The quality of journalism for NPR has gone downhill so much.
A real "protest" is inherently violent. Your are encouraging the state to use it's monopoly of force against you. Your goal is to ensure that others see the state using force needlessly against you. When others see others using violence against you they begin to reconsider the conditions that put you into this situation to begin with.
So using the police as a tool against protesters only proves them right. A protest should never be met with violence, unless you want to encourage more action from protestors.
In other words the police are the wrong tool for the job. The police absolutely should not be involved in protests. This is a great job for social workers.
Riots on the other hand should be met with police action. However, if you have a riot then that means you didn't hear the demands of the people to begin with. If you make it to a full blown riot you have MESSED UP.
The whole philosophy behind protests is really easy to understand. Spend a bit of time reading Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau, a little Ghandi and then you start with a lot of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X to understand the philosophies behind American protests.
Not necessarily. Riots can begin when bad actors take advantage of the cover of numbers provided by a peaceful protest. If there are enough bad actors, usually masquerading as peaceful protesters, to reach critical mass, then a riot can start.
All it takes is for one person to break a window to signal to the other bad actors that the riot is about to begin. This piece by Tanner Greer [1] examines the phenomenon in way more detail than I do here.
[1] https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/05/on-days-of-disor...
What if we saw a bad actor at a rally for a politician, and then bring the full force of the state upon the entire crowd because of that bad actor. It would be absurd to use that opportunity to mace and teargas and shoot rubber bullets to disperse the crowd. It is equally absurd to do the same here in political protests.
Or you lost a sports game, let's not pretend the bar for rioting is very high...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Vancouver_Stanley_Cup_rio...
EDIT: Sorry, I missed "you just won a sports game" as a reason for rioting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_riot
> After the Canadiens defeated the Boston Bruins in the first round of the 2008 Stanley Cup playoffs, fans began rioting in celebration.
Getting large groups of people together to chant in common cause can easily be just about showing solidarity around a common cause. People out in the streets today aren't trying to get police to abuse them. They're trying to show the world this is something they care about.
This is going to sound a bit conspiratorial, but I've long suspected that there is a bit of astroturfing happening on Hacker News and this doesn't alleviate my suspicions.
But it's also a separate issue entirely. It's like seeing a scatter plot and being like but what about this point right here ---------------------------->
Why beat the crap out of someone for saying I believe x? It's antithetical to the American spirit, I think.
People like to give examples such as the civil rights' movement as the effectiveness of pacific demonstration, but that was just a good tactical decision made by Dr. King and other organizers, since they knew that police was ready to kill them at any excuse. In the case of black leaders of the time, any demonstration, even a pacific one, was able to make them subversive to the system.
However to understand why this would be the case(starting from a naive POV), you have to go beyond general discussion of injustices and reforms into deeper examination of the power structure and loyalties, which is hard to surface out of soundbite media.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data.
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/ive... ... the American Negro collectively is richer than most nations of the world. We have an annual income of more than thirty billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the United States and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know that? That's power right there, if we know how to pool it. (Yeah) [Applause] We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles; we don't need any Molotov cocktails. (Yes) We just need to go around to these stores (Yes sir), and to these massive industries in our country (Amen), and say, "God sent us by here (All right) to say to you that you're not treating His children right. (That's right) And we've come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment where God's children are concerned. Now if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you."
Obviously Dr. King didn't realise that economic sanctions are a form of violence monopolised by state level actors?