https://laist.com/2020/05/31/reporters_injured_protests_poli...
It's unfortunate that it's gotten to this point for people to take police brutality at least somewhat seriously.
I'm mistaken for being pro-police and anti-BLM merely because I'm against the looting and rioting. I've always had the stance that the police in their current form are state-sanctioned street gangs.
https://bjssjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002...
Put simply, there's no need for a "but". Once can make both statements without implying that one has precedence over the other.
We lost a couple banks and a pizza hut.
But its quite tenable. No one will mourn for the buildings or police cruisers.
[Citation needed]
I find it hard to believe that a few days of these riots has caused more damage and loss of life than generations of racial oppression and police brutality. If you’ve got a source, I’m all ears.
If you had simply asked me to share what I know, I would have given you some links. But I have a distaste for the "[Citation Needed]" meme because it's pompous, so I suggest you do some basic research yourself. If you can do 2nd grade arithmetic, you can figure out that 2 or more deaths is greater than 1 death. If you've even watched a minute of TV in the last 5 days, I shouldn't have to argue whether more people's lives have been destroyed than if the riots didn't happen at all.
> I find it hard to believe that a few days of these riots has caused more damage and loss of life than generations of racial oppression and police brutality.
That's not even close to what I said.
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Police-Davenport-officer...
https://www.foxnews.com/us/federal-law-enforcement-officer-k...
https://www.foxnews.com/us/kentucky-man-killed-by-cops-who-d...
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/article/Police-Retired...
https://www.ibtimes.com/george-floyd-las-vegas-protests-1-po...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/top-detroit-news-most-arre...
----
Maybe there are more, and I think it's fortunate that the deaths don't appear to be excessively high. But I would still argue these people might not be dead or in critical condition if the rule of law wasn't out of control. I'm no fan of police, but that doesn't mean I don't think about how some kids may have lost a parent.
Buried in your reasoning is the idea that the rioting and looting is helping reducing black deaths by cops. I see no reason to believe that.
First, its directly putting people into violent conflict with police. So additional black people have been killed by police caused by the rioting. Second, innocent people are getting killed by the rioting.
Third, there are people who would support police reform but are also terrified of looters and rioters. The riots are giving me a look at what my city looks like without police control, and it is scary. I know that police v. lawlessness is a false dichotomy and I reject that sort of thinking.
There was a consensus that what happened to George Floyd was an atrocity. Even racists thought so. A huge peaceful protest would have raised awareness.
Violence lost that consensus.
But you see cops being abusive and "It's just a few bad apples!"
Anything to quell the cognitive dissonance.
"There was a consensus that what happened to George Floyd was an atrocity."
Who cares? Thinking something is an atrocity accomplished precisely jack shit. Peaceful protests get ignored or mocked. Police forces continue to get more militarized. Far right politicians, like the president, encourage violence from their bully pulpit. At a certain point, people need to respond. To not respond is to encourage those who seek to abuse power.
It was not by accident[1] - remember the police force was on the wrong side of that consensus. Strategically, allowing and even encouraging[2][3] violence is a winning move for the police (as long as their members are relatively safe) - both to punish the communities who have seemingly "turned against the police" and to change the narrative so that the same communities beg the police to save them from the violence.
1. Twitter thread on how the Minneapolis police is on "strike" https://twitter.com/lynnellmick/status/1266489804444721152
2. https://twitter.com/JoshuaPotash/status/1267670804696895488
3. https://twitter.com/realDavidOnline/status/12673136333918699...
They still aren't taking it seriously. People are still bending over backwards to justify violence and police incompetence against even peaceful protestors and press members. They're cheering for people to be run down in the street, etc. Nothing is getting better and things I fear things will only get worse from here.
I agree with you in that things probably will only get worse.
It's not a choice to make for one or the other.
Can you find a large episode of rioting and looting without any death toll? Even the 2011 London riots led to the deaths of five people.
The bigger issue though is that the current situation is starting to turn counterproductive. The only way to eventually fix things is with politics. Protests are politics.
But violence eventually takes a life of its own. Already now there are overwhelming evidence various third party actors are interfering. Soon this turns into an order vs chaos issue, and guess in who's favour that framing would play out?
The protests can no longer be ignored, now is the time to step back and to do whatever can be done to make this peaceful - before people forget why the protests started in the first place.
Totally fair. That wasn’t very conservative. I’m sorry.
> That's not even close to what I said.
Could you clarify what you were saying? I directly quoted you, but I’ll admit your sentence isn’t clear. It says “More” but doesn’t indicate “more than what?”, so I assumed you meant the oppression that rioters are responding to. Maybe that’s not the case.