Nobody is trying to quell protests. I don’t know how that misconception is still alive. The problem is the rioting. Nobody would be trying to disperse crowds if everyone was peaceful.
> Nobody would be trying to disperse crowds if everyone was peaceful.
That's not really true. There is an area between "lawful protesting" and "rioting" that's usually called civil disobedience. Civil disobedience as usually understood is peaceful, but it's also by design inherently disruptive.
In Austin, TX protestors blocked the main highway through the city. That was obviously incredibly disruptive, but many people believe the city police's forceful response of shooting less-lethal rounds relatively indiscriminately into the crowd was the exact type of response people were protesting against. A large group of trauma doctors in Austin wrote a paper arguing against using these types of rounds for crowd control due to the horrific injuries they treated: https://www.statesman.com/news/20200816/beanbag-rounds-cause...
In my mind civil disobedience, as an ethical concept, is about refusing to comply with one or more laws that you believe to be unjust. Disregarding the Jim Crow laws seems to be the "textbook" example in this regard.
So blocking a road in order to draw attention to some other incident of injustice isn't about how the law about blocking roads is unjust, nor is it even about the some other unjust law. In your example the protest was about the George Floyd killing in which the police officers were rather quickly charged with a crime.
The protesters in your example are indeed "protesting" but I don't think that their tactics are an illustration of civil disobedience, as I understand it.
So if we are to excuse protestors for breaking laws I think there needs to be a different ethical argument that must be made. And that argument has to tackle the problem of which crimes can be excused: disorderly conduct, assault, arson, vandalism, theft/looting, manslaughter? And perhaps it matters how that disobedience is directed? For example, torching the police vehicle of the police force that is implicated in the injustice seems different to me (but still not necessarily excusable) than torching the police vehicle in a city thousands of miles a way from the incident, or than looting your local Best Buy.
For those of you who feel like these types of protests are ethical/warranted/justified, I would ask, what is the limiting principle? What would represent the protesters going "too far"? When would it be appropriate to say enough is enough? When is it no longer protesting and is just criminal behavior?
I would add that another component of civil disobedience is a willingness to accept the consequences, to be arrested without violence or any resistance. I should have included that in my original comment.
> to be arrested without violence or any resistance.
Again, why are people insisting on redefining words because they don't like their meaning? Chaining yourself to a physical structure like a building or tree, and going so far as to make cutting those chains difficult, is one of the prototypical examples of civil disobedience. The whole point is to make it difficult for police to arrest and remove the protestors in those situations.
I would argue that those are examples of non-violent approaches. Another tactic is to "play dead" so that the protesters have to be physically carried away, tedious and time consuming.
But those tactics are very different than what is going on and I think it is quite easy to distinguish between that sort of thing and rioting.
Sorry, I was feeling adversarial last night because of Jacob Blake. Discussion about the right way to protest without the context of the actions precipitating it isn’t getting the job done.
Perhaps I focused too much on one type of civil disobedience. The examples you cite are useful in illustrating that the disobedience has to be peaceful. Or perhaps it might be better to say that the moral authority or message of the protest is vastly strengthened by peaceful disobedience. The willingness to be arrested without resisting is also an important component as it communicates a concurrent belief in the rule of law while still protesting.
When the disobedience includes assault, vandalism, arson, looting, and so on, it is no longer a protest, it is a riot and it looses all its moral legitimacy as a protest in my mind.
It is an interesting question. My first thought is that a core element of the Boston Tea Party was that the colonist had no representation, there was no legitimate way for them to participate in their governance and they were protesting specific laws/taxes that were being imposed without their consent.
I don't think that the current situation in the US is analogous. There are lots of ways to affect change without resorting to violence: peaceful protest, drafting new laws, voting for more police funding, voting for different representatives, voting for different executives.
The idea that all those options have been exhausted and the only solution is to physically and economically destroy communities in order to draw attention to the problem is illogical and self-defeating. In an even more bizarre twist, the story that seems to be emerging is that the rioter's demands are to make changes that aren't wanted by the people in the communities that the rioters purport to represent (see recent polls that minority communities want more police, not less).
> There is no oracle that says civil disobedience for cause X is just but cause Y is unjust.
I'm not making any comment about the justness or unjustness of the underlying cause of the protests
> The police cannot simply allow it to occur so they will react with the amount of force needed to end it swiftly.
This statement, however, is simply bullshit, and the US has literally hundreds of years of examples of how civil disobedience can be dealt with reasonably and humanely (of course as well as other examples where it's dealt with viciously). The protest would have eventually died down (an effective strategy to dealing with these kinds of protests is just to cordon them off and wait it out, they'll eventually need food and water), protestors would have been arrested and cited with an appropriate misdemeanor.
Your proposed strategy opens civil society up to endless denial of service attacks. Normal life grinds to a halt every time someone feels like they need to "protest". Would you be OK with a single person just sitting in the middle of a highway holding a protest sign? 5 people? 10? 50? Is the nature of the protest important?
The classical notion of civil disobedience is that you have to be willing to accept the consequences, so you can't resist arrest and you have to accept being jailed or paying the fine etc. What I don't see in the recent "protests" is any willingness to be arrested. In fact I see lots of people resisting arrest.
Folks, this concept isn't that difficult, and there seem to be a bunch of comments arguing about what civil disobedience really is, as if we didn't have hundreds of years of examples and jurisprudence to go by.
I'm in no way disagreeing that there were clear, obvious examples of violence and property destruction, just as clearly as there were many examples of peaceful protests. But these protests are like Rorschach tests: everyone sees in them what their mind tells them to see. I can say for a fact that in the particular instance I cited in Austin there were clear examples of police firing into the crowd in an indiscriminate fashion. Not even the police chief is really trying to defend it anymore.
My understanding is that in many historical examples of civil disobedience there was often an prior understanding between the protesters and the police as to what was going to happen. In a sense, it was scripted.
I'm not going to try to justify the police actions in Austin -- I don't know the details, but it seems to me that taking a large number of people into custody with no "script" and with the people not ready to be detained is probably quite hazardous, stressful, and ripe for something to go very wrong.
> Folks, this concept isn't that difficult, and there seem to be a bunch of comments arguing about what civil disobedience really is, as if we didn't have hundreds of years of examples and jurisprudence to go by.
I think what I've learned it discussing this is that in fact most people don't understand the philosophy of civil disobedience. Most people seem use the term to mean "breaking things, intimidating people, and baiting the police to draw attention to a just cause". And there is a unexplained rule that determines when the cause is "just" enough to excuse committing the crime that draws the attention.
Civil disobedience only works when there's civil reciprocity in a reasonable time frame. It's being abandoned as a tactic because it has been yielding diminishing returns, and radical folk are conscious that conditions keep worsening, in terms of both direct violence and funding of a repressive status quo.
Just as every single human being desires peace in the same way they desire happiness. The love of peace, therefore, is not a virtue. When those who are leading their nations sing the praise of peace they are sincere. They seek war to achieve their peace. Even violent criminals demand peace, if only for themselves. They do not love war; they aspire to an unjust peace.
That is at least an honest statement that what is going on isn't "civil disobedience". Yet there are people who are insisting that the riotous activities can be accurately given that label.
Just as there are lots of people that insist on conflating all protests with riots and cheer when the police gas the former only to act surprised when that leads to the latter.
I realize that we all struggle to overcome confirmation bias, but I really am not seeing the police preemptively gassing people prior to the riotous or threatening behavior. I don't doubt that there might be some examples of this but it is overwhelming outnumbered by people rioting but claiming that they are "peacefully assembling". What I really can't figure out is how many of these people are honest in thinking that the riotous behavior is legitimate (and useful) protest, how many of them are just excited to participate in a very realistic LARP game, and how many are attempting insurrection/rebellion.
Go back and look at the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis around May 30 - people were protesting peacefully the day after the incident (the most disruptive thing I saw was blocking intersections and some graffiti), but cops broke out the tear gas. That heavy-handed behavior in my view led directly to the full on riot the following day. (There's also an allegation that a right wing provocateur got things going by smashing the windows of an Autozone store, but I'm not sure how much of a causal role that played, and think the riot would probably have happened anyway).
Certainly, this is not always the case as local and temporal contexts vary widely. Some riots are spontaneous, some are planned to target state property or force its defense, some are engineered to exploit chaos for profit. You might find it informative to drop in on one if it is occurring in your area; counterintuitively it's not particularly dangerous to attend as a neutral person, though you should be prepared for the possibility of being tear gassed.
Honestly, this is kind of like putting your hand inside the mouth of a crocodile and then complaining that you have been bitten. Or if you start insulting/harassing and physically blocking someone and then start complaining that you were punched as a result.
I would consider civil disobedience something more like as a policeman to refuse to disrupt a peaceful protest, or illegally publishing data (consider Aaron Swartz, Alexandra Elbakyan, Edward Snowden, or Chelsea Manning), or someone like Oskar Schindler.
A crocodile is a vicious wild animal. And in your analogy... the police are the crocodiles?
Sorry for being facetious, but the whole point is that people expect police to have some self-control (unlike an animal) and behave better in these situations. If you're a cashier, and a customer is yelling at you, berating you, taunting you, etc. you're expected to try to remain calm and attempt to de-escalate the situation - certainly you're not supposed to attack the person. If anything, police should be held to an even higher standard than this.
I am not implying that. For example a worker in a gun manufactory can be civilly disobedient too by not showing up, slacking off, or intentionally making arms of subpar quality.
Edit: I am talking about wartime labor mobilization. In addition the government owns gun manufactories too.
> to make themselves heard in a way that cannot be ignored.
You are stepping away from just civil disobedience then. Riots, sieges, or a full scale revolution fit that description better.
> For example a worker in a gun manufactory can be civilly disobedient too by not showing up, slacking off, or intentionally making arms of subpar quality.
You can't just redefine words to suit your fancy because you don't like what the word actually means. That example you give is literally 100% not what civil disobedience means. Civil disobedience by definition means defying government, not your employer.
I feel like you're being intentionally obtuse. Civil disobedience is protest against a government, and is usually assumed to be non-violent. Look at Wikipedia, pick any result out of Google. Blocking a highway is classic civil disobedience, in line with making a human chain and blocking access to government buildings.
Equating these acts with "siege" screams bad faith to me, I feel like every example you've given is intentionally misleading or missing the point.
If I blocked someone from getting in their driveway and shouted insults at them, I think getting punched would be reasonable. I am not a professional conflict resolver.
Police, on the other hand, are our paid civil servants. It is their job to remove passion and emotion from the interaction and to deescalate potentially dangerous situations. They have a duty to respond sub-proportionately in a way that resolves conflict unless their life is in danger.
Time and time again we see police responding by escalating tension, passion, and violence. This is a spectacular failure of their duty and huge breach of public trust.
Pretty sure police officers nightly beating of protestors, pulling off masks and pepper spraying their eyes and assaulting reporters is a very direct attempt at quelling protestors.
If you followed the nightly protests in Portland OR with any closeness it'd be abundantly clear. Examples just in the past 20 days:
You see enough of these videos and you appreciate the cops and just vindictive and angry at the prospect of losing "power". It doesn't matter what protestors do (and they most they've done to directly threaten officers is thrown water bottles and apples and flares into an empty police building), police will use any reason (or none) to beat protestors.
* As far as I know these videos have resulted in NO reprimands to officers, might as well be standard operating procedure as it continues to happen nightly
> Today I watched a police officer in kenosha wisconsin get knocked unconscious with a brick. The fellow police officers picked him up and dragged him away - while the crowd changed "Fuck the police" and recorded it.
The idea that the worst the protesters have done is throw apples at the police is so crazy I don't even know how you could be that deep in a bubble
I'm directly talking about Portland, where plenty of protestors have been knocked unconscious by police. People get pepper sprayed in the eyes for no reason besides cops are angry.
If you want to conflate places to strengthen a case then you need to dive in to what happened at Kenosha and the lack of police response to that tragedy or any of the others.
If you want to bring up how "protestors were asking for it" by showing up to protests then we got to ask if police are asking for mass nation wide protests by actively resisting change and harming black lives.
Do you even live in Portland? I do and I live a mile away from the Justice Center where protests centered. There was looting the first night but not much at all since. Also, it's been normal COVID times business as usual in the surrounding area during business hours. If you want to make up narratives choose a different city.
Also, if you think police can just beat people senseless because they feel challenged then you're just a short step away from text book fascism.
I believe the commonly used term for this is "largely peaceful".
Sure. They're largely peaceful, except when attacking and almost killing civilians[1]. And it's not even intended as a joke. There's some crazy levels of cognitive dissonance going on.
Yep, one night protestors were just as brutal as police, mistaken identity and tensions high from the other night when a car almost ran protesters over.
You have one example versus dozens of examples of police violence. And it's Andy Ngo, who once again didn't actually take the video footage.
You're the one with cognitive dissonance claiming all nights are violently attacking civilians when you have one example. Somehow though most nights police beat protestors or use tear gas and that’s ok by you?
Are you being willfully dishonest or just naive? Portland is not doing this to protesters. They are rioting. They do this after giving half a dozen warnings. They say that anyone who does not vacate the riot will be subject to crowd control measures and arrest. The rioters remain and continue to be violent and to intentionally shield those committing the most egregious acts. It’s disgusting. The police must respond to the nightly attempts to burn down buildings and attacks on them from projectiles, laser blinding attempts, incendiary devices, and more.
There is no justification for it whatsoever. There is no legitimate cause behind any of it.
Watch the hour long interview with the Portland cop that was going around. It’s good perspective.
Today I watched a police officer in kenosha wisconsin get knocked unconscious with a brick. The fellow police officers picked him up and dragged him away - while the crowd changed "Fuck the police" and recorded it.
In the same vein, I saw store owners starting to shoot at protestors.
I suspect, generally, all parties would rather have police keeping the peace. No one wants a gun battle in the streets as people try to protect their property from looters.
I'm not 100% sure what I'd do in this case, but these are not friendly protests. I'm finding the police remarkably restrained. Even in some of these videos we are seeing, people are taking police officers weapons and / or assaulting a police officer before they open fire.
If you're attacking someone who's armed (police officer or not) you should be prepared to suffer the consequences. (I'm not saying all cases are like this, just mentioning that there's a clear tilt to the coverage here).
This kinda elides the context of it being a response to what looked to many people like a blatant attempted murder.
If you're attacking someone who's armed (police officer or not) you should be prepared to suffer the consequences.
Conversely, if police departments abuse their authority, shouldn't they expect to be punished by the people they serve, and in a similarly peremptory manner?
Nobody gives a shit about peaceful protests. If they did the Iraq war would never have happened and many policy areas would be far different from how they are. Riots should not be a first resort but when other types of civic engagement have failed they're a wholly legitimate tactic to force change.
> Riots should not be a first resort but when other types of civic engagement have failed they're a wholly legitimate tactic to force change.
This statement is devoid of any explanation as to what types of "change" are important enough to override "other types of civic engagement". The legislative process, voting, representative democracy, the "rule of law" are all designed to avoid having people take matters into their own hands. If you are going to argue that all that should be thrown out it has to be more convincing than just some generic statement that "change" is necessary.
You aren't making the case for abandoning the rule of law, you are just asserting that it is the right thing to do in this case.
Your argument seems to be that everything possible has been tried to address police violence and that there is no other solution other than to riot.
I could point to various crime statistics to suggest that the problem is not in fact intractable or "fairly common" (while still being a problem to be addressed) but it really isn't worth it. Even if I shared your apparent assessment of the problem, how does it make sense to physically and economically destroy communities in response? How does it make sense to make it impossible to actually "police" in these communities? How does it make sense to drive away anyone with resources from these communities? Why do you even think the people reacting this way are making a principled statement about police violence and aren't just taking advantage of the situation?
The phrase "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" comes to mind but it is entirely inadequate to describe the disastrous sequence of events that is going on in so many communities right now.
It's simple enough. The police primarily operate to preserve the existing social order which prioritizes property over life. The deliberate infliction of economic pain is being used to coerce change, because other avenues have failed. The authorities there could very easily preempt this by arresting the police officer who shot Jacob Blake in the back and charging him with attempted murder. He'll have his day in court and be given ample opportunity to make the argument for why his actions were justified.
In general, rioting is used selectively, targeting official buildings followed by corporate concerns, which extract capital from local communities. Little of the news coverage about Kenosha drew attention to the fact that the largest building burned down Monday night was the WI Dept of Corrections; many commentators prefer to focus your attention on commercial damage in order to push the idea that it's indiscriminate.
> The authorities there could very easily preempt this by arresting the police officer who shot Jacob Blake in the back and charging him with attempted murder.
You think the mob will stop? You are advocating for a justice system driven by threats from the mob that must be responded to in real time. You aren't even attempting to grapple with the particular facts that are in evidence at the moment in this case, never mind what might be discovered by actually asking questions. You aren't describing a justice system based on the rule of law, you are describing mob rule. It won't end well for anybody. Why would anyone in their right mind be a police office given the framework you describe? Why would anyone choose to stay in that type of a jurisdiction? The logical consequences of your framework would be disastrous for the community. The medicine you are prescribing is far, far worse than the disease.
Yes, I'm pretty sure it would, or at least would have had this happened earlier. I'm not advocating for mob rule; I'm saying that riots are a response to the lack of justice that prevails. The police officer should have been arrested immediately on suspicion of attempted murder, much as Derek Chauvin should have been arrested immediately on suspicion of murder for killing George Floyd.
The reality is that police often shoot and kill with a sense of impunity because they enjoy considerable legal immunity, to the point that the identity of a police officer who carries out a shooting is often withheld from the public. I'm saying that any time a police officer shoots, kills, or seriously injures someone, they should be immediately relieved of duty pending a full inquiry, no matter what the circumstances. If there is a colorable suspicion of misbehavior (eg the shooting was not a case of returning fire or action during the commission of a crime), then they should be subject to arrest like any other criminal suspect, while retaining their full panoply of legal rights like presumption of innocence, access to counsel etc.
If a lot of people don't want to be cops who are subject to such restraints, good. I don't want cops who use force casually. What we have now is a system that throws the book at anyone who takes or threatens life (with far higher sentences than most other developed countries despite little evidence of a deterrent effect) while frequently applying light or no penalties, or sometimes no serious investigation, to police officers who commit similar acts. These inequities are compounded by economic and racial disparities in the application of force, legal sanctions and so on.
Unless you've lived in other countries or have significant first- or second-hand experience (including talking to current and former police officers) this might be hard information to accept.
> If a lot of people don't want to be cops who are subject to such restraints, good. I don't want cops who use force casually. What we have now is a system that throws the book at anyone who takes or threatens life (with far higher sentences than most other developed countries despite little evidence of a deterrent effect) while frequently applying light or no penalties, or sometimes no serious investigation, to police officers who commit similar acts.
A core principle of a civil society with the rule of law is the government is granted a monopoly on the use of force to enforce the laws. If someone steals from you, you don't get to hunt them down and kidnap them for 1 year even if the punishment for the crime is 1 year of imprisonment. We explicitly grant police the authority to use force and when they don't use it properly they are subject to exactly the same punishment as you and I. There is no conceptual asymmetry on the use of illegitimate force. Self-defense is another example of this. You can legitimately use force against an attacker in self-defense. If you kill someone in self-defense that isn't murder and isn't an example of a double standard.
> I'm saying that any time a police officer shoots, kills, or seriously injures someone, they should be immediately relieved of duty pending a full inquiry, no matter what the circumstances.
I'm pretty sure this is exactly what happens. The mob isn't waiting more than 30 minutes never mind for a "full inquiry".
> If there is a colorable suspicion of misbehavior (eg the shooting was not a case of returning fire or action during the commission of a crime), then they should be subject to arrest like any other criminal suspect, while retaining their full panoply of legal rights like presumption of innocence, access to counsel etc.
Tell that to the mob and its enablers. We have state governors opining on who was right or wrong just hours after tragic events, without any attempt to understand what really happened. This encourages mobs and rioting.
Same thing happened in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. Some ridiculously vague account on social media regarding an interaction with police and a mob arrives to loot and pillage all night long.
Just a couple of days ago in Mineapolis someone committed suicide while police approached and that triggered more rioting.
We won't survive as a society if every police interaction is interpreted immediately as yet another racial injustice, never mind if every rumor of a police interaction is interpreted that way. Mobs and rioting need to be shutdown hard so we have room for "full inquiry", but there are political leaders who not only won't shut down this activity they are actively encouraging it.
It's not a misconception. As an example, here's a video of riot-gear-clad police marching on a crowd that is peacefully listening to a violin vigil for a man murdered by that same police department: https://twitter.com/jessiedesigngal/status/12771260192462602...
The parent claimed that it was a misconception that police were "quelling" peaceful protest and I shared a video of police disrupting a very obviously peaceful protest - feels relatively straightforward?
Watching the original video, do you legitimately believe that any of the police officers are in danger? Do you believe that a single (unsubstantiated claim, without any evidence of a) thrown object justifies pepper spraying reporters and attacking bystanders with batons?
I originally shared the video claiming that police were interfering with a peaceful protest. You disputed that the police were interfering, saying they were marching past. When I shared further evidence that the police were in fact disrupting the protest and hurting people who were participating, you found reason to instead believe that the protest was not peaceful. Consider your biases.
Here [0] [1] [2] [3] are more examples of and news articles discussing police attacking peaceful protesters.
Yep. In Seattle the vast majority of protests had no issues, because they were peaceful, permitted, and constructive. Literally the only ones that ran into problems with the police were the ones that were breaking the law, violating police orders, committing violence, blocking highways, etc. Those particular situations were often claimed to be “peaceful protests” in social media but were definitely just violent rioting and opportunistic destruction/theft.
I have no idea how people have fallen for the misleading narrative that violence was caused by police. It’s a textbook example of either the naivety of an emotionally charged mob, or incredible social media marketing, or both.
Unfortunately many well-meaning protesters were also swept up in events that were subsumed by antifa/far left groups whose aim was confrontation and violence. For them, the coming backlash against their movement (due to violence) is going to sting.
