If you care so much, how about petition your local police force to dump their tear gas at the range and stop firing on peaceful protesters, turning a lot of sitting people into a riot.
(Edit: In the event that you honestly don't know which one is the more important topic, right now or pretty much any other time - police frequently murdering black people or some store windows getting smashed and merch stolen - it's the police murdering black people.)
No matter how black people try to get their voices heard about police violence, there will be people who doggedly tear those voices down by any means necessary.
We're talking about the fact that 14% of the US population can't call the cops for fear of dying.
It's NEVER good enough for white america. NEVER.
The police have taken an oath, have systemic training, and are funded and protected. They should be held to, at minimum, their systemic failures, but probably their oaths and training (which includes constitutional law and appropriate force)
On the other hand, the only thing that protestors have guaranteed to be in common is that they've shown up in a place.
Can we please stop making this just about race and recognize we have a general police brutality issue? You do realize cops kill just as many whites as they do blacks. The same police that killed George Floyd also killed Justine Damond.
When you rationalize away the white people who also have been killed, you polarize the issue and give justification to those who are committing violence and looting.
Evidence abounds.
They committed police brutality, at the protests against police brutality. It genuinely boggles the mind.
Normalized for population, in the US the rate is 3X for black people, and a white person's expectation to be killed by police is less than the average.
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/08/police-officer-shooti...
or do you want to keep arguing about something besides the point? if so, why?
I think a large rate difference between white and black is meaningful information. Why do you prefer that information not be added?
> Then you would go on to say those particular rates are racist to say.
That didn't happen either. Your expectations are off.
But what do you honestly expect riots to lead to? Concessions? Or loss of the moral high ground and even more riot gear and tear gas and escalation?
It's just handing the cops a free pass to justify arresting you. And not just arresting you, but charging you with something that could actually stick. Its hard to advocate policy when you're serving a decade in prison for arson and conspiracy.
You actually can't, because such studies are based on arrest rates, not the unstudied "amount it actually happens."
Furthermore, something like that can't be pinned on "race," which is already a nebulous concept that exists only as an ill-defined cultural construct, whereas "cop" is a defined entity.
cops have a lawful monopoly on force, and if you cannot trust that will be used justly, then we lose the whole basis of rule by law
Is the idea to make a mess and then police will be "ok guys, we get it now, we will be nice". Obviously you will have to change the laws and this could have been the initial objective through peaceful protests only.
Seconds of thought aren't wasted. Stay in the present. It's only an emergency if you make it one.
Crowd control is a science. And you are sort of ignoring the science by claiming that rioters are the cause of the conflict.
In Minneapolis today due to the videos which were captured even those anti-kneeling americans largely recognize the problem and support solutions. But by allowing the rump to be violent (or equivalently, serruptitiously distribute bricks and gasoline) the activists are losing public support.
Roughly 200 mostly commercial buildings burned in the main shopping area for (working class) Minneapolis over the weekend. The food and pharmaceutical desert is going to kill far more of the poor and marginalized than police violence would have, in a city that already votes D up and down the ticket.
The violence is not necessary, nor productive, nor are the situations comparable.
Things escalate when someone escalates them. Sometimes that's the police. Sometimes it isn't. And even when it is, you still have to be willing to be provoked. Don't.
We have people in this thread justifying riots as "we tried kneeling at football games" as if there is some kind of reasonable progression from there to looting and burning down churches.
Here's the part you're missing: the protests are holding the police to account, and they're the only way available for the community to enforce basic rule of law on the police. If not for the protests, the officer(s) in question would be getting some paid time off to fund a vacation to the beach. Literally. And that's despite the community already having voted for stricter regulations by clear majorities and not getting them because white votes are counted more in our political system than black ones, and that's despite voter suppression disproportionately restricting black voters' access to the polls.
Reacting when violated is a natural reaction. With a group this big you cannot think in individual terms. If provoked there and there is a non-zero chance you’ll see a reaction, you will see a reaction. And now you have a positive feedback loop between the police and protestors that may escalate into riots.
I'm not convinced the rioters care about police violence either. From what I ca see the riots are outside groups with riot and anarchy as an agenda. My right wing friends are blaming George Soros, my left wing friends some nameless white supremacist group. I have no idea what the truth is, and don't expect to find out for months if ever.
Expecting the protesters to somehow control everyone in the protest, when the cops fire indiscriminately on people whether they're peaceful or otherwise, doesn't seem like a working system.