> The whole "defund the police" movement feels very much in line with the "Luxury beliefs"
Why do you believe this? It seems to me that reinvesting budgets spent on surplus humvees on more/better school counselors is a perfectly reasonable goal.
> It seems to me that reinvesting budgets spent on surplus humvees on more/better school counselors is a perfectly reasonable goal.
While that sounds great on paper, nothing the schools do is going to make a difference if the family support at home isn't there. You can't just throw money at the problem to make it better.
Anecdotal, but my sister used to work as a teacher & reading specialist in poorer areas. Per my last conversation with her on this topic, she said maybe 20% of the kids have a solid backing from family for education. The rest she had interacted with for one reason or another were a mix of parents who told her it was her job to teach and they wouldn't do that at home; another group of parents that were too drunk/drugged out to even answer the phone or call back; and another that would just swear at her for bothering them at home. All of her co-workers had similar accounts of this happening.
Kids that did want to learn in class were bullied for "acting white" and there were physical fights occurring weekly. She didn't teach high school, she taught 4/5th grade.
For us to make any progress with poorer schools there needs to be a community focus on education, having respect for each other, and having respect for the law. If you grow up for 18 years in an environment without those then nothing matters long term and we end up in the vicious cycle of poverty, crime, imprisonment, broken families and even more kids going through the same thing.
It is sad to see this downvoted, I know several people who were outcasts for "acting white" by trying hard in school (their words, not mine).
The issue really isn't about race though, it is about poverty and culture. I know a kindergarten teacher from a very rural, very white, very poor school district who was cussed out by one of her 5 year old students. The parents don't care, and it shows in the students' progression through school and young adulthood. If parents show up at all, it is to yell at teachers for giving their children bad grades or any sort of discipline.
Of course, putting any sort of onus on the parents gets talked down, as it undermines the argument that things will magically get better if only we threw more money at the problem... because the problem isn't the school or the teachers at all.
What responsibility do we have as a nation to reconcile our past actions that caused unmeasurable suffering for untold millions of people? Have we no courage, no sense of moral obligation to make things right?
The culture of black communities dealing with poverty and crime that you refer to didn't come from nowhere. It was not simply imported from 17th century Africa, in the way that the apple pie was brought over from England. It is a product of a people who were bravely struggling and striving to cope in the worst possible circumstances.
Brutally enslaved for more than 200 years, their literal chains finally removed, they continued to be viciously abused and systematically and savagely oppressed throughout the following century. They weren't event treated as fully human by the federal law until 2 generations ago. Only two generations! Many states had incredibly racist and oppressive laws even more recently than that. The most cursory research reveals an utterly depraved history. One simple and terrible example is redlining, which unfortunately was occurring even after the civil rights act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining).
We have a duty as a nation to attempt to heal the damage that we have caused. It is impossible to fully mend what we have broken, but we damn well better try.
> We have a duty as a nation to attempt to heal the damage that we have caused.
25% percent of the US’s population as a nation is 1st and 2nd generation immigrants, a substantial portion of which arrived after 1965 because desegregation and immigration reforms coincide. [1] Whatever “we” you might be thinking, it risks running an egocentric fallacy to assume it expands to the entirety of the US population.
Most people who come to US are escaping horrid conditions of their home countries (a good portion of which is not unrelated to US foreign policy).
Most immigration is not a luxurious, touristic affair but comes out of necessity. There are even people who would consider immigrations as voluntarily getting themselves colonized, coming here for the country to extract their resources in exchange of a promise of better life circumstances. We certainly extract more out of immigrants economically, academically, psychologically, who were raised and educated elsewhere, who are incentivized to work very hard or go back, who also suffer mentally from this process.
Requiring them to pitch in assuming they had perfect information and made a completely free preference is at best ignorant. Of course it is the honorable thing to answer the suffering of fellow humans, but that goes both ways, and thinking that that problem is always the one and only problem of this world is plain, pure narcissism.
Also you say this as though the US is the only country that had slaves. Chattel slavery was (unfortunately) the predominate form of labor in the entire world for centuries. The US was the 3rd to last country in the Americas to abolish it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...
Other societies in the world have largely decided that we’re better off just burying the hatchet.
That’s rather presumptuous of you. I never said the solution is reparations. I’m not sure what the solution is. I have some ideas, but obviously it is a non-trivial problem.
We aren’t talking about other countries. I’m familiar with history. I know many terrible things have happened.
You're right — s/reparations/<responsibility [...] to reconcile our past actions that caused unmeasurable suffering for untold millions of people? >.
Whatever it may be, I want no part of it. To assume that all immigrants, who today represent 25% of Americans, are willing to sign onto policy positions that are focused on correcting (distant) past wrongs as opposed to solving the problems we have TODAY — is what I'm calling presumptuous.
I think we are still miscommunicating. I don’t want to ignore present day problems and solely focus on some sort of atonement for past wrongs. We should fix current day problems with a proper understanding of how they can be, taking ownership of our failures as a nation.
Radical delegitimization of the nuclear family in the late 60’s and early 70’s got intertwined with the black power movement which essentially argued that single mother’s are better off than married. They have more agency and the nuclear family is a patriarchal tool of male supremacy. Then taken further into the black power movement with aid of that eras new feminism, it was argued that the nuclear family is a white European ideal and a tool of oppression.
So then the problem became one of the state not doing enough to fund the single mother family. Not only accepting this but making it an ideal.
Read Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s research from the early 1960’s that could have been a corner stone of the civil rights movement. But then it wasn’t.
Anyways this rejection of the traditional family structure is essentially what triggered the family values movement on the right in the late 70’s and early 1980’s.
Interestingly as the legitimization of single mothers became more and more mainstream we continued to see black kids grow up in entrenched poverty as dropout rates and criminal activity climbed year over year for these kids compared to previous generations.
So now the solution is “reparations”. Of course it wasn’t the radical ideas of middle class radicals being experimented on black people that has caused this inescapable spiral. It’s that we need to give money to single mothers and we are here because we simply haven’t given enough.
Some misguided people will say blacks did better before the Civil Rights Act. But they are wrong not in that the Civil Rights Act was bad - it is good - mandatory to be sure. It’s that during this same era we rejected rigorous research and science for so called theories that claimed the 2-parent family was a tool of oppression. This got interlaced into the black power movement and we saw the destruction of the black family and the resulting mess we are in today.
It goes all the way back to The Communist Manifesto. These are old ideas that have just been recast through a new lens. Conflict Theory just takes on new forms from one based on class (made sense at the time) to one based on so called “identity” which makes sense in a multicultural country.
In the end these ideas are illiberal and it is my hope they wither away after enough people are able to look past the facade and the tyrannical machinery is exposed. And then maybe some of these orgs can grow into something that’s actually useful.
We can argue about the marginal benefit of investing in late-stage interventions, but it's certainly doing more than cops buying Humvees and LARPING as tacticool warriors.
Generally armored vehicles police get as surplus are sold at basically the price of gas / transportation to get them to their destination. The feds just want them off their books. That compared to the price of a new Lenco Bearcat is hundreds of thousands of dollars less for a more capable vehicle.
I have never once seen those vehicles used in regular law enforcement duties such as traffic stops.
They are used in exceptional cases like active shooter situations, hostage / barricaded / swat scenarios, natural disasters like flooding due to their high clearance, and the occasional parade or community day to let kids play in the big truck. In all, they are a defensive vehicle with no weapons that costs the department very little and has a wide range of uses if the shit hits the fan.
I really don't get the outrage of them other than the optics of it "being from the military" and idiots calling them "tanks". If there are specific bad uses of police force those are great to call out, but the utility of the vehicle which is basically free for a real world need is a no brainer.
My police department should not be anywhere near militarized. It's inappropriate, wrong, and is a waste of funds because they should not be kitted out that way.
They bring out those vehicles during protests, among other things. People standing around chanting. Then they wait until curfew is over, maybe declare the assembly unlawful, and start using chemical weapons and intimidation on the crowd.
> rock-throwing protesters versus police officers wearing body armor and gas masks, carrying ballistic shields and lobbing flash grenades.
So regular riot control equipment in 95% of the world...
The only other stuff they mention are semi-auto rifles which are not militarization. Us civilians have the same rifles which are way more accurate than a standard handgun. I dont want an officer using a handgun at 50-100 yards trying to stop an active shooter, I want them to have the best tool for the job which would be a patrol rifle. That's safer for everyone, especially bystanders.
> My police department should not be anywhere near militarized. It's inappropriate, wrong, and is a waste of funds because they should not be kitted out that way.
How is riot control pads / shields and an armored vehicle to stop bullets and rocks being thrown militarization? I don't see any offensive weapons used other than crowd control agents which last I checked are used in most of the world for the same purpose. They also still use fire hoses in many other countries which we stopped doing in the 60s due to the bad optics of them during the racial tension.
> They bring out those vehicles during protests, among other things.
Judging how the protests have turned to riots over the past few months in major cities, they are completely justified in doing so. Getting rocks, molotov cocktails and everything else under the sun thrown at you when you're trying to stop people from burning down communities would make me want the best protection too. But even in those cases the vehicles are used as transport and command / observation platforms. You mostly have a problem with crowd control tactics it sounds like which are pretty standard when dealing with a declared riot. Here is a good video on the tactics with explanations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT9bit2-1pg
> So regular riot control equipment in 95% of the world...
Yes, militarization of the police is normalized in many countries. That doesn't make it acceptable. They're trigger-happy and violent. It's part of the culture.
> The only other stuff they mention are semi-auto rifles which are not militarization. Us civilians have the same rifles which are way more accurate than a standard handgun. I dont want an officer using a handgun at 50-100 yards trying to stop an active shooter, I want them to have the best tool for the job which would be a patrol rifle. That's safer for everyone, especially bystanders.
Do you believe that there needs to be a line of officers wielding rifles behind a line of riot cops with flashbangs and tear gas launchers (used liberally and indiscriminately) behind a line of shielded riot cops grabbing things from protesters and generally trying to provoke a reaction? These things all work in tandem, in this context. That line of cops is part of their show of force, as they take anti-cop protests very personally. It's a form of intimidation and escalation.
> How is riot control pads / shields and an armored vehicle to stop bullets and rocks being thrown militarization?
Half of that is literally military equipment and US police departments are frequently under a "warrior" mindset. It's been heavily exported to various different PDs. They treat confrontations as a fight between them and the "bad guys", not public safety or law enforcement. Having a bunch of military or tacticool gear is part of that mindset.
> I don't see any offensive weapons used other than crowd control agents which last I checked are used in most of the world for the same purpose.
Normalization is not the same as moral or acceptable. Plus, this isn't quite a consistent take when it comes to these kinds of things. When Soviet bloc countries used far less serious responses to color revolutions, they were decried as totalitarian, antidemocratic monsters. But we do worse here and it's just normal business as usual.
And those "crowd control" agents are chemical weapons, explosives, and "less lethal" weapons causing permanent disability and injury. I watched a woman get shot with a grenade (either flashbang or teargas) and she went into cardiac arrest, only living because medics rushed her to the hospital. She was forward but still 30 feet from any officers. She was shot straight in the chest. She was just standing there and yelling.
> Judging how the protests have turned to riots over the past few months in major cities, they are completely justified in doing so.
They absolutely are not. It's a form of escalation and the cops have frequently provoked these responses with theses "shows of force".
> Getting rocks, molotov cocktails and everything else under the sun thrown at you when you're trying to stop people from burning down communities would make me want the best protection too.
The cops aren't trying to stop people from burning down communities. They don't actually do that, they don't deescalate, they don't actually even defend the private property (which is usually much of their function) so much as blast through and hurt people indiscriminately.
> But even in those cases the vehicles are used as transport and command / observation platforms. You mostly have a problem with crowd control tactics it sounds like which are pretty standard when dealing with a declared riot. Here is a good video on the tactics with explanations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT9bit2-1pg
I'm very familiar with their tactics, they used them against me.
Are you familiar with the Rodney King riots, or the national wave in the late 60s? You seem to be presuming that large groups of angry protesters will never start trying to kill people, that this isn't even a problem the police need to plan for. And I'm just not sure that's true.
I would add that the LA Bank Shootout provided a lot of justification for effective firepower. Two men pretty much pinned down several law enforcement organizations due to superior firepower.
You don't need to militarize the police in order to have a riot response. The warrior mentality is toxic and actually exacerbates the problem.
In every protest I went to where things escalated, it was the police doing the primary escalation. Bull rushing the crowd. Trying to grab things from the crowd. Shooting teargas and OC gas and flashbangs into the crowd prior to even making any announcements. Bicycle cops hitting passersby with their bicycles. A kid got maced.
None of this requires the straw man that protests never turn into riots.
But that's the goal! When the police are worried the crowd might escalate, they preemptive action to end the situation before it can happen, because crowd-initiated escalations are much more destructive and deadly. Once protesters are shooting at people it's too late to step in.
This is incoherent. Beating peaceful protesters doesn't serve the goal of deescalation. Every single time, it resulted in more anger and frustration. Water bottles being thrown.
> When the police are worried the crowd might escalate, they preemptive action to end the situation before it can happen, because crowd-initiated escalations are much more destructive and deadly.
End the situation? It escalated every single time, exactly how you'd expect. Cops becoming aggressive and violent against protesters is not going to cool any heads. They teargassed kids, you know. In what world is that considered a way to "end the situation"?
> Once protesters are shooting at people it's too late to step in.
This is part of that dangerous warrior mentality, treating every group like an immediate existential threat that must be neutralized with violence based on nothing but speculation.
If you're justifying police violence and aggression based on what you imagine might happen, you're part of the problem.
We've just circled back around. You seem to be saying that groups of protesters are never threats, and I don't agree; it seems to me that once they start breaking random things, there's a serious and unacceptable risk they'll start killing people.
Truly peaceful protests where nothing's being vandalized or set on fire - yes, the police should never respond to those by force.
> We've just circled back around. You seem to be saying that groups of protesters are never threats
I've never said this.
> and I don't agree; it seems to me that once they start breaking random things, there's a serious and unacceptable risk they'll start killing people.
That is absurd. Damaging property is nothing like hurting people. In fact, alleging that the two are comparable is somewhat dehumanizing, as it's used to justify hurting people over damage to things. Things* should not have any level of parity with human life, particularly things like broken windows.
> Truly peaceful protests where nothing's being vandalized or set on fire - yes, the police should never respond to those by force.
Last time, you said the police could preemptively assume a protest will hurt people and start engaging in the violence we've been talking about. Now there's the good protester / bad rioter dichotomy, something often decried by civil rights leaders because it was the rallying cry of segregationists. That and outside agitators.
I was gassed and flashbanged in a protest where we were holding our hands up and chanting, "hands up, don't shoot".
If you are going to post an article to support your argument, you might want to make sure it actually supports your argument.
Police don't pay for surplus military gear, the DoD offers it for free. Police only have to pay for shipping. It has been this way since the program was created in 1988.
The police often pay for shipping, maintenance, and kitting out the equipment. They might receive a free stripped-down M16, but they still use their own budgets to make it tacticool. Just an optic and light run $1k or so.
Look into studies that evaluate self-reported crimes or violence, etc. Not police stats. Police stats are highly unreliable for drawing these kinds of conclusions a lot of reasons before you even consider malevolence or corruption.
Nearly all crimes that are policed are crimes of poverty. Rather than focusing so thoroughly on punitive measures, it is far better for everyone to focus on the root causes.
>...we end up in the vicious cycle of poverty, crime, imprisonment, broken families and even more kids going through the same thing.
Poverty. That's the root issue. But it's cheaper to blame the poverty on bad additudes and poor choices rather than acknowledge the causality goes in the other direction and pony up the cash for programs to break the cycle of poverty.
Not only is that a copout and demonstrably false, but giving people money makes poverty worse, not better. It’s counterintuitive, and unfortunately proponents of hand-outs act out of emotion and (naive) intuition, not data. They often harm those they intend to help as a result.
If the movement were "Demilitarize the police", then yes, that is absolutely something I could be in favor of.
As it stands, "Defund the police" is to me a weasel word version of "Abolish the police" and I honestly do think people are just being coy when they claim not to see that.
Most people using the word "defund" mean to reduce the level of funding for police and spend more on other social services. One argument is that police are not well equipped to provide services to people who are having a mental health, relationship, or substance abuse crisis and not actively doing violence. A mental health nurse or social worker might be a more appropriate first responder in situations that are not primarily characterized by violence.
There are a small but significant number of people in the current protests calling for policing as we know it to be abolished; they don't beat around the bush about it. The phrase "abolish the police" has 2.5 million google hits, a NYT op-ed, and a Wikipedia article.
Maybe they should carry signs that read “Fund social services” instead. The entire country has been through a traumatic event, coming at the heals of a massive opioid epidemic, I’m pretty sure it would be a unifying message that every American would support unequivocally.
Notably these funds don’t need to come at the expense of police funding.
We just dumped something like $5 trillion into a fire pit called COVID. There’s no lack of emergency funding for these programs if people demanded it.
Defund also means balkanization of police duties. The police spend about 5% of their time on violent crime. They're also highly resistant to reforms and oversight. If we reduced police budgets by 80%, restricting their duties to those we consider necessary police work, they would be much smaller and easier to manage. The excess budget could go both to funding social services and to paying social workers, etc to do the other jobs that police currently do (and do badly).
There is a real risk in politics that people mean literally what they are saying.
There is a situation where a group of people have together under the slogan "defund the police". There is a very high risk that if they get the power to do something they will, literally and only, defund the police.
Not many people are reading policy documents. The point of unity in politics is usually the literal meaning of the words being used. Secret signals of "really we meant this other thing" tend not to work.
Defund can easily mean abolish; there isn't really a feasible way to run a police force if they can't pay salaries. It is a literal reading of the phrase and in line with what some (hopefully a tiny minority) of protesters have been asking for.
Why fret so much over the language though, that's what I don't understand. I think most people, of any POV, would agree it's not the best phrase given that without explanation it means what a small minority wants. Move past it, to the issue.
They've achieved many, though far from all, of their goals in various municipalities.
Why do you believe that a PR campaign is the only protest of value?
> The way you phrased it, the protests are nothing more than tantrums by oversized children.
That is in no way implied from how I phrased it. Pain and weariness from racialized murders and intimidation by cops is not a childish tantrum and I hope you never have to endure that pain yourself. I do hope that you find the empathy to consider their position.
You say the protests have achieved their goals. To me, that means they are an organized campaign of some sort.
The fact is, BLM is a national organization with nearly universal name recognition at this point. They have funding. They have PR teams. They are directing messaging.
And the fact remains that I think "Defund the Police" is terrible messaging.
> Please treat them like people.
As I said at the beginning, I think we're talking past each other.
I never meant to dehumanize the protesters.
The main point I am trying to make is that as someone with no horse in this race (i.e. I am neither pro-BLM nor pro-police) if I were forced to pick a side on the issue based on my current view of what is and has happened over the past couple months, I would come down on the side of the police. I'd rather just stay out of it.
All this said, as much as I think our politics differ, I really do respect the way you've responded to people in this thread, and I hope there are more people like you among the protesters because then maybe you've got an actual shot at achieving your goals.
> You say the protests have achieved their goals. To me, that means they are an organized campaign of some sort.
As in there are various demands by various groups and you can identify the core where they overlap.
> The fact is, BLM is a national organization with nearly universal name recognition at this point. They have funding. They have PR teams. They are directing messaging.
BLM is decentralized. They don't have most of that.
> And the fact remains that I think "Defund the Police" is terrible messaging.
Okay. But it's not PR. It's not some campaign crafted by an overpaid consultant. It's a decentralized protest movement. I don't want it to be that, either. That's part of the problem in politics - caring far too much about this kind of thing. Focus on the realities, the people dying. The violent and aggressive and frequently racist police.
> > Please treat them like people.
> As I said at the beginning, I think we're talking past each other.
I think the attempt to infantilize was nearly dehumanizing.
> I never meant to dehumanize the protesters.
Then stop calling protests in response to murders by police a tantrum by oversized children.
> The main point I am trying to make is that as someone with no horse in this race (i.e. I am neither pro-BLM nor pro-police)
We all have a horse in this race. We live together in a society that has some level of control over things like policing, equity, violence, crime, poverty. The "neutral" position is implicit support for the status quo, much as being a "moderate" in politics indicates the same.
> if I were forced to pick a side on the issue based on my current view of what is and has happened over the past couple months, I would come down on the side of the police. I'd rather just stay out of it.
As I said before, ha.
> All this said, as much as I think our politics differ, I really do respect the way you've responded to people in this thread, and I hope there are more people like you among the protesters because then maybe you've got an actual shot at achieving your goals.
The vast majority of people in the protests are like me. You should go to one.
The point of disbanding the Minneapolis Police Department (your 3rd link) is to work around police protections like minimum force size and union protections that are codified in the city's charter. The plan is to remove and replace, not just remove [0].
As for the other two - two is not a "non trivial number" regardless of who gives them a platform. This YouGov poll [1] shows 11% support (and ~20% support among blacks and hispanics) for abolishing the police as of June, which is a non trivial number. But framing it as a yes/no question loses a lot of granularity - I bet most of those people would advocate replacing the current police force with something that materially resembles a (more community-based, less militarized) police force.
Sure, I don't disagree. The implication though was that this was a story mainly/entirely coming out of so-called conservative media, so I posted a small sampling of links from other places.
Perception is all that matters, and a large chunk of the country follows conservative media.
Unfortunately the country is doing a great job of lining up behind their preferred propaganda outlets rather than looking for truth. This is true for both Liberals and Conservatives.
You were the one who brought it up to support your argument. Your argument doesn't seem to rest on what the public preception is but in what is actually happening.
So yes i would say the veracity of the statement is relavent here.
The net effect of people hearing "Black Lives Matter protesters clashed with police again last night" on the news for an entire summer is going to be a giant step backwards for whatever BLM is actually trying to achieve.
That is true whether or not the riots have actually been geographically widespread.
It's dragged on to the point that I fully expect support to start dropping precipitously. Especially as the protests have become continuously more destructive riots.
That usually means that the police used fairly extreme violence and chemical weapons on protesters and received maybe a handful of water bottles thrown at them after doing so.
Your news sources have an agenda and tend to get these things wrong. Go to a protest and see for yourself if you want to viscerally watch them lie in real time.
I'm an American and have only seen the police rioting. Defunding the police is the most reasonable option I have heard in my lifetime. Seems like the perfect solution, there is nothing bad to say about it, it's opponents are left to make up "widespread rioting".
> I'm an American and have only seen the police rioting
I'm an American. I can't believe you can say that with a straight face. As soon as you say that ONLY the police are doing something wrong means you have an understanding of the situation that no facts will fix.
I mean I was targeted. By personally I meant that I had that personal experience. It was as part of a group - the cops tend to use "collective punishment" when it comes to protests, after all.
The use of tear gas is the use of a chemical weapon and a war crime, but when you turn it against civilians in your own country we give it a pass.
So you weren't personally targeted. In what way were you targeted? Were you doing nothing to arouse police attention? I think most first world countries have a gas they can use for riot control. Are you insisting that most first world countries are regularly engaging in what you would call war crimes... that are worse than other countries?
You are misunderstanding what they meant by "personally." They don't mean they were singled out. They mean it was a first-hand experience. As in "I thanked him personally for the gift." This is the primary definition of personally
your own definition relies on a 1 to 1 communication between people. so you're wrong right? I don't personally thank Rotary International for all their hard work.
"I personally cursed the cop for pepper spraying me"
Just that one cop huh? They're literally saying all the cops targeted them.
My definition doesn't imply communication between people or any interaction at all. It just means literally physically present for something.
"After a long solo hike, the researcher was able to personally see the inside of a volcano." There is only one person in that story. No 1:1 communication. It just means the person was there for the thing. This is how personally was used in the comment.
"Personal in this sense clearly means 1:1." Why is that clear? The commenter said they meant the other definition. Wouldn't they know what they meant better than you do?
1. In the sense that I used the term, I had the personal experience of being targeted. Attempting to browbeat me with your misapprehension is not going to work.
2. You're now editorializing my experience of which you have no knowledge, calling it a mob. Oh my. Please refrain from using your imagination regarding my experiences.
I don't think you really understand the meaning of the words "I had the personal experience of being targeted." Mostly because you seem to ignore the words you use. Especially the word "targeted." Also because you could eliminate the word "personally" and you'd be more correct. But really, you can't just be in the middle of a protesting mob and then they get tear gassed and then say "HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN TO ME AND ONLY ME?!"
>2. You're now editorializing my experience of which you have no knowledge, calling it a mob. Oh my. Please refrain from using your imagination regarding my experiences.
I think that's a lesson you could learn from regarding other people as well. It seems like a right you reserve just for you.
How is that better? In what world is police officers dosing large groups of protestors acceptable?
Give it enough years, and people will talk about the brave protestors of 2020. But like all "brave protests" of the past, today they should be supported, and are not.
In the perfectly reasonable world where the protest was escalated by rioters, anarchists, and arsonists (you know, like every protest in portland, since ever) and the police issue a dispersal order as a response to buildings on fire and violent attacks. Then they issue 5 more. Then they announce it on twitter. There is NO other way to deal with a riot. The police are vastly outnumbered and have very few tools to do their job. Well there is another way, but it’s far worse.
Nothing about these “protests” after dark is brave. It’s shameful and cowardly. So is the response from politicians.
In SEA, that's not how it's worked. The police violence has come before the announcements. Before any serious property damage (not that property damage justifies collective punishment or chemical weapons).
Have you been to the protests in PDX? Seen the cops hurting people for standing in a protest?
Absolute nonsense. I was there, repeatedly. They shot first and either then made an announcement or never made one.
Example: they announced a curfew via text a few minutes before it went into effect. Many didn't get this because they didn't have their phones with them. Tear gas and flashbangs had already been deployed with zero warnings from police.
It is not helpful or okay to assert such falsehoods with confidence.
You were in both portland and seattle? have you considered your correlation to madness? Is it a 100% correlation? I'm sorry, but are you saying protesters didn't have their phones on them? As opposed to literally every other protester who is filming every unfortunate human interaction at every protest?
No, it's not. I did a search for the string "lawnchair_larry" on this, the second page (i.e. the low-quality page) of comments on this story. It shows up 15 times. Then I went to the third page (i.e. the really low-quality page), opened all the hidden "[more]" subthreads, searched again, and found the string another 10 times. (Nothing showed up on the first page!) You have a lot to say. I read quite a few of these excretions, and found nothing but prejudice, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and unwarranted fear. You should better educate yourself about the situation in this nation and you should be a better person. The fact that you feel more empathy for abusive white cops than for their minority victims is a fact about you, not about the world.
I think I've clarified what I meant. I was targeted. I can't specify the exact degree to which anyone was skipped over to get to me.
> In what way were you targeted?
First time, it was indiscriminate use of teargas. Second time, indiscriminate use of teargas and a flashbang shot at my feet.
> Were you doing nothing to arouse police attention?
I was standing in a protest.
> I think most first world countries have a gas they can use for riot control. Are you insisting that most first world countries are regularly engaging in what you would call war crimes... that are worse than other countries?
It would be a war crime if it were a foreign military force using it against the exact same crowd, but not if it's cops. War crimes have a way of being selectively (un)enforced when it comes to those in power, in any case.
Police are fairly atrocious in most countries, so I don't think there's much point in trying to figure out exactly where I'd rank the police in the US. It wouldn't make it right if it were average or not.
You've done it poorly. You can't specify the degree to which you think you were personally selected. And you've given two examples of them shooting indiscriminately. So no, they didn't personally target you.
The other commenter seemed to understand well enough. Maybe instead of playing a blame game you could accept my clarification and move on?
> You can't specify the degree to which you think you were personally selected.
And I never claimed to.
> And you've given two examples of them shooting indiscriminately. So no, they didn't personally target you.
The second example was closer to me than anyone else and I was at the rear of the crowd.
I don't know how productive it is for me to keep telling you what I mean by saying I was personally targeted. But okay, I'll try again with the same substitution: I had a first-hand experience being targeted by police with chemical and explosive weapons.
I'm really still missing your clarification... I'm not really sure what game blame you think I'm playing?
> You can't specify the degree to which you think you were personally selected.
> And I never claimed to.
AND YET 2 SENTENCES LATER......
>I don't know how productive it is for me to keep telling you what I mean by saying I was personally targeted. But okay, I'll try again with the same substitution: I had a first-hand experience being targeted by police with chemical and explosive weapons.
The scare words really kill your credibility. It’s tear gas and pepper spray, not mustard gas. Stop trying to manufacture an oppressed victim narrative. We can call a water cannon a chemical weapon too.
> The scare words really kill your credibility. It’s tear gas and pepper spray, not mustard gas.
If it were a foreign military doing the exact same action to the exact same people, it would be a war crime. There are serious impacts from using tear gas, including poorly-understood hormonal impacts to women, particularly pregnant women.
> Stop trying to manufacture an oppressed victim narrative.
I haven't manufactured anything, these are things that have been happening for three months via aggressive, proactive police action. You can go see it for yourself by attending a protest at a major city. Or you can review the countless videos. Or you can listen to people (like me) who were there.
> We can call a water cannon a chemical weapon too.
No we can't. Water cannons are also unacceptable in these situations, however. People like to act like these weapons are relatively harmless, but people have been disabled, nearly killed, or straight-up killed with them.
That list includes deaths caused by law enforcement and death of rioters killed by people trying to protect themselves from the rioters as well.
There are some additional deaths by the rioters that are not in the list though but that does provide a decent synopsis of some of the deaths.
I'm just trying to put GP's dubious numbers in their proper context. Of those 1000, how many would you estimate are killed without reasonable cause? Could it be 30? 300? 970? We shouldn't turn off our brains just because somebody said someone died. USA society is fine with the carnage on the highway and throughout the Middle East; I think we can deal with a tiny amount of carnage in order to improve.
> A non trivial number of the protesters are advocating for complete elimination of the police though.
This categorically isn't defunding police, this is police abolition, and getting them confused is likely why you think it's a luxury belief because I fail to see what's luxurious about getting tear gassed every Friday/Saturday night or having the cops stand aside letting groups like the Proud Boys brutalize protestors and journalists. There's nothing luxurious about getting tear gassed for 3 months straight, it's a genuine struggle.
It looks like your account has been using HN primarily for political battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of which specific politics you support or abhor. If you'd like to understand why, there are extensive past explanations at these links. (If you or anyone reads those explanations and still has a question that isn't answered there, I'd like to know what it is.)
SPD routinely started firing into crowds prior to making any such announcements, including the first time I was hit. The second time, they announced it and then immediately started firing at the crowd.
Announcing an unlawful assembly is not carte blanche to dole out collective punishment or violence, either.
There's already lawsuits ongoing. They won't go anywhere in terms of reforms because individual cops are virtually always indemnified, difficult to identify in these situations (many covered their badge numbers and nametags with tape), and the city will absorb the cost without the department taking any real hits.
It isn’t, it only shows you know absolutely nothing about police budgets, and your well intentioned but incredibly naive attempt at social engineering using completely untested ideas will get more people killed.
This is tosh. If the idea is to defund the surplus, then the police will effectively maintain the exact same level of presence as already displayed.
Basically, with your suggestion, nothing will change, other than police garages. That's clearly not what the protestors want, and as such, we can immediately discard your assertion.
Why do you believe that? Isn't it possible that in high crime areas it would make more sense to focus on the police first, so that everybody, including school counselors, is not too afraid to go to work?
Why do you believe this? It seems to me that reinvesting budgets spent on surplus humvees on more/better school counselors is a perfectly reasonable goal.