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The protests were sparked by the lack of accountability of the police resulting in police brutality. The violent people among the protesters are subject to the

The protests were sparked by the lack of accountability of the police resulting in police brutality. The violent people among the protesters are subject to the same incentives. The more they expect to be held accountable, the more likely they will refrain from violence. Anonymizing photos of the violent ones is therefore likely to support their actions by making accountability less likely. To scrub ethically, limit it to the non-violent protestors. To support non-violence, better to help identify the violent people -- police or civilian -- the opposite of anonymizing them.

whatshisface 6y ago
What's your plan, exactly, for making the program not work for you if you've smashed a window?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
milquetoastaf 6y ago
The point of a riot is to riot
Mirioron 6y ago
To add though: it's not easy to tell who are the non-violent and who are the violent protestors. Sometimes violent protestors hang out in the crowd and only strike at opportune moments. If they're blurred out like everyone else during the times they are not violent then it becomes harder to hold them accountable.
michaelt 6y ago
Given that this is a protest about cops getting away with brutality even when there's clear evidence I think "gather evidence against both sides equally" is unlikely to be convincing argument to protesters.
- downerending 6y ago
  I doubt any criminal really wants to be captured on video. Having just watched a couple of videos this morning of "protesters" viciously kicking their unconscious victims in the head, I'm very much against the idea of anonymizing any of this.
  - hangphyr 6y ago
    Depends on how it's used. For example it could be useful for people protesting authoritarian governments, such as in Hong Kong. For blurring rioters during a crime spree, I don't think there's anything moral to be gained from protecting criminals.
    - downerending 6y ago
      Though I'm on the side of the Hong Kong citizens, I doubt this would help much, since the government is going to have extensive videos of their own. Not to mention a likely capability to capture immediately or almost immediately off of people's phones. On a somewhat related note, I wonder if the thousands of people being recorded committing various crimes in the US right now realize that their faces are almost certainly being compiled in various government and private databases, to be matched via facial recognition for the rest of their lives. Yeah, not necessarily a good thing, but am I wrong?
  - adamsea 6y ago
    I agree. Somebody should arrest all those protestors with shields in matching outfits that keep beating people with sticks and shooting stuff at them. I even saw a video where one of them killed a guy while three others watched.
- eanzenberg 6y ago
  “Getting away with” Who is getting away with what? They are under arrest right now. Or do you want them dragged through the streets?
  - 6y ago
adge 6y ago
Many organizers of protests in Furguson, peaceful or otherwise, have since been found murdered in ways that suggest they were literally hunted down and killed for their involvement. Multiple have been found shot through the head in burned out cars to destroy all evidence. If they broke the law it still does not merit being executed in the street. (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/puzzling-number-men-tied-ferguson-protests-have-died-n984261 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/puzzling-number-men-tie...) In a situation where police feel justified to kill extra-judicially over a possibly fake 20 dollar bill, what hope do we have that protesters won't be targeted in unfair ways? Or worse, that organizers won't be hunted down like animals and murdered like in Furguson? It would be unethical to not do everything in your power to protect those in this position. secondly how do you plan to identify violent vs non-violent protesters from a static image? How would you find their identity afterwards? There is overwhelming evidence to suggest these methods are at best ineffective and at worst racist, and in either case will lead to innocent people being charged. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2109887-police-mass-face-recognition-in-the-us-will-net-innocent-people/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2109887-police-mass-fac...
- voisin 6y ago
  This is shocking and should absolutely be more widely reported as it may change behaviour of present day activists. We need an anonymizing solution for protest organizing.
  - wongarsu 6y ago
    >it may change behaviour of present day activists that's exactly what the murderers want to achieve
    - voisin 6y ago
      Behaviour change may be more / better masks, etc. I am shocked by the number of people clearly committing crimes without masks.
- briefcomment 6y ago
jsaxton86 6y ago
I agree, and I'd go a step further and say that if you destroy evidence of someone burning my city down or looting, you're an accomplice to that crime.
- blotter_paper 6y ago
  What if you stop an EMT from checking the pulse of somebody who your co-worker has been choking to death for minutes? Does that make you an accomplice, too? If your city charged these cops justly then nobody would be burning it down; cure your disease and the symptoms will go away.
  - augustt 6y ago
    Yup, I'd love if we were able to be a unified front and collectively say the mayhem will not stop until all four involved are charged. And if they're not convicted... 1992 will look like a joke.
    - jsaxton86 6y ago
      This whole situation sucks because most people are rightly outraged about police violence, but their anger is totally misdirected. These businesses had nothing to do with the death of George Floyd. I live in Portland, Oregon now. Without going into too many details, we have an expensive pension program. Many feel that the pension program is too generous, and there has been a lot of thought put into how we can fully fund both pensions and everything else. Last year there was a bill in the Oregon Senate (SB1049) that proposed some modest changes to how pensions work. It passed with bipartisan support, and the public unions went nuts. They said they'd never support a candidate who voted for SB1049. Last month we had our primaries. The most important primary was the Democratic primary for the Oregon Secretary of State. If the governor were to step down for any reason (to take a cabinet position in the Biden administration, for example), the SOS becomes governor. Someone who opposed SB1049 joined the race at the last minute, got over half a million dollars of union money, outspent her candidate, and won the election. This is just one of many examples. Even though the unions are only spending a couple of million dollars per year in Oregon, they're really smart about it, and as such, they get what they want. In the Secretary of State race they hit a home run. For half a million dollars, they pushed their preferred candidate through and sent a message that if you oppose them in any way, it will be a career limiting move. The reason I mentioned that is because I think it is a good contrast to what we're seeing today. With smart leadership, we would have a better chance of solving this problem. But people are enraged and not thinking clearly. And there's no reason to believe that these riots are going to be more successful than the Baltimore riots, the Ferguson riots, the Oakland riots, or even the Rodney King riots.
blotter_paper 6y ago
The more that protestors refrain from violent property destruction, the less likely it becomes that the three cops who were accessories in the murder of George Floyd get charges brought against them. Burning down one precinct got one cop charged (albeit with a 3rd degree); I would really love to see the other three charged, even if it requires some anonymous protestors to light up three more precincts. I'd gladly trade in police destroying citizen lives for citizens destroying police property.
- tal8d 6y ago
  Ah justice. It is better that ten innocent persons suffer than that one guilty escape. -- Bizzaro William Blackstone
  - blotter_paper 6y ago
    The topic of the week is an extrajudicial murder committed by a team of four cops; where was our restraint in deciding the fate of George Floyd? Do these officers deserve nicer treatment than this system gave Floyd? Did Floyd deserve this treatment, too? If so, why didn't he get it?
    - tal8d 6y ago
      That would be the topic of the week, if we were seeing protests. What we are actually seeing is something that is quickly approaching race riots, here is how that has happened: Local government officials pulled law enforcement, because cops are bad and protesters are good. Looting and arson cause hundreds of millions of dollars of property damage to those that have nothing to do with the purported cause of the riots. Local government officials offer easily disprovable lie, claiming the majority of those arrested are shown to be outsiders. The media doesn't bother fact checking, they instead helpfully inform the public that "white nationalists" are secretly tricking the poor helpless minorities into burning down their own communities. Local government officials admit that they were lying. The media pretends to not hear, continues screeching about nazis in blackface looting Footlocker. And here you advocate burning down three entire precincts in order to ensure that three officers get prosecuted (and be honest, you mean "convicted"). That is absolutely insane, it is the direct opposite of justice and a perfect example of someone being ruled by their emotion.
pera 6y ago
> The more they expect to be held accountable, the more likely they will refrain from violence. The thing is people are already being held accountable for their skin tone, and the likelihood of changing your behavior when you have lived your entire life in an environment of constant oppression for fear of being identified in a protest is marginal, specially during catharsis, otherwise you wouldn't see for instance people burning police cars in front of a camera. Keep in mind also that many (most?) of these "violent protestors" are simply reacting against violent cops in a power trip. I can't say I wouldn't react violently against a cop intentionally running over me and others with its SUV, but I can say that I would be thankful if my face was anonymized no matter how I reacted.
- sfj 6y ago
  > The thing is people are already being held accountable for their skin tone, and the likelihood of changing your behavior when you have lived your entire life in an environment of constant oppression Actually, a lot more whites are killed by cops than blacks. And before you say that's because there are more white people than black people, blacks represent only 13% of the population but commit 52% of the crime. So, you are less likely to get killed committing a crime as a black person than as a white person. https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de... https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-black-americans-commit-crime https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-black-amer...
  - fwip 6y ago
    Your first link shows: more black people are killed per-capita by cops than white people. Y Your second link shows: Black people are more likely to be convicted of homicide than white people. You've made a number of unfounded leaps on top of that: That "Black people commit 52% of crime." This is wrong in several ways. You're assuming that conviction rates accurately represent rates of crimes, and also that "all crime" has the same statistics as homicide. But instead, we see that black people are convicted of only 27% of overall crime. That's including the fact that certain categories are known to be racially disparate in conviction and sentencing - e.g. white & black people use marijuana at approximately equal rates, yet black people are nearly 4 times as likely to be arrested for it. That the people killed by cops were all committing a crime at the time. I don't have statistics on hand for this, but a well-known counterexample is Tamir Rice.
tehjoker 6y ago
"Ferguson, Mo., Activists Are Dying and It’s Time to Ask Questions" https://www.theroot.com/ferguson-activists-are-dying-and-it-s-time-to-ask-quest-1794955900 https://www.theroot.com/ferguson-activists-are-dying-and-it-... "Crawford was found shot to death Thursday night in his car, just like activist Darren Seals in 2016 and protester DeAndre Joshua the night of the Ferguson verdict in 2014. The latter two had gunshot wounds to the head and their cars were lit on fire. Crawford, it is believed by police, shot himself in the back seat of his car either in an attempted suicide or by accident."
djsumdog 6y ago
I agree entirely. Can we not blur out the faces of people who are looting (stealing), destroying property, defacing city and national sites and violently attacking people and store owners? This is super fucked.
Sevaris 6y ago
When the US inevitably does turn into an authoritarian dictatorship, I think people would be happy if there wasn't copious amounts of proof they were on the streets protesting. I should add: In all of the streams and pictures I've seen, all (most?) the looters or violent people were wearing masks, ensuring their anonymity. If anybody's being protected by measures like this, it's your average peaceful protestor.

whatshisface 6y ago

What's your plan, exactly, for making the program not work for you if you've smashed a window?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

milquetoastaf 6y ago

The point of a riot is to riot

Mirioron 6y ago

To add though: it's not easy to tell who are the non-violent and who are the violent protestors. Sometimes violent protestors hang out in the crowd and only strike at opportune moments. If they're blurred out like everyone else during the times they are not violent then it becomes harder to hold them accountable.

michaelt 6y ago

Given that this is a protest about cops getting away with brutality even when there's clear evidence I think "gather evidence against both sides equally" is unlikely to be convincing argument to protesters.

downerending 6y ago
I doubt any criminal really wants to be captured on video. Having just watched a couple of videos this morning of "protesters" viciously kicking their unconscious victims in the head, I'm very much against the idea of anonymizing any of this.
- hangphyr 6y ago
  Depends on how it's used. For example it could be useful for people protesting authoritarian governments, such as in Hong Kong. For blurring rioters during a crime spree, I don't think there's anything moral to be gained from protecting criminals.
  - downerending 6y ago
    Though I'm on the side of the Hong Kong citizens, I doubt this would help much, since the government is going to have extensive videos of their own. Not to mention a likely capability to capture immediately or almost immediately off of people's phones. On a somewhat related note, I wonder if the thousands of people being recorded committing various crimes in the US right now realize that their faces are almost certainly being compiled in various government and private databases, to be matched via facial recognition for the rest of their lives. Yeah, not necessarily a good thing, but am I wrong?
- adamsea 6y ago
  I agree. Somebody should arrest all those protestors with shields in matching outfits that keep beating people with sticks and shooting stuff at them. I even saw a video where one of them killed a guy while three others watched.
eanzenberg 6y ago
“Getting away with” Who is getting away with what? They are under arrest right now. Or do you want them dragged through the streets?
- 6y ago

adge 6y ago

Many organizers of protests in Furguson, peaceful or otherwise, have since been found murdered in ways that suggest they were literally hunted down and killed for their involvement. Multiple have been found shot through the head in burned out cars to destroy all evidence. If they broke the law it still does not merit being executed in the street. (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/puzzling-number-men-tied-ferguson-protests-have-died-n984261 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/puzzling-number-men-tie...) In a situation where police feel justified to kill extra-judicially over a possibly fake 20 dollar bill, what hope do we have that protesters won't be targeted in unfair ways? Or worse, that organizers won't be hunted down like animals and murdered like in Furguson? It would be unethical to not do everything in your power to protect those in this position. secondly how do you plan to identify violent vs non-violent protesters from a static image? How would you find their identity afterwards? There is overwhelming evidence to suggest these methods are at best ineffective and at worst racist, and in either case will lead to innocent people being charged. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2109887-police-mass-face-recognition-in-the-us-will-net-innocent-people/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2109887-police-mass-fac...

voisin 6y ago
This is shocking and should absolutely be more widely reported as it may change behaviour of present day activists. We need an anonymizing solution for protest organizing.
- wongarsu 6y ago
  >it may change behaviour of present day activists that's exactly what the murderers want to achieve
  - voisin 6y ago
    Behaviour change may be more / better masks, etc. I am shocked by the number of people clearly committing crimes without masks.
briefcomment 6y ago

jsaxton86 6y ago

I agree, and I'd go a step further and say that if you destroy evidence of someone burning my city down or looting, you're an accomplice to that crime.

blotter_paper 6y ago
What if you stop an EMT from checking the pulse of somebody who your co-worker has been choking to death for minutes? Does that make you an accomplice, too? If your city charged these cops justly then nobody would be burning it down; cure your disease and the symptoms will go away.
- augustt 6y ago
  Yup, I'd love if we were able to be a unified front and collectively say the mayhem will not stop until all four involved are charged. And if they're not convicted... 1992 will look like a joke.
  - jsaxton86 6y ago
    This whole situation sucks because most people are rightly outraged about police violence, but their anger is totally misdirected. These businesses had nothing to do with the death of George Floyd. I live in Portland, Oregon now. Without going into too many details, we have an expensive pension program. Many feel that the pension program is too generous, and there has been a lot of thought put into how we can fully fund both pensions and everything else. Last year there was a bill in the Oregon Senate (SB1049) that proposed some modest changes to how pensions work. It passed with bipartisan support, and the public unions went nuts. They said they'd never support a candidate who voted for SB1049. Last month we had our primaries. The most important primary was the Democratic primary for the Oregon Secretary of State. If the governor were to step down for any reason (to take a cabinet position in the Biden administration, for example), the SOS becomes governor. Someone who opposed SB1049 joined the race at the last minute, got over half a million dollars of union money, outspent her candidate, and won the election. This is just one of many examples. Even though the unions are only spending a couple of million dollars per year in Oregon, they're really smart about it, and as such, they get what they want. In the Secretary of State race they hit a home run. For half a million dollars, they pushed their preferred candidate through and sent a message that if you oppose them in any way, it will be a career limiting move. The reason I mentioned that is because I think it is a good contrast to what we're seeing today. With smart leadership, we would have a better chance of solving this problem. But people are enraged and not thinking clearly. And there's no reason to believe that these riots are going to be more successful than the Baltimore riots, the Ferguson riots, the Oakland riots, or even the Rodney King riots.

blotter_paper 6y ago

The more that protestors refrain from violent property destruction, the less likely it becomes that the three cops who were accessories in the murder of George Floyd get charges brought against them. Burning down one precinct got one cop charged (albeit with a 3rd degree); I would really love to see the other three charged, even if it requires some anonymous protestors to light up three more precincts. I'd gladly trade in police destroying citizen lives for citizens destroying police property.

tal8d 6y ago
Ah justice. It is better that ten innocent persons suffer than that one guilty escape. -- Bizzaro William Blackstone
- blotter_paper 6y ago
  The topic of the week is an extrajudicial murder committed by a team of four cops; where was our restraint in deciding the fate of George Floyd? Do these officers deserve nicer treatment than this system gave Floyd? Did Floyd deserve this treatment, too? If so, why didn't he get it?
  - tal8d 6y ago
    That would be the topic of the week, if we were seeing protests. What we are actually seeing is something that is quickly approaching race riots, here is how that has happened: Local government officials pulled law enforcement, because cops are bad and protesters are good. Looting and arson cause hundreds of millions of dollars of property damage to those that have nothing to do with the purported cause of the riots. Local government officials offer easily disprovable lie, claiming the majority of those arrested are shown to be outsiders. The media doesn't bother fact checking, they instead helpfully inform the public that "white nationalists" are secretly tricking the poor helpless minorities into burning down their own communities. Local government officials admit that they were lying. The media pretends to not hear, continues screeching about nazis in blackface looting Footlocker. And here you advocate burning down three entire precincts in order to ensure that three officers get prosecuted (and be honest, you mean "convicted"). That is absolutely insane, it is the direct opposite of justice and a perfect example of someone being ruled by their emotion.

pera 6y ago

> The more they expect to be held accountable, the more likely they will refrain from violence. The thing is people are already being held accountable for their skin tone, and the likelihood of changing your behavior when you have lived your entire life in an environment of constant oppression for fear of being identified in a protest is marginal, specially during catharsis, otherwise you wouldn't see for instance people burning police cars in front of a camera. Keep in mind also that many (most?) of these "violent protestors" are simply reacting against violent cops in a power trip. I can't say I wouldn't react violently against a cop intentionally running over me and others with its SUV, but I can say that I would be thankful if my face was anonymized no matter how I reacted.

sfj 6y ago
> The thing is people are already being held accountable for their skin tone, and the likelihood of changing your behavior when you have lived your entire life in an environment of constant oppression Actually, a lot more whites are killed by cops than blacks. And before you say that's because there are more white people than black people, blacks represent only 13% of the population but commit 52% of the crime. So, you are less likely to get killed committing a crime as a black person than as a white person. https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de... https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-black-americans-commit-crime https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-black-amer...
- fwip 6y ago
  Your first link shows: more black people are killed per-capita by cops than white people. Y Your second link shows: Black people are more likely to be convicted of homicide than white people. You've made a number of unfounded leaps on top of that: That "Black people commit 52% of crime." This is wrong in several ways. You're assuming that conviction rates accurately represent rates of crimes, and also that "all crime" has the same statistics as homicide. But instead, we see that black people are convicted of only 27% of overall crime. That's including the fact that certain categories are known to be racially disparate in conviction and sentencing - e.g. white & black people use marijuana at approximately equal rates, yet black people are nearly 4 times as likely to be arrested for it. That the people killed by cops were all committing a crime at the time. I don't have statistics on hand for this, but a well-known counterexample is Tamir Rice.

tehjoker 6y ago

"Ferguson, Mo., Activists Are Dying and It’s Time to Ask Questions" https://www.theroot.com/ferguson-activists-are-dying-and-it-s-time-to-ask-quest-1794955900 https://www.theroot.com/ferguson-activists-are-dying-and-it-... "Crawford was found shot to death Thursday night in his car, just like activist Darren Seals in 2016 and protester DeAndre Joshua the night of the Ferguson verdict in 2014. The latter two had gunshot wounds to the head and their cars were lit on fire. Crawford, it is believed by police, shot himself in the back seat of his car either in an attempted suicide or by accident."

djsumdog 6y ago

I agree entirely. Can we not blur out the faces of people who are looting (stealing), destroying property, defacing city and national sites and violently attacking people and store owners? This is super fucked.

Sevaris 6y ago

When the US inevitably does turn into an authoritarian dictatorship, I think people would be happy if there wasn't copious amounts of proof they were on the streets protesting. I should add: In all of the streams and pictures I've seen, all (most?) the looters or violent people were wearing masks, ensuring their anonymity. If anybody's being protected by measures like this, it's your average peaceful protestor.