Nah. They would never do anything like that.
As everyone knows, all police are paragons of moral excellence in every country in the world at all times.
Governments have definitely never, ever gone after innocent protesters.
</sarcasm>
i.e. how skewed are different professions w.r.t. morals?
Do you think lawyers are worse? Politicians? The Media? Where do police fit into this spectrum?
Are all police bad? What percentage?
<perspective> (you can close this tag if you wish)
With power comes a responsibilty to be better than others, and if that's not something you can count on, which it isn't, we need to protect others.
Was the police violence worse during the time of the civil rights? Were the protesters ever violent or turn to rioting?
What would Dr King say about the protests?
“…it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear?…It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.” (“The Other America,” 1968).
Funny, it sounds just as true of 2020 America as 1968 America. https://www.history.com/news/for-martin-luther-king-jr-nonvi...
He would understand. He would probably be out there. He might try to be a calming influence—or he might act as a street medic. He might have turned as militant as Malcolm X over the last fifty years since his assassination. His tone was changing even from his 1966 Mike Wallace interview where he said:
“I contend that the cry of "black power" is, at bottom, a reaction to the reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality for the Negro. I think that we've got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard.”
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mlk-a-riot-is-the-language-of-t...
Dr King was heavily involved in protests. He did everything he could to keep his protests non-violent, but he faced extreme violence from the ~slave patrols~ white racist cops of the time. His son is on Twitter…and is being MLKsplained to by white people who consistently misunderstand what MLK said and meant.
https://twitter.com/OfficialMLK3/status/1266040838628560898 (follow the thread)
MLK’s position initially was very much the same as Michele Obama’s “When they go low, we go high”. But he never said that people should just _give in_ to the violence of the state, and so it’s pretty clear that he would not have completely condemned the protests or even the riots.
(In other words, there’s multiple MLKs, and most people—especially white people—remember the sanitized “I have a Dream” MLK that is taught to us as history. That MLK is _not_ the MLK that existed at the time of his assassination.)