Now putting myself in the shoes of the protesters: seeing the same destruction, destroying of properties, cars and businesses, I'll call it a day because this is no longer a protest. I'd go back home and wait for this to be taken care of and join a civilized protest once this has been taken care of. A civilized country should be able to hold a civilized protest. And having spent most of my life in eastern Europe, you can say I know a thing or two about protests. Last large protest I was a part of was in ~2013 irrc and the aftermath was very different. The night after each of those protests, everything was spotless clean, people thew all their garbage in the bins, nothing broken or destroyed. People were coming with their children and pets and being completely comfortable with it. There was a completely unrelated incident of a gas explosion at a Chinese restaurant, which burned a nearby shop. People gathered donations fo the shop owner to recover. Incidents with police? Practically none during ~3 months of daily protest. And we are talking eastern Europe - the police officers are anything but the nicest people on the planet.
[1] https://twitter.com/XruthxNthr/status/1266903223220097024
The protests started out peaceful but became less peaceful when the police showed up and tear gassed innocent crowds. There's people literally getting arrested for practicing their right to assemble and right to freedom of speech.
I wonder how many have told a cop to go fuck themselves in the past 24 hours.
Judging by how quickly you were downvoted, I'm guessing quite a few.
It's their job to remain calm and lawful under all circumstances.
They have the full force of state sanctioned violence at their disposal.
Watch some of the hundreds of videos on Twitter now and see if you can't see a rotten and brutal culture in US policing.
You want to see the protesters and officers as equal, but they’re not - the protesters are trying to change the status quo, the officers by and large want it to stay the way it is, and often want to make things worse for minorities (“Make America Great Again”).
Sympathy for the officers is fine, but remember they can quit whenever they want. Black people can’t quit being black.
On the first, I firmly believe that you should always deploy people who are accustomed to a more difficult or dangerous task. Managing large crowds of potentially violent people is far beyond the typical danger police face (usually peaceful, or one or two dangerous people). On the other hand, this is one of the scenarios the National Guard is trained for. And the level of force is likely lower than what they have trained for. The current response is like handingba Sev1 incident to an intern. They're just as or more likely to cause more damage as they are to help.
On the second point, handing armored vehicles and body armor to a group that isn't well versed in their use and effects on the opposing force is a bad idea. The outcome is inevitably the "five foot drop". When you your electronics don't work and you don't know how to fix them, people tend to give it a hard smack to see if that works. Likewise when your day to day policing doesn't work, deploying your heaviest armaments probably seems like a good idea.
I do still hold the officers accountable to a degree. The degree of force is incredibly one sided. However, more than them, I blame the system that put them in a situation they are so unequipped to handle.
You are confusing the idea of collectivism (in which each individual is responsible for the welfare of the members of the group, and is expected to sacrifice to some extent—different variations on collectivism vary on the extent—their own welfare for the common good) with the concept of collective punishment (a widely recognized violation of human rights and, in the context of armed conflict, a war crime, in which members of a group are punished for mere shared membership in a group which contains wrongdoers, without any evidence of collaboration in or support for the wrongdoing.)
They are not equivalent.
This may be a topic of another discussion but I wouldn't call it a bad idea in a country where everyone and their dog has firearms, just saying...
That said: it's increasingly evident that they're very poorly trained. You see the same strongman tactics in every city. They gang up on a single person, sometimes 4 or 5 of them, all hitting, all kicking, and continue to do this once you're on the ground. If you've ever watched Live PD, you see a ton of this same behavior, all the time, all across the country.
At the same time, there are some really bad cops out there (and the cynic in me tells me they're more common than we're lead on to believe), and also lots that just don't have the mental fortitude to do the work, but are still doing it anyway. Those people need to be weeded out, and we need to better equip them with tools that are not weapons.
The Portland police bureau came out to the game locked and loaded, full riot gear, trucks modified to hold ten cops hanging on the outside, tear gas, flash bangs, pepper balls, rubber bullets, riot batons, helicopters, spotlights. And, they decide to starts gassing protesters half an hour before curfew begins...
Protests started loud but moderately peaceful; no thrown objects, no fires, no damaged buildings. Cops tear gas and shoot them for "obstructing traffic". After a few hours of this, the crowd starts throwing water bottles, breaking windows, hurling the tear gas grenades back. This back and forth goes on through Sunday night.
Portland mayor Ted Wheeler gets a LOT of flack from important people who spent their weekend coughing on tear gas and waking up to sirens, painful screaming, and flashbangs, instead of drinking fine wine at nice restaurants and walking the Pearl District. He tells the cops no more violent riot control measures.
Monday night hits, something like 10,000 protesters take the streets and bridges, organized, geared up with cones, leaf blowers, shields, gas masks, body armor. The cops stay put. They don't even come out of their staging area. Protesters spend the evening chanting, talking to passersby, and policing bald headed agent provacateurs wearing German camo to hide their swastika tats. It was beautiful, the air was breathable, and there were no reports of looting or damage.
> Sympathy for the officers is fine, but remember they can quit whenever they want.
That's not always the case. As I said, often those people have to provide for someone and put food on the table each night. I know exactly what it is to be a kid and seeing an empty table in the evening.
No, it's not. Participation in a mass protest may be motivated by collectivist ideals, or it can be motivated by the individualist ideal that it is better to discourage a government course of action that could in the future be of grave danger to you individually, and that the immediate risk of participation in the protest is less than the long-term risk of the policy being protested against.
People of ideologized strictly and emphatically opposed to collectivism engage in mass protests.
> Collective punishment may be a violation of human right [...]
> what is your solution when [...] your task is to make sure that the city is still there the next morning?
The legitimate task of the police is to protect the rights of all (innocent, suspect, and even, except to the extent specifically and legitimately deprived due to their guilt, the guilty). There is no circumstances when participation in a gross abuse of human rights is within the scope of their legitimate task.
Why are you not applying the same logic to the police state? The police murdered George Floyd, so doesn't that imply the police are no longer innocent at this point? Why is only one side beholden to rights and responsibilities? At that point isn't it your obligation to stand up to a group becoming criminal?
Why was Floyd pinned to the ground until he suffocated when all he supposedly did was use a fake $20 bill? (supposedly because innocent until proven guilty). Why did none of the other officers present step in? All of them are guilty IMO.
As a police officer, you need to keep your colleagues in check. The problem right now is that there's vast groups of policemen who have no qualms with using excessive violence, especially against PoC, and they protect each other. I suspect that goes up the chain of command all the way up. For one, the US President himself hasn't condemned the actions of the police, not in the Floyd case, not in any other case of police violence. And that makes them complicit.
You've provided the theory, but you didn't answer my practical question: you have 1000 people representing authority and 100,000 people crowd. Let's say 4% of that crowd is violent. That is still 4 times your capacity. All while a large number of the remaining 96k are shouting at you. Put yourself in the shoes of those 1000 and your task being "restore order". In which case, the ball is in the crowd's yard. As an outside spectator(and someone who literally grew up in the epicenter of daily protests as a child), what I'm seeing here is the recent South Park episode turning into a documentary.
It's really easy to quote laws and rules, but in the real world, they are not always applicable. And in the case of mass gatherings, they are hardly ever applicable. Are you seriously suggesting that you were never put in a position where your only course of action was to grossly break the rules? If so, I envy you, I really do. No one hates breaking the rules more than I do but on many occasions in life, I've had to. It doesn't have to do with how rules and laws are defined or implemented. It's simple math: you have two bricks and three holes to fill, otherwise your house will flood. It's the same story with the pandemic - no one wants lockdowns or businesses crashing but it's either that or the death of millions.
That's the equivalent of blaming any European for the Holocaust or any Muslim for terrorist attacks or any eastern European for car thefts or any other stereotype you can think of. I mean isn't this what the whole thing is about? Abolishing stereotypes? I'm all up for that, but trying to abolish something by actively using it seems really counter-productive to say the least.
As I previously said, I've had encounters with horrid police officers, regardless of my polite manners. But I'm also aware policemen are people with the exact same problem like any of us. I see something deeply hypocritical in the whole situation(and the many similar situations across the world over the years). Truth be told I only know one police officer personally. And the truth is he is one of the kindest people I have ever met, despite being utterly strict in his work. Now given the opportunity to choose between rocks flying his way and people calling him a dirty pig or playing with his 2 year old granddaughter in the evenings, which one do you think he'd rather pick?
On the topic of armored vehicles, I vehemently disagree with distributing them to police forces. If there is a significant threat of a firefight, we have an existing domestic force that is trained to handle combat conditions. They are the National Guard. If things escalate to that point, the proper response is to call in the National Guard. They are both trained to handle that situation, and they have far more equipment than you could ever hope for. The National Guard has actual tanks, if it comes to that.
I will grant you, there is a very narrow middle ground of things that SWAT is equipped to handle but the National Guard would take too long to deploy. However I would contend that the military attitude SWAT-style tactics cause costs more in human lives than the small subsection of things SWAT needs to handle before the National Guard arrives.
The police should be a domestic force, charged with maintaining law and order among largely non-violent and lawful citizenry. The National Guard should be a force charged with handling violent and unlawful situations.
Traffic stops are well within the police jurisdiction. Standouts can be handled by police, so long as they don't plan on going in to the building. Taking a building full of hostile combatants with at-risk civilians should be handled by the National Guard. If the police feel at risk enough that they need more than a handgun, they should call the National Guard.
The police are not an invading army performing an occupation of hostile lands. They are public servants enforcing democratically chosen laws on a largely willing populace, of which they are part. Anything outside that scope should be handled by another branch that has been chosen and trained for that purpose.