunity". That's number one force, that corrupts police.
> police officers are required to get malpractice insurance. The tax payer should not be paying for criminal behavior.
And who is going to pay that "malpractice insurance"? Tax payer again.
But I heard opinion, and I agree, that some of police attitude "shot first, ask questions later" is caused by insurance. Here is how:
1) police is looking to buy life&disablity insurance for it's officers
2) insurance providers are demanding, that policies of the police force designed in such a way, so that likehood of the injury to the officers is minimal, which in practice mean: shoot first, ask questions later.
3) police implement such policies to get life&disability insurance.
> All these "go to jail" stops at the "qualified immunity". And no politician yet was willing to do anything about it. We need to demand to end this "qualified immunity". That's number one force, that corrupts police.
> A man whose bid to become a police officer was rejected after he scored too high on an intelligence test has lost an appeal in his federal lawsuit against the city.
> The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York upheld a lower court’s decision that the city did not discriminate against Robert Jordan because the same standards were applied to everyone who took the test.
What has stood out to me, even above the violence, is the sheer fear and stupidity in the eyes of officers. They have zero control over themselves. They aren't doing a job, they're just fighting people. It's incredible just how bizarrely amateur they all are. Like it was all one violent LARP to them until they met their first riot
I was watching someone stream the protests near the White House last night. The police were being hit with water bottles and sometimes fireworks, but still they mostly just stood there. The police did not escalate at all until the protestors lit two fires. One completely took over a small building and another was like a bonfire in the middle of the street.
So the question is how many fires should you let them light? After that they became very aggressive and used the year gas and batons and rubber bullets to take over the area and force the protestors to retreat back a few blocks. Later on the looting a few blocks away from the police escalated and it does seem like it could have been partially motivated by the violent tactics from before.
But if you look at the amount of arson and destruction in Minnesota recently when there was no real police presence, it seems like the result was worse.
No police presence? Oh! You mean where they waited to announce anything and defended the house of the police officer while everything burned? Or do mean where people on their porches were fired upon for filming? Or maybe that cnn crew that was attempting to comply?
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The article points out that many protests in the U.S. went smoothly through the practice of police and protest organizers meeting and jointly managing protests, but that this practice fell into disuse after the 1999 Seattle WTO meeting in which protesters violated the negotiated terms and police responded with violence.
While some recent (and ongoing) protests have turned violent, many didn't. In the coming months we'll have time to do a postmortem. I strongly suspect spontaneous protests without organization will be found to have the most potential for violence, while those with organizers committed to self-policing and, ideally, cooperating with police will be found to have fared much better.
Individual people may be intelligent and responsible, but crowds have their own rules of behaviour and need to be managed. Protests are more dangerous when unplanned or when their organizers give no thought to self-policing.
There will always be organizers who want violence because it reliably brings press coverage and attention to their protests, but social media is also creating new problems. Coordinating a large number of people to show up at the same time and place used to take considerable planning and effort. When you have to work hard just to get the even to happen, why wouldn't you plan how it will unfold as well? Now a couple of tweets or posts on the right reddit subs will suffice. How can police meet with the organizer of a protest when it's really just some dude who had a lot of social media followers and might not even bother showing up himself?