This is specifically why, in the case of these exact protests, the police gave the crowd ample opportunity to leave the area without being arrested, around 5pm,

This is specifically why, in the case of these exact protests, the police gave the crowd ample opportunity to leave the area without being arrested, around 5pm, after allowing them to protest peacefully the entire day. Half the crowd left, then the remaining crowd pumped themselves up and attacked the police after being peaceful the entire day. Seems to me like the reasonable ones left and the remainders were assholes. The extremists were the ones being shot with rubber bullets. Anyone that wasn't an extremist and still got shot is an idiot, they had every opportunity to voice their opinion peacefully. But all I hear from the fucking yanks on HN is them projecting their own politics onto what's happening over here. There's so much misinformation in threads like these and everyone laps it up like idiots. Like I said before, I watched the entire day live on my second monitor, from livestreams run by the protestors themselves. I got their viewpoint, which shows clearly what happened. Whereas the people trying to argue against policy brutality here are doing so with Fox News rhetoric, not with facts. We need more eyes on the police, at all times. But we need that scrutiny to come with facts. I have no love for Victoria Police, but I'm sick of them and our liberal (small L) government being the focal point of a debate half way across the world that completely misses the mark. HN seems like it skews left on privacy and surveillance issues, but because of it's American focus, the people here just spew dangerous rhetoric that risks cutting the head off the lesser evil, when we have an ultra conservative federal government pushing the most authoritarian tech surveillance laws in the western world. They're on opposite sides here. As long as there's no realistic chance of getting the average person to vote for a third party, if it's all the same, I'd prefer if you all stop letting an American media invasion turn us into the 4th fucking reich.