This is more difficult than you expect. Police are drastically outnumbered in any crowd control situation. You can watch videos from Minneapolis riots where police just watch windows being smashed and shops being looted because they don’t have enough people.
It takes more than once officer to arrest someone too so things like Kettling need to be done for safety of everyone.
The rules are simple: if you get dispersion order it’s time to go. It’s not like they are not given a choice. I think a lot of people showing up to protests are just a bit unaware of the law. The number of times you see someone complaining about being asked to move on and they shout back that they are “on the sidewalk - can’t I just walk in my own city blah blah”. It’s just a misunderstanding of the law or a willingness to violate democratic law.
I wish all this moderation would be flipped around. Just allow people to filter the content they see. We should have a system similar to movie content ratings to make it easier instead of manually muting keywords like on Twitter.
Then there is no controversy and everyone can get along.
The vast majority of people never have negative interactions with police and actually are thankful for them keeping their communities safe.
The ones that do have problems are those that resist arrest and detainment in a society where everyone is armed.
Hence, I wouldn’t know the taste.
I acknowledge the historical precedent but it’s been a long time since such things and I prefer to look at the facts of the situation at hand (as would be done in a court of law) rather than implying conspiratorial motives from history.
Only comment on the entire thread that makes sense.
It’s amazing that every comment seems to imply sinister motives to every action by every police officer, when the more obvious answer is that most police actually do their jobs well and there are circumstances they must deal with that commenters here are not privy to or want to perpetuate a narrative.
The same commenters of they met police or had friends who were police would think very differently. Police are dehumanized to the extent that people want to go out and attack them in the streets
I don’t think any officer goes out wanting to attack people and start fights. Look at videos of police. They stand in a line and have projectiles thrown at them and verbal abuse yelled at them. 90% of the time they have to stand there and do nothing. And if it gets too much they clear the protests.
The vast majority of society do not want to go yell at police in the street.
The biggest problem is takeovers of protests by anarchists and I don’t know the solution to this. If anarchists consistently escalate protests then it takes away people’s rights to protest. But I see this as a problem to be solved by protestors.
> Do cops think there are thugs cloaking themselves in fake press gear ?
Yes. Everyone has phones now. Everyone can claim they are press or they have a YouTube channel. These people don’t wear press gear.
A lot of the time the police are not suspecting press and they get more access so people claiming they are press are more of a threat, which is why they must verify.
Say you are trying to light a fire in a police station or break a barricade. Should police allow you to loiter and go wherever you want rather than stay with the crowd?
If you think it through you will realize that unless identification is done it creates immense risk.
Journalists will always complain on an individual level, but police are working on reducing threat level and maintaining order of a wider context.
> Law enforcement quickly identified media and escorted them to a line where they were asked for credentials and identification. Law enforcement took pictures of journalists' credentials and IDs as well as photos of the journalists’ faces.
You ignore the facts of this specific case. Anecdata indeed.
> Department of Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington says throughout the night, and particularly from 8 p.m. onward, officers came under threat from a variety of new individuals who began to approach and contest the area around the police department with items like baseball bats, plywood, shields and "liquid products."
> There were reports of some protesters shaking the perimeter fencing, while lobbing objects over the fence at officers on the other side.
> Harrington outlined how attempts to breach the outermost ring of fencing by more belligerent protesters was handled with some amount of restraint, with officers repairing the breach and backing off rather than immediately proceeding to clear the area around the station.
> While law enforcement leaders say they had hoped to continue facilitating the more peaceful elements of the demonstrations with a more distanced approach, there were pockets of aggressive behavior that posed a threat to officers, as well as attempts to breach the station's outer ring of fencing, which spurred action from law enforcement to clear the immediate area.
The protests became unlawful and rightfully so.
> A lot of journalists like myself were slow to leave the area,” Colt said. “We didn’t think we needed to, and we wanted to cover what was happening.”
> Colt described police then corralling protesters and media into one group and yelling for them to get “flat on our stomachs.”
Sounds like if you had the full context it wouldn’t be so outrageous.
How do we know people are press and not pretending to be to sneak behind police lines and set fire to the police station or things like that.
Thanks for the insights. I like the more nuanced spectrum you present. I find myself too often in a simplistic left/right divide. I think there is great value in a more fine-grained spectrum coming into common usage.
The conundrum that stands out for me though is when one group defends another group’s right to censor, and then that group uses that right, to censor the other. I think that’s where we are today. The legislative restraint of the Republicans to regulate seems they are living up to their principles to their own disadvantage. But this just leaves them to be taken advantage of by the other group to the point of severely damaging the next election prospects of Trump runs again.
Will defenders of freedom always be subjugated to those who want to use freedom to restrict others? Sustaining this freedom is the challenge of humanity and a very careful balance. We’ve seen so many free countries fall to left/right authoritarianism over the ages. It’s almost like we cycle back and forth between authoritarianism and freedom. This century will surely be a big test.
I think we are quickly heading into left authoritarianism which is ironic because the most vocal complaints are of right authoritarianism which I really didn’t see any evidence of the past 4 years. It was just a trendy thing to say. I don’t even know where the accusation of Trump authoritarianism began.
Therefore “killed” is more accurate.