3 ms·

You think police should ignore situations in which violence and destruction of property are highly likely? Why? How does that benefit society? At what point d

You think police should ignore situations in which violence and destruction of property are highly likely? Why? How does that benefit society? At what point do you allow intervention? After they've destroyed £x,000 of property? After people are assaulted? How are you proposing police get deployed safely in those circumstances with 10s of thousands of protesters/rioters in the streets? Don't you think maintaining law& order is a necessary activity of the state in a democracy? You can't seriously think we should stand back and give over or streets to whoever can be most violent?

Caracas288 5mo ago
No, I didn’t say police should ignore violence, I actually said that existing laws would be sufficient. I was referring to governments ‘ignoring’, i.e. not further restricting rights to protest, not the police ignoring protests. To address it though, I think we are in a bad situation when widespread violence is even a risk; it indicates that civic pride has completely broken down. I don’t know what the answer would be in that situation, and I’m not proposing a solution to it. (I’m not sure we’re there quite yet either) More important than people trusting authority is authority trusting the people. The more trust in a society, the less ‘law and order’ needs to be handled by structures external to the social mass.