Quote:
Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague
I posted this several hundred posts ago and still have not received a satisfactory response, despite people continuing to support, or at least excuse, the rioting and looting.
I continue to await an explanation.
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I'm going to sidestep the question of "is it useful" and take another angle to this.
Who's job is it to make sure shops don't get looted?
a) The police force
b) The people who organize protests against police violence?
When the police loses control of a city, **** happens. When the police brutalize and murder the people they should be protecting, at some point the people will start lashing out. It's just going to happen. If you keep hitting people, eventually some of them will start hitting back and hitting first, and while it's easy to say that people getting hit should try to keep their calm, it's just unrealistic to expect that everyone will turn the other cheek forever.
Everything that's happening in the riots is ultimately the fault of the police. The whole string of events that led to this was their fault. They killed someone, they let the murderer go (initially), they completely effed up their response to people protesting... in some places. They've been building this fire for decades, by being unnecessary violent, incompetent, blatantly racist and uninterested in reforms.
In a functioning democracy when people are protesting, it's the job of the police to make sure the protesters get to voice their opinion in a safe and organized manner, and that nobody takes advantage of the situation by, say, rioting.
In too many places in the US the police is both incapable and unwilling to take this attitude. In Minneapolis the police completely ignored the first public outcry which created the need for people to protest. They then tried to first intimidate and then brutalize the protesters into submission. It's not only a horribly fascist response and of very questionable legality, it's also terrible policing as we can see from the results. The riots are not "the other side" here, they're another incriminating fact that underlines how absolutely terrible the police in Minneapolis and many other places are at their job. Instead of arresting and convicting the murderer they started fights with the people who wanted the murderer arrested. Instead of focusing on catching the rioters and looters, they've been beating up anyone who gets on their nerves too much and shooting rubber bullets at reporters and even at random people on the streets. The police have been very actively escalating the situation into what it is now.
It's worth noting that not all police forces in the US suck at their job like this. In the places where the police have responded to protests with respectful communication and humility, even sometimes marching with the protesters, things have been peaceful. This shows very clearly that the riots and looting were not inevitable and not something that automatically needed to follow the protests. The looting and rioting are as much the result of violent, racist and incompetent policing as the protests themselves.
I also have a comment on the looting:
While I don't support looting, to some extent I get it. Not the white guy who takes the opportunity to steal a Lego set (Seriously that happened
), and not every looter, but... We live in a consumerist society where to be normal is to have stuff. If you're a poor black person in America, I get that you might feel the game is so rigged against you that it's okay for you to break the rules too, and just take stuff when the opportunity arises.
It's not okay, it's still a crime, but it's very human and understandable.