Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

fivethirtyeight.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

711–720 of 799 posts

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#711

Post by hef19898 »

0xBA5ED wrote: post #680
craftinator wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've participated in law enforcement hand to hand and incapacitation training sessions (as a Marine). At least in those trainings, it was very clearly taught what techniques were safe and effective, how to use them, and we practiced them on each other literally hundreds of times. If you've ever had a blood choke or constrictive choke applied to you, you immediately understand what it's like, and what dangers it prese…

But do you believe it would be totally clear that you should be convicted of a crime for failing to stop your commanding officer from committing a crime?

Absolutely, yes.

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#712

Post by runarberg »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #464
runarberg wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not so sure you can pin causality here. Anecdotally, the protests I’ve visited in the past have always been exactly as violent as the police initiates. A peaceful police usually means a peaceful protest in my experience. A violent police—on the other hand—can sometimes cause a violent protest, and even a riot. Crowd control is a science. And you are sort of ignoring the science by claiming that rioters are the ca…

> Anecdotally, the protests I’ve visited in the past have always been exactly as violent as the police initiates. Things escalate when someone escalates them. Sometimes that's the police. Sometimes it isn't. And even when it is, you still have to be willing to be provoked. Don't. We have people in this thread justifying riots as "we tried kneeling at football games" as if there is some kind of reasonable progression…

Like I said, crowd control is a science. Even if you have violent actors at the protest, it is still a failure of crowd control if the whole protest turns violent.

Reacting when violated is a natural reaction. With a group this big you cannot think in individual terms. If provoked there and there is a non-zero chance you’ll see a reaction, you will see a reaction. And now you have a positive feedback loop between the police and protestors that may escalate into riots.

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#713

Post by bluGill »

jaas wrote: post #164
bluGill wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I care about both. Two wrongs are two wrongs.

But hopefully you care about one much, much more than the other. They are not comparable in terms of needing discussion at this moment in history. (Edit: In the event that you honestly don't know which one is the more important topic, right now or pretty much any other time - police frequently murdering black people or some store windows getting smashed and merch stolen - it's the police murdering black people.)

Riots have a history of escalating (often by someone with an agenda), my family and town was worried last night that they would come here (several arrests were made), and do real harm. That is they might be less now but from store windows to killing people is not that big a stretch.

I'm not convinced the rioters care about police violence either. From what I ca see the riots are outside groups with riot and anarchy as an agenda. My right wing friends are blaming George Soros, my left wing friends some nameless white supremacist group. I have no idea what the truth is, and don't expect to find out for months if ever.

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#714

Post by ikeyany »

yters wrote: post #705
ikeyany wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rioters don't care about the goals of the protestors.

i've conversed with a couple of people on HN who seem to think rioting is aligned, and in fact more effective than peaceful protests they weren't downvoted, whereas my counter comments were so, it seems this opinion that violence is the way forward is not the minority position

If rioters are aligned with protestors in your mind, then aren't cops who murder innocents also aligned with good cops?

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#715

Post by kingkawn »

KuiN wrote: post #492
kingkawn wrote: post #246

Instead of optimizing protesting don't kill black people.

As an outsider watching from across the Atlantic, I am astonished at what is being posted in these comments. There are hundreds of videos on social media of wanton police violence towards peaceful protestors. Of course there are non-peaceful protestors (and I do not defend them) but they are responded to in incidents of heavy handed violent escalation. Bellingcat have collected more than 100 reports of protected medi…

In America there is a culture of rushing to find center ground between two points regardless of what the points are. So now they rush to make false equivalence between large groups of many kinds of people protesting in public and a professional militarized force with government funding.

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#716

Post by pmiller2 »

cpursley wrote: post #673
learc83 wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not promoting or condoning violence. But Apple shut down their retail stores over this, so it definitely is impacting "the elites" to some extent.

I own shares of Apple via my retirement plan. Am I elite?

Yes.

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#717

Post by ashtonkem »

0xBA5ED wrote: post #680
craftinator wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've participated in law enforcement hand to hand and incapacitation training sessions (as a Marine). At least in those trainings, it was very clearly taught what techniques were safe and effective, how to use them, and we practiced them on each other literally hundreds of times. If you've ever had a blood choke or constrictive choke applied to you, you immediately understand what it's like, and what dangers it prese…

But do you believe it would be totally clear that you should be convicted of a crime for failing to stop your commanding officer from committing a crime?

The question isn’t whether failing to stop a crime makes you an accessory, it’s a question of whether or not performing perimeter security for a crime makes you an accessory.

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#718

Post by yters »

ikeyany wrote: post #714
yters wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i've conversed with a couple of people on HN who seem to think rioting is aligned, and in fact more effective than peaceful protests they weren't downvoted, whereas my counter comments were so, it seems this opinion that violence is the way forward is not the minority position

If rioters are aligned with protestors in your mind, then aren't cops who murder innocents also aligned with good cops?

perhaps if i saw protesters actively stopping violence and looting instead of just spectating and filming and cheering, as well as comments supporting violence getting flagged on hn

otherwise, plenty of people may not be personally willing to risk themselves by being violent, but are happy to stand by as others are violent

anyways, i hope the protesters look forward to trump 2020, because that is the current trajectory they are pushing

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#719

Post by komali2 »

endogui wrote: post #430
komali2 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before it was looting, it was that kneeling at a football game distracts from the game. Before that, it was "no, no, protest will never work, you need to get more black people elected! Try to get a black president maybe!" Before that, it something else equally absurd. No matter how black people try to get their voices heard about police violence, there will be people who doggedly tear those voices down by any means n…

Kneeling during the national anthem at football games should have been an issue between the players and the NFL, but the kind of people who attend football games disapproved of it. In Minneapolis today due to the videos which were captured even those anti-kneeling americans largely recognize the problem and support solutions. But by allowing the rump to be violent (or equivalently, serruptitiously distribute bricks a…

> But by allowing the rump to be violent

Expecting the protesters to somehow control everyone in the protest, when the cops fire indiscriminately on people whether they're peaceful or otherwise, doesn't seem like a working system.

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#720

Post by arkades »

tasogare wrote: post #77
arkades wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While there's a kernel of validity to what you're saying, cops in every state and every nation have to deal with a violent and hateful environment. The variation in outcomes suggests something else is at play .

Variation of outcome in other countries can be easily explained by low availability of weapons (that the case of most places): policemen are less susceptible to make use of their weapons when people they arrest as low probability of holding one.

While I grant that that is true, and likely a contributing factor, it's worth noting that police have other disabling weapons at their disposal. The ease with which one, and the other, are deployed again suggests that it's not simply a matter of "need to defend one's self against possible violence" differing between regions.

How many videos, at this point, are out in public of police taking out tasers at routine, non-violent traffic stops? Of chemical spraying non-violent protestors? And of shooting unarmed people? The famous photo of the UC Davis photo casually spraying seated students at a campus protest makes the case more eloquently than I can: that was not a person in fear of their life, and we've created a system where that person avoided criminal prosecution (https://humansarefree.com/2014/04/the-cop-who-pepper-sprayed...). When that happens, it seems an offense to logic to reach to "well, our police are more violent because our criminals are more violent." It may be true, but it's outright offensive to their victims not to pause, first, at "...and because their violence goes unpunished." Pointing out the risk they are exposed to is less plausible when we see violence undertaken in non-violent situations, and where they do not see criminal prosecution for wildly disproportionate responses.

How many events have we learned of where unarmed people providing no violent resistance were killed by officers who didn't suspect violence? The death of Eric Garner in NYC involved an unarmed man, stopped by the police for selling single cigarettes, who was pinned down and choked to death, while his hands were up and he was wheezing and begging for air. Those officers were neither permanently removed from duty, nor prosecuted. It's difficult to interpret "slowly choked an unarmed and unresisting man to death" as "acting in response to fears of the violence possible in the situation." Situations like that make it highly unlikely that violent police are a simple correlation to violent criminals, because that would at least suggest that the police violence is constrained to violent and reasonably-possible-to-escalate-to-violence situations. Which isn't what we see riots breaking out over.

Post reply on HN