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>>oftenw+(OP)
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?

>>beloch+uc
It is flabbergasting to me that we expect self-policing from protestors, but not the literal fucking police.

>>lxmorj+AF
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

>>solsti+q41
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.