23 ms·

We should expect police to us less use violence and improve their crowd management and deescalation skills. The increasing militarization of police is a trend

by beloch 6y ago

We should expect police to us less use violence and improve their crowd management and deescalation skills. The increasing militarization of police is a trend that must be reversed. However, we should not neglect the other side of the equation either. This article is, in large part, about just that. The article points out that many protests in the U.S. went smoothly through the practice of police and protest organizers meeting and jointly managing protests, but that this practice fell into disuse after the 1999 Seattle WTO meeting in which protesters violated the negotiated terms and police responded with violence. While some recent (and ongoing) protests have turned violent, many didn't. In the coming months we'll have time to do a postmortem. I strongly suspect spontaneous protests without organization will be found to have the most potential for violence, while those with organizers committed to self-policing and, ideally, cooperating with police will be found to have fared much better. Individual people may be intelligent and responsible, but crowds have their own rules of behaviour and need to be managed. Protests are more dangerous when unplanned or when their organizers give no thought to self-policing. There will always be organizers who want violence because it reliably brings press coverage and attention to their protests, but social media is also creating new problems. Coordinating a large number of people to show up at the same time and place used to take considerable planning and effort. When you have to work hard just to get the even to happen, why wouldn't you plan how it will unfold as well? Now a couple of tweets or posts on the right reddit subs will suffice. How can police meet with the organizer of a protest when it's really just some dude who had a lot of social media followers and might not even bother showing up himself?

lxmorj 6y ago
It is flabbergasting to me that we expect self-policing from protestors, but not the literal fucking police.
- xendo 6y ago
  Policing by police usually leads to escalation. I think that's the point of this submission.
  - Kye 6y ago
    Of and by, not just by. None of this would happen if they checked their own before they murdered someone.
- solstice 6y ago
  I think it's normal, reasonable and beneficial. If I had a very strong grievance that lead me to protest, I'd be highly motivated to not let others detract from my message or tarnish it. Nut jobs and provocateurs make it harder for me to attain my goals and can in the worst delegitimise my cause entirely
  - TeaDrunk 6y ago
    But peaceful protesting hasn’t actually appeared to result in justice for black lives in the past. Black America have had peaceful protesting in Washington DC before it was violently dispersed (so trump could pose in front of a church). We’ve even had mildly disruptive protesting (BLM highway blocking, also violently dispersed). We’ve even had black people not protesting at all (cases of police shooting at people just standing on their own property during Minneapolis curfew). None of these get more coverage than property violence. None of these got a response from political leadership. It’s a bad look for the country that the only time our leadership is willing to punish law enforcement relatively mildly (currently the police officer in question is charged for only up to 35 years in prison with his accomplices merely losing their jobs, something statistically has been borne out that they get hired for more law enforcement work in neighboring districts) for killing someone in a terrible and slow manner is when disruption on property happens.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - empath75 6y ago
    You'd think police should be highly motivated to stop their coworkers from murdering people and getting away with it, but here we are.
- dmix 6y ago
  Why not both?
- neutronicus 6y ago
  Well, I think these particular protests are raising the following questions: 1. Should there be police at all? 2. If so, can an institution staffed by these particular people ever function correctly? The more effectively the protesters self-police, the more powerful an argument they make that you could improve society by disbanding urban police departments and letting the protest organizers assume de facto responsibility for maintaining the social order. Of course, the other end of the violence spectrum is an effective argument, as well.
znpy 6y ago
I'm seeing many videos of police doing things like attacking journalists, beating their own cars so that they can later blame the protestors or videos of police unloading bricks from their pickup. The problem is not de-escalation, is that the police is behaving in a criminal manner.
- JoeSmithson 6y ago
  Do you have the links for the second two (damaging own car, unloading bricks)?
  - gindely 6y ago
    What crazy times we live in, that a person only needs to ask for links for cops damaging their own police car and unloading bricks, but can regard US cops assaulting journalists as proven. No reflection on you, but where has America fallen to?
  - znpy 6y ago
    this seems to be a link: https://www.wcvb.com/article/viral-social-media-video-claims-boston-police-damaged-its-own-cruiser-that-s-wrong/32734748 https://www.wcvb.com/article/viral-social-media-video-claims... I am not sure because "this content is not available in your region". Also this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LTeTUtbKvo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LTeTUtbKvo cops unloading bricks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTA0N3kkPaE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTA0N3kkPaE
    - dmix 6y ago
      Why did they stop filming the cops unloading bricks video? It’s really not clear what they are doing individually grabbing three or four before the 20 second video ends. Most of the bigger conspiracies about police being behind everything are usually wrong and show similarities to all conspiracies (they take tiny seeds of truth and amplify it 1000x fold into far bigger schemes). There was a video of that one agent provocateur cop with an umbrella breaking windows with a hammer, then there were a bunch of 100k tweets blaming them for burning down all the buildings. I get police use an awful tactic to stir up violence to try to end large unsanctioned with protests quickly before worse damage happens - for some cynical ends justify the means. But it amazes me that people don’t realize just how many people show up to cause violence and simply steal things. And not even just the anarchists and Black bloc who use property damage and vandalism as a tactic since they despite private property, that’s been proven thousands of times and those groups exist in every city, but just the average mob will always have trouble makers and opportunists. There was even tweets from DSA groups prompting the burning and destruction of property. Yet everyone is so quick to blame police for everything. It’s seems to strange and cynical to not only take zero responsibility for the wider group but to completely blame their it on outsiders when it’s so obviously not just police. The only real solution is isolating and dismissing the radical groups as a policy. Just like right wing groups telling Nazis they aren’t welcome, the unions and powerful left wing groups should refuse to protest with black bloc and other violent protestors. I don’t believe they need to actually physically stop them but they need to denounce them early and often, and organizers need to put real efforts in warning people not to engage in violence, theft, and vandalism. The other half is police cause as much problems as they prevent at almost every single protest I’ve ever been to. Mayors and leaders need to put pressure on police to change their tactics to deescalation and middle managers who don’t stop their lower ranking cops from provoking fights and high ranking police who allow agent provocateurs need to be fired.
chris123 6y ago
The mass media could use some de-escalation skills, too. Of course, their specialty is escalation, not de-escalation.
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  We become what we behold. https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb
- twic 6y ago
  We go now live to Chris Morris in 1994: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IEwBrJzhlg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IEwBrJzhlg
adamsea 6y ago
Are we going to ignore the elephant in the room? Police are, in the aggregate, racist. They are more violent towards people of color. The marches are led by POC, include large numbers of POC, and are all about calling the police out for their own biases and illegal behavior. This is simply a fact. It's not only intuitively true based on astute observation of current affairs, but the data trends towards supporting it. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/08/police-officer-shootings-gun-violence-racial-bias-crime-data/595528/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/08/police-officer-shooti...
myopenid 6y ago
You guys are slowly turning into self-ware wolves. It's funny.
lmilcin 6y ago
In simple words. Police job is to police - ensure order. Brutality is definitely not a solution.
monadic2 6y ago
> We should expect police to us less use violence and improve their crowd management and deescalation skills. What about american history would lead you to this expectation? That said, I like the rest of your comment. It’s somewhat disturbing to hear people compare the rage of the crowd with the individual intentions of folk who break windows, raid to bring things home, and set things on fire—you’re allowing one person to derail thousands.
- vulcan01 6y ago
  > We should expect not "I expect". Your parent comment is not expecting this, but hoping for it.
  - monadic2 6y ago
    Good catch, thanks.
slg 6y ago
>The article points out that many protests in the U.S. went smoothly through the practice of police and protest organizers meeting and jointly managing protests, but that this practice fell into disuse after the 1999 Seattle WTO meeting in which protesters violated the negotiated terms and police responded with violence. Beyond the general history, this is a big ask of the protesters when one of the primary motivators for this specific protest is distrust of the police.
- XorNot 6y ago
  It's a big ask when politicians have been acting like they can ignore protests which is what the past, hell, decade or so has really been like. The political class had collectively decided they understood protests, that people would turn up peacefully, shout some slogans and then go home. But that's not what a protest is. A protest is a clear and specific message "this is how many people took time out of their day, free time, time off work to come and represent themselves for an issue - do you think it's wise to ignore them?"
  - qq11ww22ee33 6y ago
    > It's a big ask when politicians have been acting like they can ignore protests which is what the past, hell, decade or so has really been like. Decade? More like century. The labour demonstrations in the 19th and 20th century were ignored until they got militant. Nothing's changed since then in the US.
iphone_elegance 6y ago
it's a nice idea but instead we're about to go full tiananmen
- dang 6y ago
  Please stop posting unsubstantive/flamebait comments to HN. We ban accounts that do that, and eventually the main account as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
ISL 6y ago
When the organization is decentralized, then the police will need to meet protesters where they are -- communicating with many people in parallel, using the same media.
komali2 6y ago
I disagree that any responsibility should fall to the protesters. The right to protest is baked into the first legal document the country as a political entity wrote. For the last 250 years politicians and cops have had the knowledge that Americans care a great deal about their right to stand in front of a statehouse and shout to their heart's content. They should create their own policies to deal with that fact. If that means ensuring no roads go near the statehouses, that there's ample space around popular protest spots, hell that there's guaranteed public restrooms in those areas, so be it. It also means that cops should have 250 years of collective knowledge in how to deescalate... But instead they've always gone the violent route (remember the 60s, when young black people were being shredded by police dogs?) Now that being said, black lives matter in particular suffers from (in my opinion) a lack of leadership and organization. Over the weekend I wanted to attend protests. I have 100 surplus masks and shitloads of water bottles I wanted to give out. But after a straight hour of searching on every social media platform I could conceive of (as well as Google and just asking on Twitter) I found nothing but out of date websites, with articles from the beginning of the black lives matter movement. If I want to donate money, I can choose between several different variations of the name "black lives matter," with no way to verify that these are representative organizations, or where the money goes. During the protest (I just turned up at city hall and hoped for the best - it happened to work out), I didn't see any sort of leadership. Sure some local community leaders turned up, but nobody that represented any sort of modern iteration of a black rights movement. Far be it from me to tell people how to best accomplish social goals - in my opinion raw, unfettered, and disorganized rage is a perfectly valid outlet for the people against the crimes of the American police system. I just feel like organization could only help.
- stcredzero 6y ago
  Now that being said, black lives matter in particular suffers from (in my opinion) a lack of leadership and organization. A universal problem with "leaderless movements" is that they quickly devolve to the lowest common denominator level. Anyone can put out their slate and call themselves an "activist" and it's inevitable that some dim person will come along and try to make a name for themselves by taking things farther. Put that person into a crisis situation with quickly gathering flash mobs, and what should we expect? Then, on top of that, add on extremist opportunists who decide to exploit the situation, with the goal of destabilizing social order. A "leaderless movement" has all of the biomass of a huge national organization, but none of the immune system and command/control to counter such organized exploiters. in my opinion raw, unfettered, and disorganized rage is a perfectly valid outlet for the people against the crimes of the American police system. No. Outside of a protest, the worst actions we've seen would be crimes and qualify the perpetrator as a bad person. Just because they're in a protest doesn't change that. Would you feel that way if they came and burned your house or business down? Evil is evil. Violence is violence. Another's evil is no excuse to perpetrate your own. Especially if it falls on innocent bystanders.
bjourne 6y ago
I've been on a few demos that turned violent. Among them the famous one when George Bush decided to pay a visit. In all cases, the organizers wanted to cooperate with the police. They knew who were in the "autonomous bloc" (troublemakers) and would have gladly helped the police zone in on them. In all cases the police didn't care and charged peaceful and violent demonstrators alike. I find it very odd that the police still cannot after all these years and with all development in surveillance tech distinguish between peaceful demonstrators and rioters. One could almost believe that they have no interest in making that distinction.
- zo1 6y ago
  We're not allowing governments to do the proper, necessary surveillance to control and prevent crimes in general, including ones at demonstrations/protests. Whenever these ideas start popping up, someone always finds some "privacy" concern that spoils a lot of tech-answers to crime and violence, including here on HN. I find it very saddening as the victims of these crimes end up being victims that are ignored by "privacy" advocates and proponents, as if "privacy" is a bigger concern than violent crimes.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    The idea that we just need a bit more surveillance to ensure our safety is not a compelling one right now.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    The original violent crime - the murder of George Floyd - was filmed in public. That is the kind of violent crime that needs to be controlled to stop the cycle of riots.
- lazyjones 6y ago
  > In all cases the police didn't care and charged peaceful and violent demonstrators alike. FWIW, German police regularly used undercover, black-clad, violent agents as a pretext for breaking up peaceful protests. It's probably an established tactic. But the situation in the USA looks very different (from here), violent protesters appear to be a small minority of the problematic people, most of which are just criminals using the opportunity to loot.
g8tor 6y ago
I don't read that article as supporting the title that descalation leads to less violence. it does discuss evidence for escalation being correlated with more violence. but you can't blanket say that's causal. These are complex situations that don't follow rules. The mob consists of peaceful protesters, violent protesters and looters. people's membership in any of these groups can be multiple and shift over time. it's not reasonable for police to make an assessment who is who on the ground because their job is not to be a jury. what is reasonable is that once a gathering crosses the threshold of criminal activity it becomes illegal. one solution is to just arrest everybody after giving them time to disperse. but to do that you need overwhelming numbers. not always the resources to do that. you can't just stand there and let people beat you, stab you, lob projectiles at you. you have to respond to that force with force. You also need to protect property again using force. again unless you have overwhelming numbers you can't engage in hand-to-hand combat or using battons. this strategy cannot be used by itself to bring the crowd under control. so each officer needs a force multiplier some sort of tool that can effect multiple people. it's a given that in such situations any such tool will affect multiple people even those doing nothing violent. tear gas and rubber bullets are okay tools. but I think there needs to be more. when a patient becomes psychotic and dangerous in a hospital or asylum you don't mace their face. you give them a sedative. instead of CS gas it would be great if there was some sort of sedative gas to just slow people down enough to sap their will to continue. police have to handle the situations as best they can using the tools they have. I don't think you can say that big protests are all about the death of one man or the treatment of one group. I think the causes of people's unhappiness here is systemic and this is probably just an outlet where people feel now we can stand up. the police can't cure the people of their anger no matter what they do. when I see this chaos, I remember ahow US media lionized what happened in Hong Kong not even 1 year ago, and I can't help thinking of the proverb, people in glass houses....
- paulannesley 6y ago
  > instead of CS gas it would be great if there was some sort of sedative gas to just slow people down enough to sap their will to continue That is the most casually delivered fucked up dystopian line I've seen on HN.
ashtonkem 6y ago
There now appear to be police that want violence now too. In my city they’re ignoring looters and tear gassing the protestors. There is no public safety rationale for that.
- twic 6y ago
  I'm not sure if readers of HN are familiar with the concept of a "police riot", but that is clearly what is happening in many places now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_riot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_riot
divbzero 6y ago
> Protests are more dangerous when unplanned or when their organizers give no thought to self-policing. Gregg Popovich expressed a similar thought in his interview with The Nation: [1] ”[Protests] are very necessary, but they need to be organized better. It’s frustrating. When Dr. King did a protest, you knew when to show, when to come back the next day. But if you’re just organizing protests and everyone is coming and going in every direction, it doesn’t work that way. If it was nonviolent, they knew to be nonviolent, but this is muddled. More leadership would be very welcome so these incredible mass demonstrations can’t be used by people for other means. We can limit the bad, but only if things are organized better.“ [1]: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/gregg-popovich-george-floyd-protests/ https://www.thenation.com/article/society/gregg-popovich-geo...

by beloch 6y ago

lxmorj 6y ago

It is flabbergasting to me that we expect self-policing from protestors, but not the literal fucking police.

xendo 6y ago
Policing by police usually leads to escalation. I think that's the point of this submission.
- Kye 6y ago
  Of and by, not just by. None of this would happen if they checked their own before they murdered someone.
solstice 6y ago
I think it's normal, reasonable and beneficial. If I had a very strong grievance that lead me to protest, I'd be highly motivated to not let others detract from my message or tarnish it. Nut jobs and provocateurs make it harder for me to attain my goals and can in the worst delegitimise my cause entirely
- TeaDrunk 6y ago
  But peaceful protesting hasn’t actually appeared to result in justice for black lives in the past. Black America have had peaceful protesting in Washington DC before it was violently dispersed (so trump could pose in front of a church). We’ve even had mildly disruptive protesting (BLM highway blocking, also violently dispersed). We’ve even had black people not protesting at all (cases of police shooting at people just standing on their own property during Minneapolis curfew). None of these get more coverage than property violence. None of these got a response from political leadership. It’s a bad look for the country that the only time our leadership is willing to punish law enforcement relatively mildly (currently the police officer in question is charged for only up to 35 years in prison with his accomplices merely losing their jobs, something statistically has been borne out that they get hired for more law enforcement work in neighboring districts) for killing someone in a terrible and slow manner is when disruption on property happens.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- empath75 6y ago
  You'd think police should be highly motivated to stop their coworkers from murdering people and getting away with it, but here we are.
dmix 6y ago
Why not both?
neutronicus 6y ago
Well, I think these particular protests are raising the following questions: 1. Should there be police at all? 2. If so, can an institution staffed by these particular people ever function correctly? The more effectively the protesters self-police, the more powerful an argument they make that you could improve society by disbanding urban police departments and letting the protest organizers assume de facto responsibility for maintaining the social order. Of course, the other end of the violence spectrum is an effective argument, as well.

znpy 6y ago

I'm seeing many videos of police doing things like attacking journalists, beating their own cars so that they can later blame the protestors or videos of police unloading bricks from their pickup. The problem is not de-escalation, is that the police is behaving in a criminal manner.

JoeSmithson 6y ago
Do you have the links for the second two (damaging own car, unloading bricks)?
- gindely 6y ago
  What crazy times we live in, that a person only needs to ask for links for cops damaging their own police car and unloading bricks, but can regard US cops assaulting journalists as proven. No reflection on you, but where has America fallen to?
- znpy 6y ago
  this seems to be a link: https://www.wcvb.com/article/viral-social-media-video-claims-boston-police-damaged-its-own-cruiser-that-s-wrong/32734748 https://www.wcvb.com/article/viral-social-media-video-claims... I am not sure because "this content is not available in your region". Also this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LTeTUtbKvo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LTeTUtbKvo cops unloading bricks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTA0N3kkPaE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTA0N3kkPaE
  - dmix 6y ago
    Why did they stop filming the cops unloading bricks video? It’s really not clear what they are doing individually grabbing three or four before the 20 second video ends. Most of the bigger conspiracies about police being behind everything are usually wrong and show similarities to all conspiracies (they take tiny seeds of truth and amplify it 1000x fold into far bigger schemes). There was a video of that one agent provocateur cop with an umbrella breaking windows with a hammer, then there were a bunch of 100k tweets blaming them for burning down all the buildings. I get police use an awful tactic to stir up violence to try to end large unsanctioned with protests quickly before worse damage happens - for some cynical ends justify the means. But it amazes me that people don’t realize just how many people show up to cause violence and simply steal things. And not even just the anarchists and Black bloc who use property damage and vandalism as a tactic since they despite private property, that’s been proven thousands of times and those groups exist in every city, but just the average mob will always have trouble makers and opportunists. There was even tweets from DSA groups prompting the burning and destruction of property. Yet everyone is so quick to blame police for everything. It’s seems to strange and cynical to not only take zero responsibility for the wider group but to completely blame their it on outsiders when it’s so obviously not just police. The only real solution is isolating and dismissing the radical groups as a policy. Just like right wing groups telling Nazis they aren’t welcome, the unions and powerful left wing groups should refuse to protest with black bloc and other violent protestors. I don’t believe they need to actually physically stop them but they need to denounce them early and often, and organizers need to put real efforts in warning people not to engage in violence, theft, and vandalism. The other half is police cause as much problems as they prevent at almost every single protest I’ve ever been to. Mayors and leaders need to put pressure on police to change their tactics to deescalation and middle managers who don’t stop their lower ranking cops from provoking fights and high ranking police who allow agent provocateurs need to be fired.

chris123 6y ago

The mass media could use some de-escalation skills, too. Of course, their specialty is escalation, not de-escalation.

wizzwizz4 6y ago
We become what we behold. https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb
twic 6y ago
We go now live to Chris Morris in 1994: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IEwBrJzhlg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IEwBrJzhlg

adamsea 6y ago

Are we going to ignore the elephant in the room? Police are, in the aggregate, racist. They are more violent towards people of color. The marches are led by POC, include large numbers of POC, and are all about calling the police out for their own biases and illegal behavior. This is simply a fact. It's not only intuitively true based on astute observation of current affairs, but the data trends towards supporting it. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/08/police-officer-shootings-gun-violence-racial-bias-crime-data/595528/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/08/police-officer-shooti...

myopenid 6y ago

You guys are slowly turning into self-ware wolves. It's funny.

lmilcin 6y ago

In simple words. Police job is to police - ensure order. Brutality is definitely not a solution.

monadic2 6y ago

> We should expect police to us less use violence and improve their crowd management and deescalation skills. What about american history would lead you to this expectation? That said, I like the rest of your comment. It’s somewhat disturbing to hear people compare the rage of the crowd with the individual intentions of folk who break windows, raid to bring things home, and set things on fire—you’re allowing one person to derail thousands.

vulcan01 6y ago
> We should expect not "I expect". Your parent comment is not expecting this, but hoping for it.
- monadic2 6y ago
  Good catch, thanks.

slg 6y ago

>The article points out that many protests in the U.S. went smoothly through the practice of police and protest organizers meeting and jointly managing protests, but that this practice fell into disuse after the 1999 Seattle WTO meeting in which protesters violated the negotiated terms and police responded with violence. Beyond the general history, this is a big ask of the protesters when one of the primary motivators for this specific protest is distrust of the police.

XorNot 6y ago
It's a big ask when politicians have been acting like they can ignore protests which is what the past, hell, decade or so has really been like. The political class had collectively decided they understood protests, that people would turn up peacefully, shout some slogans and then go home. But that's not what a protest is. A protest is a clear and specific message "this is how many people took time out of their day, free time, time off work to come and represent themselves for an issue - do you think it's wise to ignore them?"
- qq11ww22ee33 6y ago
  > It's a big ask when politicians have been acting like they can ignore protests which is what the past, hell, decade or so has really been like. Decade? More like century. The labour demonstrations in the 19th and 20th century were ignored until they got militant. Nothing's changed since then in the US.

iphone_elegance 6y ago

it's a nice idea but instead we're about to go full tiananmen

dang 6y ago
Please stop posting unsubstantive/flamebait comments to HN. We ban accounts that do that, and eventually the main account as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ISL 6y ago

When the organization is decentralized, then the police will need to meet protesters where they are -- communicating with many people in parallel, using the same media.

komali2 6y ago

I disagree that any responsibility should fall to the protesters. The right to protest is baked into the first legal document the country as a political entity wrote. For the last 250 years politicians and cops have had the knowledge that Americans care a great deal about their right to stand in front of a statehouse and shout to their heart's content. They should create their own policies to deal with that fact. If that means ensuring no roads go near the statehouses, that there's ample space around popular protest spots, hell that there's guaranteed public restrooms in those areas, so be it. It also means that cops should have 250 years of collective knowledge in how to deescalate... But instead they've always gone the violent route (remember the 60s, when young black people were being shredded by police dogs?) Now that being said, black lives matter in particular suffers from (in my opinion) a lack of leadership and organization. Over the weekend I wanted to attend protests. I have 100 surplus masks and shitloads of water bottles I wanted to give out. But after a straight hour of searching on every social media platform I could conceive of (as well as Google and just asking on Twitter) I found nothing but out of date websites, with articles from the beginning of the black lives matter movement. If I want to donate money, I can choose between several different variations of the name "black lives matter," with no way to verify that these are representative organizations, or where the money goes. During the protest (I just turned up at city hall and hoped for the best - it happened to work out), I didn't see any sort of leadership. Sure some local community leaders turned up, but nobody that represented any sort of modern iteration of a black rights movement. Far be it from me to tell people how to best accomplish social goals - in my opinion raw, unfettered, and disorganized rage is a perfectly valid outlet for the people against the crimes of the American police system. I just feel like organization could only help.

stcredzero 6y ago
Now that being said, black lives matter in particular suffers from (in my opinion) a lack of leadership and organization. A universal problem with "leaderless movements" is that they quickly devolve to the lowest common denominator level. Anyone can put out their slate and call themselves an "activist" and it's inevitable that some dim person will come along and try to make a name for themselves by taking things farther. Put that person into a crisis situation with quickly gathering flash mobs, and what should we expect? Then, on top of that, add on extremist opportunists who decide to exploit the situation, with the goal of destabilizing social order. A "leaderless movement" has all of the biomass of a huge national organization, but none of the immune system and command/control to counter such organized exploiters. in my opinion raw, unfettered, and disorganized rage is a perfectly valid outlet for the people against the crimes of the American police system. No. Outside of a protest, the worst actions we've seen would be crimes and qualify the perpetrator as a bad person. Just because they're in a protest doesn't change that. Would you feel that way if they came and burned your house or business down? Evil is evil. Violence is violence. Another's evil is no excuse to perpetrate your own. Especially if it falls on innocent bystanders.

bjourne 6y ago

I've been on a few demos that turned violent. Among them the famous one when George Bush decided to pay a visit. In all cases, the organizers wanted to cooperate with the police. They knew who were in the "autonomous bloc" (troublemakers) and would have gladly helped the police zone in on them. In all cases the police didn't care and charged peaceful and violent demonstrators alike. I find it very odd that the police still cannot after all these years and with all development in surveillance tech distinguish between peaceful demonstrators and rioters. One could almost believe that they have no interest in making that distinction.

zo1 6y ago
We're not allowing governments to do the proper, necessary surveillance to control and prevent crimes in general, including ones at demonstrations/protests. Whenever these ideas start popping up, someone always finds some "privacy" concern that spoils a lot of tech-answers to crime and violence, including here on HN. I find it very saddening as the victims of these crimes end up being victims that are ignored by "privacy" advocates and proponents, as if "privacy" is a bigger concern than violent crimes.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  The idea that we just need a bit more surveillance to ensure our safety is not a compelling one right now.
- pjc50 6y ago
  The original violent crime - the murder of George Floyd - was filmed in public. That is the kind of violent crime that needs to be controlled to stop the cycle of riots.
lazyjones 6y ago
> In all cases the police didn't care and charged peaceful and violent demonstrators alike. FWIW, German police regularly used undercover, black-clad, violent agents as a pretext for breaking up peaceful protests. It's probably an established tactic. But the situation in the USA looks very different (from here), violent protesters appear to be a small minority of the problematic people, most of which are just criminals using the opportunity to loot.

g8tor 6y ago

I don't read that article as supporting the title that descalation leads to less violence. it does discuss evidence for escalation being correlated with more violence. but you can't blanket say that's causal. These are complex situations that don't follow rules. The mob consists of peaceful protesters, violent protesters and looters. people's membership in any of these groups can be multiple and shift over time. it's not reasonable for police to make an assessment who is who on the ground because their job is not to be a jury. what is reasonable is that once a gathering crosses the threshold of criminal activity it becomes illegal. one solution is to just arrest everybody after giving them time to disperse. but to do that you need overwhelming numbers. not always the resources to do that. you can't just stand there and let people beat you, stab you, lob projectiles at you. you have to respond to that force with force. You also need to protect property again using force. again unless you have overwhelming numbers you can't engage in hand-to-hand combat or using battons. this strategy cannot be used by itself to bring the crowd under control. so each officer needs a force multiplier some sort of tool that can effect multiple people. it's a given that in such situations any such tool will affect multiple people even those doing nothing violent. tear gas and rubber bullets are okay tools. but I think there needs to be more. when a patient becomes psychotic and dangerous in a hospital or asylum you don't mace their face. you give them a sedative. instead of CS gas it would be great if there was some sort of sedative gas to just slow people down enough to sap their will to continue. police have to handle the situations as best they can using the tools they have. I don't think you can say that big protests are all about the death of one man or the treatment of one group. I think the causes of people's unhappiness here is systemic and this is probably just an outlet where people feel now we can stand up. the police can't cure the people of their anger no matter what they do. when I see this chaos, I remember ahow US media lionized what happened in Hong Kong not even 1 year ago, and I can't help thinking of the proverb, people in glass houses....

paulannesley 6y ago
> instead of CS gas it would be great if there was some sort of sedative gas to just slow people down enough to sap their will to continue That is the most casually delivered fucked up dystopian line I've seen on HN.

ashtonkem 6y ago

There now appear to be police that want violence now too. In my city they’re ignoring looters and tear gassing the protestors. There is no public safety rationale for that.

twic 6y ago
I'm not sure if readers of HN are familiar with the concept of a "police riot", but that is clearly what is happening in many places now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_riot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_riot

divbzero 6y ago

> Protests are more dangerous when unplanned or when their organizers give no thought to self-policing. Gregg Popovich expressed a similar thought in his interview with The Nation: [1] ”[Protests] are very necessary, but they need to be organized better. It’s frustrating. When Dr. King did a protest, you knew when to show, when to come back the next day. But if you’re just organizing protests and everyone is coming and going in every direction, it doesn’t work that way. If it was nonviolent, they knew to be nonviolent, but this is muddled. More leadership would be very welcome so these incredible mass demonstrations can’t be used by people for other means. We can limit the bad, but only if things are organized better.“ [1]: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/gregg-popovich-george-floyd-protests/ https://www.thenation.com/article/society/gregg-popovich-geo...