I have been to a few rallies/vigils/marches lately and all incidences of violence that I have witnessed either in person or through media has been instigated by the police. As far as I know,every documented case where a formerly peaceful crowd turns into chaos has been started with police shooting pepperspray, teargas, or whatever into the crowd.
I find it really hard to not come to the conclusion that the police is desperately trying to set a narrative to justify a history of violence by escalating more violence, but please, someone, restore my faith.
People protest peacefully, and police shoot tear gas into the crowd and attack whomever they can get their hands on.
I’ll admit, the outright brutality I saw in-person in Oakland was worse than what I’ve seen here in the recent days.
In Oakland, the police would purposely corral protestors into groups and literally beat the shit out of them. I saw this in-person multiple times. In Seattle, I haven’t seen that sort of corral behavior. However, police do shoot tear gas completely unprovoked and fire rubber bullets and mace without concern.
In both places, no looting was occurring at the main scene of the protests. In both cases, numerous videos show police breaking windows themselves.
In any case, it’s all the same: in a country that parades its freedom, people of color can’t protest without the president calling for them to be roughed up, and without the police willingly complying.
Unfortunately, some senior "dog whistle" politicians have labeled protesters "thugs" and "looters" and have called for "shooting" and "no quarter." These loose words are dangerous and may be unlawful: https://lawandcrime.com/george-floyd-death/republican-senato...
As a result of these statements, some armed enforcers including police, National Guard, and U.S. military may interpret these bellicose pronouncements as a declaration of war or a granting of letters of marque and reprisal against protesters and their property.
Good leadership would call for toning down the rhetoric but leadership appears to be in short supply. Gefickt, we are.
Oakland has had a Democratic mayor since 1977. California routinely has a super-majority of Democrats in the state legislature, and the last Republican Federal Senator from the state left office almost 30 years ago. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that the second paragraph after mentioning the “fraught” relationship between black residents and the Oakland PD should have something to do with those Democrats who have direct executive and legislative control over the city and state, who are directly in charge of hiring/firing police chiefs and operating the state level internal affairs bureaus, and who set police department budgets and make the laws. And maybe the (admittedly deplorable) coded language a Republican Senator thousands of miles away uses belongs many paragraphs below that.
[1] Interesting fact. Oakland and Louisville are ranked similarly (188 versus 194) on Urban Institute’s “economic inclusiveness” index: https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/97981/...
I agree. But that's not the whole story; perhaps not even the main story here. "Police act like laws don't apply to them because of Qualified Immunity": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23373329
Thanks to HN commenter @yyyk ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23382006 ), we learn that in 1967, the Supreme Court held that:
- "Few doctrines were more solidly established at common law than the immunity of judges from liability for damages for acts committed within their judicial jurisdiction... "
- "This immunity applies even when the judge is accused of acting maliciously and corruptly... " and - "... the immunity of legislators for acts within the legislative role was not abolished. The immunity of judges for acts within the judicial role is equally well established... "
- "The common law has never granted police officers an absolute and unqualified immunity" but "... a police officer is not charged with predicting the future course of constitutional law... " and "the defense of good faith and probable cause... available to the officers in the common-law action for false arrest and imprisonment, is also available to them in the action under § 1983 [Civil action for deprivation of rights]."
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Pierson_v._Ray/Opinion_of_the...
After which followed a cascade of case law that granted police officers, and others similarly anointed, a "qualified immunity" to trials (including pre-trial discovery): https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/qualified_immunity
Oakland lies within the ambit of the U.S. Supreme Court so, as long as qualified immunity remains the law of the land, local officials have limited ability to change a long-standing police culture of impunity.
> coded language a Republican Senator thousands of miles away uses belongs many paragraphs below that.
I disagree. Thanks to telecommunications, social media, and other new-fangled technologies, powerful and influential persons can cause action at a distance of thousands of miles. "Thousands of miles away" is meaningless in instances in which powerful persons can transmit or impose effects tens of thousands of miles away.
Edit: formatting