zlacker

I can weigh in a bit on what the police claim happened here in Indianapolis. They won't account for all of their CS deployments, which I think is crazy, but they did address why it started the other day (Saturday?). Their claim is that what they saw was some police inside the city/county building and a single person started hitting the glass on the building. Simultaneously, "previously peaceful" protesters started locking arms at one end of the street, blocking emergency vehicle ingress, so they let loose a bunch of (13 year expired)_CS gas.

Is that believable? Sure, but locking arms is also a common thing during protests. The road was already blocked off and cars weren't going through. Also, they fired CS into crowds of protesters blocks away, claiming that they think the protesters are coordinating by secure communications and instantaneously turning violent across the city. Most of it seems like bullshit, and even if it's all true, locking arms on one side of a closed street is not at all unusual. They should have arrested the one guy hitting the glass and let the protest continue.

By the way, they used this event to justify the curfews that haven't been raised since then.

>>jonluc+(OP)
> blocking emergency vehicle ingress, so they let loose a bunch of (13 year expired)_CS gas.

That doesn't make sense, unless they wanted the driver and other people in a not airtight emergency vehicle to end up in the gas cloud as well...

>>virapt+Da
Right. And this is the justification given during a press conference the next morning; it's not some on-the-spot question asked to the deputy chief of Indianapolis Police. It's a dumb excuse. Plus, it's literally one block long. If you want police on that block, they can stop around the corner and walk in. The building isn't touching the street; it's a couple hundred feet back.

>>virapt+Da
I'm in Richmond, Virginia, and according to people monitoring the unencrypted fire department radios on twitter (one of them a fairly reputable community organizer, but rate the source as you will), this exact situation supposedly happened on Saturday night. Fire department got called to a shoe store fire, they faced some impediment reaching the fire, police showed up and dropped tear gas all over the area, and the fire department ended up back on the scanner requesting an ambulance for the commander on site for tear gas exposure, and additional PPE from another department to help the other fire fighters cope. The building ended up being marked a complete loss, although I'm unclear of the nitty gritty details like timelines, source of the fire, etc.

EDIT: I will also note that this, among other events, was used to justify calling for a curfew in town, and today, the mayor and police chief have condemned their own police officers for deploying tear gas on peaceful protests prior to the start of the curfews last night, and then putting forward a false justification (admitted by the police chief to have been a false justification, to be clear) for doing so.