Steven Pinker describes how that went:
> "As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 a.m. on October 7, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 am, the first bank was robbed. By noon, most of the downtown stores were closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist)."[16]
The issue isn’t even just “crime” in the sense of robbery, etc. When there is no police, organized crime can take over. When we lived in Bangladesh in the 1980s, a minibus full of criminals showed up at the gate of our house. (This being Dhaka in the 1980s, we had a brick wall around the whole house with broken glass on top and a big metal gate, and an armed guard out front.) I don’t know if it was because my dad hadn’t bribed the right people or what, but it took police an hour or more to respond, during which time the criminals tried to drive through our gate.
(I don’t actually disagree with the thrust of the article, which is more that we need to rethink the roles where we have police. I’m just sharing this because I’ve seen a lot of “defund the police” in my Facebook, and I strongly suspect it’s from people who have never lived somewhere without effective policing.)
Just a heads up that "defund the police" isn't actually that different from "we need to rethink the roles where we have police"
They will, for example, say they cannot investigate the rape of a white woman, supposedly because lack of funds. But they will have plenty of funds to harass poor and non-white people for maybe smoking pot, but mostly for being poor and/or non-white.
We can see it right now, in that they teargas, shoot with rubber bullets, beat and arrest completely peaceful protesters and people just on their own porches but do nothing about looters. It is obvious why: looting makes protestors look bad (especially if news coverage cooperates with the police's narrative), makes people scared and proves that police are necessary.
Of course, the mafia can also provide safety if you obey them and pay them. Might even be a better deal for some populations than the current police.
If you want police that work for the population and are not an occupation force extracting tribute through use of force, you need to do more than reduce their budget. You need to punish the offenders (jail, not layoffs) and replace the people in charge (their union bosses and informal leaders, not just the nominal chief of police who might have little actual power).
And some of those completely peaceful protests have still met tear gas, and/or pepper spray. For example, see the protest in DC that was peaceful and broken up before curfew.
Is your assertion that nationwide, over 9 days, there hasn't been any peaceful protests?
Often there is an assumption that because they didn’t see what started it, it must have been nothing. You might think they didn’t have a good enough reason, but I have yet to see police in any city deploy OC for no reason at all.
Here's video of the incident from 13 minutes prior (June 1): https://www.facebook.com/jessica.bundy.79/videos/36571421876...
And earlier recording of the hours beforehand (June 1, earlier): https://www.facebook.com/jessica.bundy.79/videos/36570100309...
You're not missing any violent context; just the bigger picture.
There are no “pretexts” happening. These conspiracy theories are absurd.
From the ground video of this same incident, it was seen that protestors were pushing on the fence. They then deployed umbrellas, some of which were deployed over the barrier. An officer swats a pink umbrella out of his face and grabs it. The protestor tries to pull it away. A tug-of-war struggle ensues. Another officer notices there is a struggle and rushes in with his pepper spray to get the girl off.
The whole time, the crowd was told they are NOT allowed to cross this street. They can cross any other street. The precinct is this way. They form a plan to “push through” earlier, and they chant to let them through.
on the other side, there are clearly projectiles being thrown, and before the cops deploy flashbangs, you can see some flashing from the crowd side - not sure what that is.
You might think they overreacted. You might think he shouldn’t have started the scuffle with the umbrella. You might think they shouldn’t have raised their spray over a combative protestor pushing the barricade and mouthing off from 12 inches away from a cop’s face. That’s all fine to debate. But there is a clear pattern of escalation, tension, and confusion. The cops did not just say “let’s fuck up some protestors!” out of nowhere and then fire. And they definitely didn’t set up a pretext. You guys sound like Alex Jones with that shit.
The protestors had umbrellas for hours; they were not "deployed" shortly before officers initiated violence. Protesters were up against the fence for hours and did not push it forward substantially. The umbrella the officer grabbed wasn't in anyone's face.
Note that 12,000 complaints were filed about SPD's overuse of force after that night.
> you can see some flashing from the crowd side - not sure what that is
Bud, that's a camera.
> But there is a clear pattern of escalation, tension, and confusion.
I totally agree with that statement. SPD repeatedly escalates peaceful situations into violent ones.
> The cops did not just say “let’s fuck up some protestors!” out of nowhere
Actually, they did, on video: https://twitter.com/Bishop_Krystal/status/126800997417045196...
At 7:00 in the video the protesters pushed the fence a couple of meters forward and almost broke the police line, that is not peaceful protesting. Pushing up a blockade against police is very aggressive, and can't be done by a single bad apple either. If protesters had been acting like this for hours then it makes sense that the police sprays them.
https://www.facebook.com/jessica.bundy.79/videos/36571421876...