They don't care about rioting or looting. Watch how the police have been arranged, in Los Angeles at least. They are there to make the protest seem dangerous, while intentionally allowing looting to go on 2 streets over.
The idea is to allow scary looking but ultimately meaningless damage to occur while blaming it on protestors.
Hmm... If they want to stop rioting and looting, why are they going after "protestors" rather than the rioters and looters? Someone's torching a mall? No police in sight. People are walking and chanting in the street? That calls for a crowd of 1000 police fully decked out in military gear and tear gas, itching to crush heads.
The police don't "have to" be occupied with protestors. The police are prioritizing punishing peaceful protestors for speaking out against them, while deprioritizing going after looting as its presence actually helps the police narrative.
Look at their gears and equipment. The whole riot-police industry only focuses on anti-riot training and strategies. They don't practice for peaceful protests. They aren't designed for that and you can see it just by looking at what they are wearing and holding.
An armed protest without riot-police presence is normally more quiet than a peaceful protest with their presence.
It was a wrong call to send them to a peaceful protest in the first place. They should have published a proper schedule and location for the protest and let people to share their voices.
Police shouldn't guard the protesters. That's a recipe for chaos. They should guard the city, businesses, and take care of safety of protesters.
And it gets worst when the government focus is pushing police harder and harder to end the protest instead of helping them by telling people that their voice has been heard. Police under pressure starts overreacting to protesters instead of taking care of looters which has nothing to do with protesters.
No matter how much they try to control. Often they just get tired, things get messy and overwhelming and they start to beat people.
Now sadly there are also a small number of police force that are just waiting for a day to have an opportunity to enjoy and exercise all the anti-riot trainings they had with their fancy equipment. And that's where you see stupid unnecessary violence from police and no sign that they regret doing that.
There now appear to be police that want violence now too. In my city they’re ignoring looters and tear gassing the protestors. There is no public safety rationale for that.
I'm not claiming there is no looting anywhere. But why should we expect that other police departments treat peaceful protestors any less violently? Do you think the NYPD is just especially sadistic?
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.
I fully expect police officers in the United States to be able to give lawful orders to disperse rioters and prevent our cities from looting and destruction.
If you don't want to be told what to do, don't riot, loot, and destroy.
If you're trying to say that our citizens can just burn our cities down, and there's nothing that can be legally done about it, I really don't understand you.
In all the clips you see, they're no longer peaceful protesters. All of the clips cut out all of the context. That's the piece you're missing. Peaceful protests happen every day and the police don't order them to disperse. Police only order them to disperse when they've become a public safety hazard.
These are not "mistakes". The police are unwilling to disambiguate between peaceful protesters and looters. I live in NYC, where looting has largely stopped and every single protest I've been to has been peaceful — yet police begin indiscriminately assaulting protesters as soon as curfew ends, and threatening reporters who dare document it.
It seems to me that almost every violent protest/riot started peaceful but then police make it violent.
I have seen this so many times where police stay out of the way and everything goes smoothly. I think US police actually want a riot. They want to create violence.
This implies that a riot was the intended goal of the protestors. I wasn't there, so I don't know for sure, but I can't imagine militarized police showing up gave the protestors warm and fuzzy feelings. The implied threat of violence amps up adrenaline, and it only takes one person doing something dumb for the police to violently swoop in and for everything to fall apart.
At the very least, there should be a parity in force used. The current police strategy seems to be overwhelming force, which is both not working, and a moral failure in my opinion.
I genuinely believe that they let the looting happen either to punish the citizens who dared question them, or in the hopes that we’d focus on the looting and not the cops beating citizens down.
We saw the same in London after the 2012 riots. Instead of stopping the rioting and looting the police let it go on and then took all the cctv and arrested the perpetrators after the event.
It’s lazy policing, hundreds of shops got damaged and looted simply because for whatever reason the police wouldn’t do what people want them to do. Stop people committing crime at the time.
If you have a group of people upset and disenfranchised enough to leave their homes to protest, it doesn't seem like beating them, shooting their eyes out or gassing them is going to defuse or better the situation. It seems that rarely does this disincentive the protesters. This isn't making anyone more safe though I'm not sure that's the purpose of the riot police.
They are already out protesting because they don't feel they have a voice any other way. If the state they feel doesn't hear them decides to attack them (in many cases unprovoked) they'll run to the next block and burn the city down. What else are they to do?
Reminder - in Seattle, looting and property damage only started hours after the police started throwing tear gas and firing less-lethal bullets into protestors, and the entire downtown area turned into chaos.
In Bellevue, the police did neither, and instead, talked with the protesters, and there was no looting anywhere near the protest areas.
If you actually cared about minimizing looting, you should probably not attack peaceful protestors on public streets. The chaos that starts is what gives looters cover to operate.
Maybe if the protestors werent so intent on disrupting everyday life and kept things peaceful in the first place the police wouldn't have to clear them out using such means. These protests are a serious nuisance and everyone is paying the consequences for the protestors actions
The idea is to allow scary looking but ultimately meaningless damage to occur while blaming it on protestors.
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