zlacker

>>oftenw+(OP)
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.

>>just_s+k8
Minneapolis Chief of Police: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medaria_Arradondo

Seattle Chief of Police: http://www.seattle.gov/police/about-us/about-the-department/...

St Louis Chief of Police: http://www.slmpd.org/chief_of_police.shtml

Atlanta Chief of Police: https://www.projectq.us/atlanta/atlanta_police_chief_erika_s...

Chicago Chief of Police: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brown_(police_officer)

Oakland Chief of Police: https://climaterwc.com/2019/07/17/san-mateo-police-chief-sus...

People on HN seem to have a cartoon villain view of police, so I thought I'd share a few faces of police leadership in effected communities.

>>nostro+C9
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.

>>HarryH+6a
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.

>>briefc+gb
> 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.

>>komali+tg
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.

>>briefc+Si
> They will instead tell us there is no choice but to make this more of a police state.

Let them try...

>>komali+rk
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.

>>briefc+Yk
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.

>>komali+Ll
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.