The more recent history suggests that the people who wish to deter or educate the cops are significantly outgunned, and the brutality will continue until such time that those trying to change the status quo will give up, as they stand no chance of victory in the physical battle this has become.
See also: Hong Kong
I frequently wonder if these police would be so eager for a fight with sticks if some fraction of the protesters were carrying the same rifles as their opponents. In theory, that is legal there, and I hope more people take the peaceful, rights-based approach that the Black Panthers did.
Protests now, and when you get home, call, email, and write letters to every person that conceivably has authority over how the police act. Don't relent. They did arrest the murderer, after all.
Then these young people (in the U.S.) should stop fighting for gun control when it only works against them in times such as these. Can you imagine how these protesters would be treated if most of them were carrying a rifle?
Could the police roll out tanks in response? Sure, but I do not believe the U.S. politicians would be willing to start all out war between police and civilians.
I don't condone the looting and destruction of property. Having said that the curfews in place are a form of suppression/muzzling the peaceful protesters.
The police have for too long had unchecked power in the U.S. I've always been taught to be respectful and have been treated in kind in my interactions with police (but I am white.) If a cop is having a bad day or he's just a bully, that should not keep bystanders from helping a victim of police brutality with the threat of "assaulting a police officer."
The better solution is unarmed police: billions of people live in localities where most police they encounter don't have guns and may not be even authorized to make physical contact in the case of a conflict. The idea that all police must carry guns and must be ready to use violence "to protect us" is one of those assumptions you assume must be universal until you somehow find out that it very particular to certain locations.
Have you read about what happened during the Civil Rights Movement? How many MAGAs would even blink if police started killing Black people?
More recently MOVE was bombed and no politicians thought twice.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/10/move-1985-bo...
There are 2 outcomes here:
1) You get shot immediately by the police, chaos ensues but at the end of the day you're still dead.
2) You shoot them, harm/kill them and if their colleagues don't shoot you back there's still more than enough proof out there to bring you a lifetime of legal troubles, especially considering "self defense" laws don't apply when it's against police.
In both cases, you're either dead or in the shit and nothing gets fixed. The US already proved that they couldn't give a shit about police brutality (otherwise we wouldn't have these protests to begin with) so more civilian kills on the leaderboard is just a drop in the bucket at this point.
Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Fox News hosts, and even Rush Limbaugh have all spoken out against the murder of George Floyd.
> “I hope these cops are dealt with good and hard,” Limbaugh said. “I’ve seen the video like everybody else, and it makes me so mad I can’t see straight.”
https://www.dailywire.com/news/limbaugh-george-floyd-death-m...
> "it was clearly police brutality and it was not conduct we expect of any officer," Cruz said.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/ted-cruz-on-floyds-death-riots...
You noticed he never called White guys storming into state capital with guns “thugs”. Even after they basically forced the government to shut down out of fear.
Whereas these "thugs" today doing all of the above aren't protestors, in fact I've heard many protestors speak out against them too, and they seem to include quite a lot of young white leftists just looking to cause trouble.
The remark you're referring to was specifically about looters, so I think it's a bit dishonest to compare that to a group of peaceful protestors.
If the government wasn’t afraid of the white protestors, why did they postponed re-opening? They specifically said that they didn’t reopen out of fear.
You noticed he never called the policemen “thugs” has he ever called a white criminal a thug or a “son of a bitch” like he called a football player peacefully protesting?
I don't remember all the details, but weren't the protestors calling for reopening? If the government postponed, they did so despite the protestors, not because of them.
> has he ever called a white criminal a thug
Many of the looters right now are white, so they'd be included in the group of criminals he recently called thugs.
> or a “son of a bitch” like he called a football player peacefully protesting?
Kaepernick got the same treatment as Trump's white Republican competitors in the 2016 primary. Trump is an asshole and he's never nice to people he disagrees with, regardless of race.
Here are some other remarks Trump made along with "very fine people":
> we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence. It has no place in America.
> The driver of the car is a murderer. And what he did was a horrible, horrible, inexcusable thing.
> I think the driver of the car is a disgrace to himself, his family, and this country.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trump...
Excuse me, the armed Michigan protestors who stormed the state capital were “very good people”.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/01/politics/donald-trump-michiga...
I don't know if they were "very good people", but I haven't heard any reason to think otherwise.
And your own source makes it clear that the government wasn't intimidated by these peaceful protests:
> lawmakers were meeting to debate an end to the emergency order... Despite the pressure, Whitmer extended the order, which was due to expire at the end of Thursday.
Police are not generally being shot at.
The situation you describe is not a violent one.
What I think would be a better situation is a much higher percentage of visibly armed protestors. You didn’t see police beating and attacking any of the armed protests last month, and there’s a reason for that that extends beyond their being mostly white people.
People like to condemn the previous protests for being armed, and for protesting for something that was dumb (reopening businesses during a pandemic), but the armed part will become more and more important for any meaningful protest in America, as we have now learned that if you aren’t, the police will just come and attack you with sticks or gas or cars or the threat of their own rifles.
People shouldn’t carry guns to shoot them, they should carry them to indicate to everyone around them that nobody wants a fight, which is generally the same reason police do.
Criminals don’t attack cops in groups because criminals know that if they do, 20 cops have weapons that will be used against them in seconds.
I would love to be able to say: “cops don’t attack protestors because cops know that if they do, 20 protestors have weapons that will be used against them in seconds”.
The police in America are extremely well-armed, far better than the general public in most places. It poses a real danger, as we have seen playing out over the last few years.
Do you think 20 or 30 armed Black men could have gotten away with this?
https://www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/2020/05/05/PDTF/5969fca5-...
I'll just say that if 20 armed black men couldn't get away with protesting in Michigan, that says something very bad about the Democrats who run the state.
It's only dangerous when you work under the assumption that the primary role of police is getting into altercations with people or doing things that require the potential for the immediate deployment of violence. The vast majority of police work doesn't require that.
Some small proportion of police should be armed so they can be called in for the exceptional case, but that's not necessary for most cops. The potential cost and messiness of any kind of use of physical force (armed or not) is usually far higher than the cost of what it's intended to remedy.
Branded as a terrorist organization so that use of extreme and possibly military force could be justified?
See the “War on Drugs” in the “inner city” and “Treat Drugs like a Disease” when it affects “rural America”.
But those policemen probably weren’t wearing Black Lives Matter under their uniforms.....
Obviously the best thing to do is avoid fighting. However, if you’re going to be in a fight, it’s better to be armed than unarmed, if for no other reason than to encourage your opponent not to force a fight.
