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Originally Posted by Itse
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?
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Clearly the police force. But that doesn't make the looting right, which I think you ultimately conclude as well.
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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.
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I do think this was inevitable, as I said earlier. But again, it's still not something that should be celebrated or excused, as some are doing.
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Everything that's happening in the riots is ultimately the fault of the police.
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This isn't how proximate cause works, so I disagree. If you set a building on fire and loot a storefront because you're angry about how the local police treat black suspects, it's not the police's fault for upsetting you. You're committing a crime. The police's criminal behaviour and institutional failings are their fault, your criminal behaviour is yours. There are many reasons to be justifiably angry, but you do not get to go downtown and break a bunch of windows and then claim it was the fault of the people who made you angry in the first place. That's on you.
We'll leave aside the fact that I question if many of these guys are doing what they're doing exclusively out of anger at systemic racism, because I think many of them are just young dudes who are taking the opportunity to break some things and get some free stuff. If they can justify it to themselves as being part of "fighting back against the system", more the better.
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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.
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I agree. However, in at least some of these instances, I think it's probably impossible to prevent this without taking very aggressive steps that I suspect we both would prefer they not take. If the alternative leads to more people getting injured or killed by police in attempting to quell the rioting, the rioting is pretty clearly the lesser evil.
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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.
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This isn't what happened, though. The officers were almost immediately suspended, and shortly afterwards, fired. The mayor's office immediately decried the abuse and called for charges. Those charges were laid, again, quite quickly. The normal time it takes for these processes to take place were abridged here.
Again, I think it's revisionist history to suggest that this was a case where the response from those in power was half-measures, it was actually surprising how hard they came down on the officers involved, given how these things have gone in the recent past. I don't really see how you could expect a better process.
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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.
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No argument here, the conduct of a lot of police during these protests has been awful. They're supposedly professionals, and the rioters are
literally rioters - you expect that of the two, the rioters will behave worse. And yet, there's far, far more video of police behaving egregiously than the rioters, which demonstrates precisely the underlying systemic problem with police forces in the USA (which isn't to say that there aren't similar problems in other countries to varying degrees but we're obviously focused on the USA here).
And yes, it does seem strange that they're not focused on catching the looters. From what I can tell, if you looted a store in the midst of all of this, there will be no effort made whatsoever to apprehend you. There will be no consequences. Compare that to what the brits did in 2011.
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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.
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As I said earlier, I think this is a brilliant strategy, but I also think it's naive to suggest that if every police force tried this, it would work in every case and no rioting or looting would have happened. For the most part, this has been a daytime strategy. The worst of the damage and looting has happened at night. The two crowds, on the protester side, have been very different.
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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.
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I agree with this too. My whole thing was not that it's not understandable, or that it's surprising that it's happening. I'm not the
least bit surprised. My objection is to people suggesting that it's excusable, or unimportant, or even laudable (I have read a bunch of cheerleading, though not so much in this thread), or that even being interested in it at all somehow suggests that you're trying to distract from the central issue about police overreach and brutality. It is, as you say, not okay, it's fairly harmful to people who don't deserve it, and it's not ultimately productive.
