zlacker

Absolutely. I'm utterly confused if you're not, though I recognize that you may have a different perspective based on your background.

Do you live in a metropolitan city in the US? Seattle, USA is my point of reference. I have lived for 15 years here, mostly living in the most dense neighborhood and mostly working in the downtown core.

Seattle is a low-violence, high-civic-engagement, high-trust, relatively wealthy city. There is typically a small 10-50 person protest weekly in front of the Federal Building. There will be additional larger protests several times annually, with a 200-500+ person gathering probably about every two months in favor of pot, anti-war, or whatever. Then 2-3 times a year there will be a large gathering, often around May Day, MLK Day, Hempfest, etc., where thousands will gather for (generally permitted and pre-planned) marching and demonstration. This is all the baseline activity level regardless of things like COVID, Trumpism, or BLM.

It's very usual to see strollers and children on shoulders at these events. The strong presumption is that civic engagement in Seattle is safe and normal.

If you come from a place where political parties have proxy street-fights with backed youth gangs, or where ethnic mobs are torching trains full of apostates, I understand (and I'm very sorry and hope it gets better). I know the world is a scary place and that there are such things as violent mobs.

But despite how inconvenient it might be to have one's commute path blocked, or how scary it might initially be to have an Other-looking youth shouting hyperbolic slogans, protests here (and elsewhere) generally don't start, and don't inevitably turn, violent.

That particular reaction requires another reagent altogether, and usually quite a bit of activation energy.

>>rlucas+(OP)
You realise not everyone is protesting peacefully right? Some people are taking this opportunity to steal and let out their anger by burning down shops and buildings. That’s nothing to do with the police, in fact that has happened most of all in places where the police have been weak so far. How do you propose dealing with that?

>>jpxw+g9
In many places the people committing property crimes are off-duty cops themselves or right wing agitators taking advantage of the situation, they're not part of the people protesting.

>>rlucas+(OP)
I've seen plenty of violence by protestors where the cops weren't even there. Do you blame the cops for that too?

>>refurb+Lf
>There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break?

>>miniki+Og
Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological battle. It makes the threads more repetitive and more nasty.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

>>jpxw+g9
Look, not to "True Scotsman" this thing too much, but there really is a thing called protesting, and there really is a thing called criminality.

If you write a firmly worded letter to your Senator, you are protesting and it would take the most abusive stretch of discretion to consider it criminal in any way.

If you drive with your buddies in dark of night to a store and do a smash-and-grab, it would take an absurd ideological contortion to consider it protesting in any genuine way.

In real life, there's a spectrum moving from letter-writing and sign-holding into civil disobedience and then into forms of disorder.

If you start with the observation, as you have, that "people are taking this opportunity to steal and ... burn[] down shops," I would submit that you shouldn't then apply the term "protester" to what you are defining as an opportunistic criminal.

You know what has worked really well for Niketown in Seattle the last few days? They just have a bunch of beefy dudes in athletic wear (some Polynesian fella cheered them as being Samoans, I dunno, but it's relevant mainly in that they look not like a bussed-in white-only goon squad, and optics are gonna matter in this crisis) standing around it. Nobody's messing with those guys.

If your cops aren't up-armored and manning a barricade of people doing free speech stuff, they can, you know, take 911 calls and go respond to actual calls.

I would challenge your insinuation that theft and arson are "in places where the police [are] weak" and the implicit corollary that you should then make those police more "strong." I would grant you that (perhaps tautologically) those crimes happened in places where keeping the peace has been done poorly, and it should be done better.