Should anyone breaking curfew be subject to rough treatment? Should the police stand idle while people burn and loot? How can peaceful protesters be protected while looters/abusers are using them as shields for their activities?
PS: If replying, please be civil!
I think the way forward is let police do what they need to, but also allow the people to prosecute police when they step out of bounds. The current culture of protecting abusers among the police needs to go away.
What generally happens is that protests begin and the police departments move in to shut it down, instead of trying to contain it and let the protesters get their message and frustrations out.
When you see the videos of aggressive action against people who are peacefully protesting, then it causes more frustration and anger with the police which escalates and creates more conflict.
I think the French generally handle protests in a way that allow the protests to proceed until they reach a certain point. Yes, private property is damaged/destroyed (ie cars burning etc), but generally the protests are allowed to proceed.
If the police in our country recognized that people need to protest, to vent their frustrations and contain it to a mostly orderly affair, we might be better off for it.
But the truth is, while the line may be hard to draw—and in reality, there probably will never be a perfectly defined line—there are always cases that are definitively on one side or the other. And police violence against non-violent protests will always be on the “unacceptable” side, no matter where it ends up being.
Some situations are grey. But it does not follow that all situations are.
But more importantly, you avoid these kinds of situations by not being an absolutely inhumane and racist police force that should be a disgrace to any nation that calls itself civilized.
I do find it fascinating and a bit scary that you can read this article, watch the linked videos, and then come up with a comment like this though. Is this kind of stuff that normalized in the US?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Davis_pepper_spray_incident
Also forgot how people revenge killed good, innocent cops
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/cops-shot-bro...
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/cops-shot-bro...
There was some pretty awful things happening on the live streams last night.
I'm surprised by how many people streamed themselves committing crimes. Are they ignorant or just dumb? The police just started taking pictures of everyone
Whereas in other countries, such as the UK, police are considered civilians in a uniform and behave accordingly.
If that happens we’d see how easy things will “fix” themselves, the police will police themselves too
That is not to say that there aren’t bad actors on each side, there are. I didn’t like the looting but I think its nothing compared to how systematically broken things are.
Im white and I do break the law here and there, minor stuff and sometimes by accident: going above speed limit or smoking pot. If i were not white it’s likely that I would have ended up in jail.
When I was younger I’d do stupid things like trespass some propery with my friends, for fun. We would be caught sometimes and let go with a warning. They understood we were kids doing stupid stuff. Well, i dont need to tell you what would have happened if I was black, you probably know..
But as soon as you introduce color, aren't you seeing color and preventing the fundamental problem from fading away?
You can't force it away, you have to teach it away, right?
Do children see color naturally or do we teach them how? Where are they primarily learning this? (I suspect from video screens more so than IRL, sources widely varied)
They are guilty.
I also think there are many people using this tragedy as an excuse to commit crime and somehow justify their behavior via a bifurcation of their world view.
Are you applying your beliefs about a group (the police in this case) at an individual level or in one broad stroke? Is not the definition of bias / prejudice (racism as a subset?) essentially applying beliefs at the group level rather than the individual level?
It's well documented that modern policing in the US began in the model of slave patrols. And it shows.
Pray explain what is so tough about refraining from shooting tear gas canisters right in the face of an unarmed civilian from distance of few tens of meters ?
One of the main ways America is so different than Europeans because of its political system. Here we empower rural areas (due to electoral college). Without electoral college, the national policies are what urban policies are. NY state looks just like Canada from a political POV, large urban concentrated center who vote and dictate all the policies, and rural areas don't really get much of a say in state policy.
Urban areas are ok with different point of views, they are ok with lifestyles which don't result in 'spreading of the tribe' (i.e. abortion, LGBTQ etc), they are less religious, pro-infrastructure spending (because a fire brigade can serve a LOT of people).
Rural areas are more religious, self-reliant, pro-guns, anti things which don't spread the tribe.
In European democracies, this results in primarily urban driven policies, whereas in the US this results in a constant rural-urban divide and struggle.
If I am not mistaken, fines, if imposed on the cops would be paid using tax payer's money too.
If you move abroad, the same can happen to you.
Hundreds of tear gas canisters got fired off at US citizens by police last night, though.
Insane.
A lot of the videos portray violent rioters/looters. A lot of the ones of the police are ambiguous because they don't show what behavior warranted the police reaction.
I've also seen a lot of videos of peaceful protests with police walking/talking/marching with the protesters.
We do justice a disservice when we lump everyone and every precinct together.
Two sides to every story.
Peaceful protesters deserve respect and to be heard. Rioters and looters should be dealt with harshly by the law.
Human stupidity and the law of averages.
My theory on why the police need to use some level of brutality is because a mob mentality is an animal. It's an amorphous mammalian manifestation that is afraid of loud noises, pain, and losing it's ability to breath easily. So they use counterpart tools to control it, because when this animal cant be controlled, the whole city could be be razed in flames. (As an example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots#Destruc... )
Im not excusing shitty behavior, but it's worth considering there are millions of events going on in these protests, and all the excess force ones fit in a bullet list on my monitor. Also, in many of the listed events, the cops told people to move away or go back inside repeatedly before taking action. From their perspective, keeping battle formation is necessary to success. And lawfully, you are supposed to comply with this demand.
Just things to consider. I hope I'm not gut-reaction-down voted for taking the middle ground.
Doesn't look so to me.
instead I think it's because those policemen (which are not all policemen) enjoy being others.
Just last year, in the official Christmas Tree in Minneapolis precinct 4 headquarters, discarded malt liquor containers and menthol cigarette packages were used as ornaments:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/12/racist-christmas...
What perspective make you happy about taking a middle road around a police force, and society, that tolerated this? The police haven’t needed to hide their outright motives: it’s race, whether it’s killing someone or decorating a Christmas tree. Other officers don’t speak up. Enjoy the privilege, I do and am more than aware.
They are in an incredibly difficult situation, and putting their lives at risk. I think there are plenty of cops who care about their community, but they do what they have to do because there is no efficient way to communicate to or painlessly control an emotional mob of people (plus bad actors climbing out of the woodwork to cause harm to the community). When you talk to a mob, you aren't talking to anyone.
Imagine if the police showed up and started handing out water bottles, rather than assaulting unarmed (but angry) citizens. I think you'd see a different response.
Imagine if the police were trained to remain passive even when struck. A few violent protesters would strike the police, but if they remained passive I don't think it would take the sight of very many passive cops getting beaten up before the crowd would turn on the violent protesters and protect the cops. Seeing someone getting beaten without defending themselves triggers a very powerful gut reaction in people, even when the victim is 'the enemy'.
And, in organizations, change comes from the top. As I said, reaching perfection is prohibitively expensive.
Rather, the repeatedly demonstrated fact that the system is willing to protect the "bad apples" (read: outright thugs) corrupts the entire policing system and undermines its legitimacy, regardless of how many benign officers there are.
You're justifying police brutality. Period.
Cops don't get to brutally assault us citizens because they're not complying. That's some third world behavior and your comment, under the guise of considering both sides, is tacitly condoning this.
For the record, I don't condone looting or property desctruction. But there are plenty of videos circulating right now that have peaceful protestors that are being assault by cops, cause they make their job a bit harder.
I say we take away their guns.
If a suspect is brandishing a firearm, they can call in a separate unit allowed to carry weapons.
Also, no more riot gear. The police can’t be trusted with it. Let the national guard have it, but train them for emergency response, not hunting down crooks.
I'm sorry, what? They are literally an organization. With uniforms. The entire point is that they're supposed to be one entity. If they can't even act as one entity - much less one that, I don't know, helps people - then why do they get to wear the uniform at all?
> When you talk to a mob, you aren't talking to anyone.
They don't have to talk. They can show through their actions that they're willing to de-escalate the violence. Here's one that did: https://twitter.com/SCr_conserv/status/1266885805328355333
Indeed. With our greater-than-apple intelligence, we should expect cops to sort out the bad apples themselves. Not close ranks and ostracize colleagues who speak up against the bad apples.
When you have great power and knowledge, inaction is being complicit.
I've yet to see an instance of this that wasn't precipitated by cops showing up in ironman armor to a peaceful protest and firing on people with all sorts of military-police toys.
The violent instigators are the cops, across America. Even Target came out and said "whatever, our shit's insured, this problem with the cops needs to be solved."
When cops break the law, and that's what they're doing here, they destroy faith in the justice system, in rule of law.
What's crime? Is looting a Target, crime? Sure, according to tons of various laws in the USA, it is. Think about it another way though - there's a pile of food, more food than anybody could possibly eat before it spoils. In fact, lots of it does get thrown away, because it spoils. You're hungry, you walk up, take some, eat it, and leave. Did you just do something unethical? You take a TV, a pure form of entertainment and nothing more. Did you just do something Bad? Hm. Maybe, if I followed a very very long chain of events, I could say that the taking of the TV meant a CEO got to buy 1/100th less TVs for himself, sure, that's kinda bad I guess.
Is it... worst than someone with a state-sponsored monopoly on violence doing, well, any of the following? :
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23373619
There is no "excused crime" happening here. It's people recognizing that the rule of law is broken, that those with the Most Might are doing as they please, and telling themselves "well fuck it, I'm going to get a TV then."
Expectation of the citizenry to, uh, "respect property rights" (lmfao) is absurd when we don't even expect our police to respect the rights of People to exist without violence being committed against them.
So in short, who gives a fuck if target loses TVs - until we solve police brutality to the point that every cop is held criminally accountable for unethical violence, I say let it all burn, because the harm done by a looted target is immeasurably less than even a single instance of police brutality.
https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proacti...
>Imagine if the police were trained to remain passive even when struck.
Tell me how much it would cost to train a police force to that level of self control, and to be able identify, in a split second, if the person is attempting to do serious harm to you or is just blowing off steam. Once a person is close enough, there are plenty of blind spots to pull a knife out of.
>the crowd would turn on the violent protesters and protect the cops
Crowd psychology overrides individual identity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_psychology
The riots will get people killed and are destroying businesses.
Events like this are as bad as the original event https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/22-arrested-60-l...
If this has deteriorated to an eye for an eye I'm not sure where it will end. I hope things get better before there is more loss of life.
Most people abroad are friendly. Makes one think why we hang on to old conceptions and limited beliefs, and instead meet people "as new".
I spoke of the broad variety of people involved in a sibling comment, did you consider my comments at large to gain perspective or chose things in isolation to support your world view?
> “The United States may justify firing tear gas [...] as legal, but the decision to use an indiscriminate, psychologically terrifying toxic chemical was excessive and certainly immoral."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/11/27/tear-gas-forb...
https://twitter.com/TyreeBP/status/1256813343764918272
Granted, the number of people is ~100x different. Still, examples like the tweet above illustrate that the needed 'self control' has existed within about a pay-period or two.
https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
TLDR: They hit you just as hard as they hit the enemy and they are wildly unpredictable.
I mean, the US has come a long way from chattel slavery, Jim Crow laws, Chinese exclusion acts, Irish exclusion, Italian exclusion, Catholics, etc. It did recently have a black president. Yes it has a very long way to go, but there has been a lot of progress in it's history.
There are many reasons why this argument does not hold water. In every economic system inequality feels terrible. People don't really have an absolute scale of inequality where they get upset if it crosses a certain threshold. It's all a matter of how much do they believe they can achieve the top spot.
A starving artist doesn't get super upset at wealth and the lavish parties of a successful artist because he truly believes that one day he'll get there. Tomorrow Jay-Z could become world's first trillionaire but a struggling hip-hop star would still not support high taxation on his assets.
The resentment starts when he believes that achieving that high status is not possible (which is not true for America) OR when he loses the existing status (i.e status loss).
The status loss theory explains things like Communist revolutions, rise of Christianity in the decline of Roman Empire far more than income inequality.
In fact in the United States, people at the low end of income almost never support the income inequality theory, it's almost always done by high social status non-religious left-liberals. For the people at the low end of income curve (but not like starving actors/artist/authors) believe that in the US, people have a shot at becoming rich, but because of loss of economic opportunity due to globalization, immigration etc has resulted in creation of this situation.
https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/15/us/sikh-hate-crime-victims/in...
I don't really understand your agitation here to my comment. Yes, right now liberals aren't open to new ideas and conservatives are, but traditionally (and its well documented) liberals are open to new ideas and experiences but conservatives aren't. This doesn't mean anything other than what it says there.
The liberal-urban nexus and conservative-rural nexus is defined by their circumstances. You can choose to not keep a gun while living in the rural area, but you definitely have trouble keeping a gun in the urban area.
If you live in the rural area you can have many-many kids without an extra pressure on resources or you may choose to have fewer kids, whereas in the urban areas you need to be a lot more rich to have that 3rd kid because the resource pressure is so great.
Why did you imply that guy was a white supremicist? What ever evidence do you have?
Video in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vurPRZbLvc
No one I know feels safer with armed police around and tensions frequently escalate with them around. We all go, "this man has a gun and could kill us - he will do it too because he knows he will get away clean and free."
Training isn't sufficient. If there are real consequences for police and it shows that they face the same consequences the rest of us do for many years - maybe then. But that day will not be for 10+ years. For now, it's much easier to say and act on taking away their weapons that are meant to kill people.
I guess that if you feel unsafe around armed security guards I can't argue with your feelings
First of all, the Geneva Conventions (plural) are about treatment of prisoners of war, not agents or munitions used.
Your given link refers to the Chemical Weapons convention, but its scope is specific to wartime use between combatants.
The Hague convention has munitions provisions, but the USA is not a signatory.
Animals.
How about credit where credit is due - systemic police racism, and when that was protested, insane amounts of police brutality.
All people had to do was not be racist.
I linked to the CWC because that is the relevant international convention allowing for the use of tear gas in non-military contexts. IOW, the GP creates the ban, but the CWC provides an exception.)
The looters in this video are acting like animals.
More links to the same incident: https://twitter.com/PatrolRpd/status/1267202275895803904 https://streamable.com/ibwexe?fbclid=IwAR3Kmn22FzFgxAHTxNfiu...
No. They are rioters and looters, and guilty of aggravated battery.
This has nothing to do with race. It has to do with behavior.