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De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

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Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#581

Post by dmix »

znpy wrote: post #544
JoeSmithson wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have the links for the second two (damaging own car, unloading bricks)?

this seems to be a link: 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 cops unloading bricks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTA0N3kkPaE

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.

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#582

Post by throwaway0a5e »

lobotryas wrote: post #548
noobermin wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less officers overall and train the remaining officers better. Besides, given that the police already get so much money and we still have problems, it seems like throwing more money at them isn't the answer.

So you want even longer wait times for an officer to respond to your complaint of a stolen car/bike or other “quality of life” crime? How are people thinking they will get better police service (or any police service) by reducing police budgets? Most of said budget is spent on pensions anyway from the breakdowns I’ve seen. It’s not like cops are rolling in it. Even if you rake in overtime you still have to work durin…

>So you want even longer wait times for an officer to respond to your complaint of a stolen car/bike or other “quality of life” crime?

But even in well funded departments the response is laughable. At best if your stolen item is serialized they will record that number and it will be recovered at a later date when they happen to bust someone for something else and catalog everything they found in the vicinity and their computer system tells them your thing was reported stolen.

>Even if you rake in overtime you still have to work during that time.

The Massachusetts State Police and their 2-5yr recurring "whoops it looks like a bunch of people were getting paid for working overtime that wasn't actually worked, we'll fire someone as a sacrificial lamb and go right back to what we were doing" scandal would beg to differ.

That said, as much as it pains me to defend them, the fact that the job can be easy money for anyone willing to step in line with the organization means that you get people who just want to slack and make easy money or want to over achieve and run a full fledged side business on company time (MSP isn't the only MA gov department where people do this but they're known internally for it) and not the people who want to LARP as soldiers and kick down doors. As a result they don't often wind up receiving allegations of excessive force.

Obviously this is by no means and ideal status quo but it's far superior to having a more violent police force.

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#583

Post by TeaDrunk »

solstice wrote: post #570
lxmorj wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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.

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#584

Post by matwood »

snickell wrote: post #543
mhh__ wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100k dead

0.026% dead As per normal, absolute numbers can be misleading to very smart humans when we have trouble intuiting about vast numbers like "100 million". If the goal is to convey scale accurately, its generally recommended to default report population related measures as per capita percentages. That doesn't mean other measures can't be relevant, but the choice really should be very carefully weighed in order to convey…

The rate seems small because you're apply it across the whole population. So, your number 2 choice is not quite accurate. The question is are people ok with many of their parents and grand parents dying this year?

> 0.026% is a number that means "most people don't know anyone well who died of covid19"

My wife's grandmother had COVID-19. At 80 years old, she was a lucky one and was asymptomatic. She's in a nursing home and many people around her did die though. I have 3 other friends who lost relatives to COVID-19. Even at the low population rate, it's rather stunning anecdotally.

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#585

Post by [deleted] »

jayd16 wrote: post #260
briandear wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Its really about scale and whether a counter protest shows up. I'd also like to see numbers. There are a lot of pride parades, various demonstrations, women's marches etc that aren't met with violence.

[deleted]

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#586

Post by bobbean »

humanrebar wrote: post #472
bluedino wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been almost no guns used against police during these protests.

But to rephrase, there was a LEO murdered in a drive-by shooting.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests 200 cities have had protests. Out of the probably hundreds of thousands of people protesting, guns have been responsible for one death of an officer (as far as I know)

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#587

Post by TeaDrunk »

Joeri wrote: post #565
vertex-four wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This has happened, incrementally. Do you have statistics that show that? Are more cops charged and imprisoned after murdering unarmed people every year, or does the number of unarmed murdered people go down, at all? People who die mysteriously in custody?

“Fatal police shootings of unarmed people have significantly declined, experts say” https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/fatal-police-s... However, the overall trend in police killings is flat. https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends Interestingly: “White Police Officers Are Not More Likely To Shoot Minority Suspects” https://www.npr.org/2019/07/26/745731839/new-study-says-whit...

According to from what I understand fatal police shootings have declined in dense cities but have increased everywhere else.

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#588

Post by matwood »

Kye wrote: post #580
californical wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it's related to the fact that the protestors a few weeks ago were carrying lots of guns openly. I genuinely wonder what would happen if a majority the people protesting today were all carrying AR-15's

Historically speaking, it would lead to a sudden interest in gun restrictions from people who were previously opposed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act

I wondered about this. If all the people protesting started building arsenals like we saw a couple weeks ago, would that lead to gun control finally happening?

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#589

Post by ashtonkem »

lsh123 wrote: post #320
ashtonkem wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not “any” means.

Please watch this and imagine that this was your mom: https://www.facebook.com/501974795/posts/10159362491674796/

When physical safety is threatened, more force is justified. But advocating for stopping property crime with “any means necessary” is beyond the pale.

Re: De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer

#590

Post by nicoburns »

0xBA5ED wrote: post #546
vzzvzsz wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A man is murdered on the street by police and basically the system worked as it should. Fuck you.

Police officers are humans, believe it or not. Some of them are bad and that will always be true. Regarding your unnecessary insult at the end: Grow up.

The problem is with how these incidents are dealt with when they happen. Ordinary citizens could expect jail time for doing something like this, and that threat helps to protect black people against these bad people.

In this specific case, it looks like the police officer will face justice. But that only happened after the huge public outcry, and it didn't happen in countless other cases even when there was a big-but-not-as-big outcry. In many cases, not only have the officers escaped trial, they've actually kept their jobs!

That's what people are protesting.

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