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?
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.