De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer • Hacker News Board

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#391

Post by jamiewilson » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 5:03 AM UTC

briandear wrote: post #220

bjourne wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 polic…

> 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. I have been in the middle of protests when I worked for Reuters and the difference between peaceful and violent is very tiny. I was in the no-man’s land between the K…

Like you’ve noticed, it appears to me that the state responds with much more violence to protests explicitly against violence than protests about other issues. I wonder why that is?

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#392

Post by thebradbain » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 5:04 AM UTC

Jommi wrote: post #376

thebradbain wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"As they would rather not tax people to pay for it" I think you may be underestimating how much cities dedicate their budgets to police spending: "Mayor Eric Garcetti's 2020-2021 city budget gives police $3.14 billion out of the city's $10.5 billion. That's the single biggest line item, dwarfing, say, emergency management ($6 million) and economic development ($30 million)." (In fact, LAPD is getting pay raises while…

Please don't use LA as an example. Its not a city that can be compared to any other because of its weird patchwork nature and stupid geographic boundaries.

I studied Los Angeles history of city planning and urbanism in university, as a minor (not that makes me an expert by any means, of course, but I'm no stranger to LA, plus I've lived here for 6 years) – it's a special city, yes, but it's not fundamentally different from most other large cities in the US, including my hometown, Dallas, so much as just further along the same growth pattern (sprawl and then densification) as most sunbelt cities such as Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Denver, San Diego, and Salt Lake City. (And as far as "stupid geographic boundaries", please see Houston or even San Diego). We could argue about this greater point all day, but nothing makes LA fundamentally special from a city-planning point of view, though it is in my heart :'-)

Regardless, as far as policing goes, NYC's 5 borough/county/city system is _much_ more complicated, which proponents might say justifies their (imo insane) $6 Billion(!) annual budget allocation, but if you compare that to NYC's $34 Billion [1] education budget, it looks a little more reasonable than LA's $3 Billion LAPD budget compared to LAUSD's $7 Billion [2] education budget.

[1] https://www.schools.nyc.gov/about-us/funding/funding-our-sch...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Unified_School_Dis...

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#393

Post by gonzo41 » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 5:08 AM UTC

rhegart wrote: post #321

gonzo41 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also watching that video, the cops were grabbing at his waist where there was a gun, If the guy was just saved by firefighters he may be in an altered state so antagonizing him about carrying seems pretty reckless.

The excuses and justifications for criminals are infinite yet a remotely nuanced take on a cop’s difficulties are met with vile hatred and anger

I'm not excusing the criminal. He made a choice, but the power of video. Other cops should learn from it. Could that situation have ended safely with some other approach.

That second voice, "lift up your shirt". it stopped being a conversation with 1 officer and became two people giving orders to 1 guy.

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#394

Post by vertex-four » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 5:09 AM UTC

kuzimoto wrote: post #383

vertex-four wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not an answer to my argument - that the Government says one thing so we're compliant, and then does another when it suits it.

It is citizens job to be compliant. It is the government's job to enforce compliance. I'm sure there was things the police could do better, but no one died at the hands of the police (after protesting started). The same can't be said for the protestors/rioters.

> It is citizens job to be compliant. It is the government's job to enforce compliance.

That sounds an awful lot like a dictatorship, not democracy. In a democracy, it's the citizens' job to keep their Government accountable - when the population says that the right to a presumption of innocence is paramount, they create a Government to ensure that right.

What you are suggesting is that the population does not believe that the right to a presumption of innocence is paramount - that it is ok to risk life, liberty and limb of innocent people to go after a criminal. That's maybe fine (although I'd argue ethically wrong), but stop teaching the opposite to your children. If you taught your children that the police and courts were out to kill them or lock them up indefinitely for nothing they have any control over, maybe they'd correctly be a little more terrified from an early age - and maybe they'd campaign to change that. Funnily enough, one demographic does get taught that, and others the opposite - because that's how it works out in practice.

The police have literally blinded people, including journalists, permanently, by the way. And potentially have killed people - "In Louisville, David McAtee, 53, the owner of a well-known barbecue business, was shot and killed early Monday. The authorities said that officers from the Louisville Metro Police Department and National Guard soldiers opened fire in response to a gunshot as they tried to disperse a large crowd after a curfew had gone into effect. It was not immediately clear if Mr. McAtee had been killed by the police or someone in the crowd, the authorities said." Of course, as always when the police kill people, body cameras were not on.

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#395

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 5:10 AM UTC

malnourish wrote: post #355

alexashka wrote: post #233

It takes just a few rotten apples on the side of the protestors to make it go violent. It also takes just a few rotten apples on the side of the police to make it go violent. Protesting is largely a modern witch hunt. It lets people blow off some steam, rather ineffectively in the modern protest case, because you don't get to burn anyone alive at the end of it. Enough people long for that witch hunt finale, and that'…

Boston tea party Haymarket riots Black Friday suffragette riots Martin Luther King Jr riots Stonewall riots

[deleted]

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#396

Post by OGWhales » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 5:13 AM UTC

drusepth wrote: post #111

just_steve_h wrote: post #10

Folks - don't be obtuse. Police commanders know exactly what will happen when they escalate with tear gas and rubber bullets. Pro-police forces WANT mayhem. It makes people watching on TV afraid of the protests, and it changes the subject away from the widespread peaceful opposition to racist police violence.

I am pro-police and I do NOT want mayhem. The ideal protest in my eyes is a peaceful, effective one. One that causes real change -- like increased oversight, accountability, altered training, etc -- in the general police population: one that fixes the very real problems we've seen with police for years and continuously improves law enforcement for years to come. Claiming "pro-police forces WANT mayhem" paints the sit…

> The ideal protest in my eyes is a peaceful, effective one.

I know several people personally who say this exact phrase, yet they mocked the football players who took a knee during the national anthem at games protesting exactly this issue.

Obviously most sane people would prefer an effective and peaceful protest, but there has yet to be one for this particular issue. So I am hardly surprised it has become this violent, especially with members of the police force and the president antagonizing people further. Also, I would add that any protest of great size naturally has people who try to take advantage of it and turn to anarchy. Shutting down such rioters with force seems to exacerbate the issue, as police force is what is being protest—an understandably difficult predicament.

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#397

Post by gdubs » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 5:15 AM UTC

I remember being in Grand Central Station, NYC, not long after 9/11, and noticed a student sitting on a step — right next to their head was the barrel of a casually dangled rifle, hanging off the shoulder of a cop who happened to be standing next to them.

We’ve become pretty normalized to it, but a militarized police force wasn’t always a thing in America.

The scenes of the WTO protests in Seattle two decades ago, of cops in riot gear shooting tear gas and rubber bullets into crowds of people — those images were pretty shocking at the time. Now it’s a familiar scene, one that is currently playing out in cities around the country and beyond.

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#398

Post by sdenton4 » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 5:18 AM UTC

kortilla wrote: post #362

idealboy wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I and about 90% of the crowd wore masks. Yes, we did our best to keep 6 feet but not always, hence the masks. People were walking around with hand sanitizer to share. A global pandemic is awful, but it does not alleviate us of our civic responsibility. Was it uncomfortable and difficult? Yes. Am I glad I went? Hell yes. Black lives matter.

> but it does not alleviate us of our civic responsibility. The protests haven’t worked though for the last 20 years or so. IMO it’s more important to vote and promote change than to block traffic. People remember how you made them feel more easily than what you actually said. Preventing them from getting somewhere is a great way to just piss people off.

You know, whining about blocked intersections is even less compelling during the never ending lockdown...

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#399

Post by voganmother42 » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 5:18 AM UTC

ilaksh wrote: post #323

I was watching someone stream the protests near the White House last night. The police were being hit with water bottles and sometimes fireworks, but still they mostly just stood there. The police did not escalate at all until the protestors lit two fires. One completely took over a small building and another was like a bonfire in the middle of the street. So the question is how many fires should you let them light?…

No police presence? Oh! You mean where they waited to announce anything and defended the house of the police officer while everything burned? Or do mean where people on their porches were fired upon for filming? Or maybe that cnn crew that was attempting to comply?

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#400

Post by Klinky » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 5:19 AM UTC

kuzimoto wrote: post #343

vkou wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He was arrested, and charged. He will pay for what he did. He was only arrested and charged because of the protests.

> He was only arrested and charged because of the protests. I have a feeling that would have happened regardless. Do you have a source that shows there wasn't an intent to charge him before the protests?

Literally that just happened with the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, right before George Floyd's murder. Extreme conflicts of interest. These events back-to-back really set the bonfire alight. The immediate outrage over George Floyd's murder, ensuing demonstrations, and demands for charges to be filed probably helped motivate charges actually getting filed promptly. That's definitely not a guarantee however!