What world do you live in? I could just go on a murder spree and when police come to arrest me I can just tell them "you can't tell me what to do", and they'll say "shucks, he's right, guess we'll let him on his way".
By the way, you're being doublespeaky when you say "protest is legal". It sure is. But the vast majority of these altercations come from after a group has been declared a riot, a public safety hazard, and ordered to disperse. They're no longer peaceful protesters when the cops have to use force to shut it down.
> But the vast majority of these altercations come from after a group has been declared a riot
This is typically after police have antagonized the situation and created it through tactics like kettling and surrounding protesters and then throwing grenades of tear gas and misusing rubber bullets in potentially lethal ways on nonviolent crowds.
"declared a riot" is political speak for when the police don't like a protest and begin attacking.
Yes, that’s 100% correct. There is an overabundance of documented evidence that police all around America are declaring completely peaceful protests riots and responding with force.
You can find the videos yourself of this happening over many many cities. I'm not going to do that work for someone clearly not trying to understand in good faith.
You say this like it's a conspiracy when there are clear maligned motives for cops to approach these things in this manner, as well as a history of it.
> In your mind, cops really just see a peaceful protest and just decide to start fucking with them?
Sometimes, but not often.
More often, when there is a gross “overreaction”, it's a calculated attempt to suppress the message of the protestors, coordinated by leadership and instigated by various means including feeding false intelligence to the cops on the line that distorts their interpretation of facts.
But in the case of race-related issues it's often much worse than that, and this is apparently the case now. The infiltration of American law enforcement agencies by white supremacists is long-documented, there is, at the moment, an active white supremacist effort to trigger a race war, and the President of the United States is actively using language invoking historical racist government violence, and directly initiating violence against peaceful protestors. This isn't impulsive police violence, or merely violence as instrumental to winning a political debate, this is a (mostly loosely) coordinated campaign of racist violence where the violence and the harms it inflicts is, itself, a goal, and not just a callously accepted cost of some other end.
Can you explain what the cops [1] were doing to this car and what is their rationale for destroying someone else's property? Was the car resisting arrest?
The police have limited powers to uphold the law, including things like arresting murderers. They don't have the power to arbitrarily order people to do whatever they want. If an officer asks you to do something when you're not committing a crime or endangering anyone you are allowed to say no.
For all Americans talk about having rights and freedom you do seem incredibly quick to give them up in the face of authority.
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.
As someone who has taken part in DC protests, we were gassed, pepper sprayed, stun grenaded, and shot with pellets in order for the president to take a photo at a church. It is incredibly naïve and downright incorrect to suggest that the police are _only_ intervening during "public safety hazards".
What world do you live in? I could just go on a murder spree and when police come to arrest me I can just tell them "you can't tell me what to do", and they'll say "shucks, he's right, guess we'll let him on his way".
By the way, you're being doublespeaky when you say "protest is legal". It sure is. But the vast majority of these altercations come from after a group has been declared a riot, a public safety hazard, and ordered to disperse. They're no longer peaceful protesters when the cops have to use force to shut it down.