Tony_Tarantula on 2/6/2020 at 15:04

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We're on the same page here actually. My biggest worry is that if we don't at least make people FEEL that they're safe in outlying areas, they will start organizing into armed militias. I know you disagreed with me when I initially predicted this evolution of events (left wing aligned protests sparking an armed right wing counter-reaction) but I would politely ask you to consider it wasn't me saying that in isolation. I was mostly paraphrasing analysis from public geopolitical experts such as the columns published in Politico.

(https://twitter.com/SupaBwe/status/1267694939443470336?s=20) Latin Kings are already doing "kill on sight" for looters in their neighborhoods. We're also starting to see some armed white militias pop up in places like Pittsburgh.

These need to be brought under control fast before we get an actual hot civil war.


My proposal for police: Start by holding them to the same standards as any infantry grunt

Military members with a basic security clearance (nothing cool. Just your basic one almost everyone has) are followed to require a relatively strict code of conduct. Beating your wife? DUIs? Violent crimes? extremely bad credit problems? Failing annual mental health assessments? Repeated ethics complaints? Adultery involving another married service member of their spouse?

All of those will get your ass booted out of any combat role you are in and quite possibly give you a bar from re-enlistment. My suggestion is that any cop who is having any of those problems is immediately put on a desk job and barred from participating in any job that involves carrying a weapon including non-lethal ones. Also end qualified immunity.


So this is for once me dropping internet stuff and just being a dude. My perspective is NOT your average person's and I'm biased towards a certain view...not even your average veteran's....because I spent almost a year as a member of an "advisory" team for the Afghan National Police working a spec ops dude (who was hilariously a dead ringer for Beavis). Those dudes. A literal third world militia...were more professional than American police are. I'm just grateful that the gun clinger types are finally figuring out that the police aren't really on your side the way they historically have thought.

The grain of consensus that could possibly allow this to be defused is that a majority on both sides seem to agree the death was unwarranted and police need better accountability. I even read that freaking Rush Limbaugh said that which is astounding.

Starker on 2/6/2020 at 18:14

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Yet more videos emerge of the police rioting:

(https://twitter.com/brett_mcgurk/status/1267662905383596032)

Pyrian on 2/6/2020 at 20:20

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Abruptly charging full-tilt into a peaceful crowd and slugging the cameraman is what you think is standard crowd control? If that's "standard" then yes, that's a problem. A group of people charging and violently attacking bystanders indiscriminately is very much a riot.

heywood on 3/6/2020 at 00:03

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That wasn't crowd control at all. That was the police trying to clear a space for the President to come in and pose for a photo op with a Bible in front of a church.

Whatever happened in the UK in the 90s is not relevant. We have a Constitutionally guaranteed right to assemble peacefully.

As far as I've been able to tell from the multiple reports and footage around the event, the protesters that were over-run by police were not violent and not destroying any property. They were simply in the way of the President's media event. The President has no greater right to be there than any other citizen.

Besides, another one of those Constitutionally guaranteed rights is freedom of the press. There are two different videos of this incident, one from the camera's POV and another from the side. In both videos, it's clear that the news crew was on the sidelines when the cameraman was targeted and slugged, and the reporter gets a baton to the back as she's running away. I presume they were targeted because of the TV camera. I can't say that for sure, but I can't think of any other explanation.

Stopping looting and property destruction is one thing, but this has no excuse. It may as well have been shot in Hong Kong.

demagogue on 3/6/2020 at 02:29

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In my hometown, Fort Worth, Dallas I think so too, the police also knelt down and prayed with the protesters.
But North Texas isn't so much of a hotbed of radicalism, even if we have a good number of minorities.
(We probably have a bigger problem with the white nationalist militias, but that's another story.)

In this case there was really no ambiguity that a cop needlessly murdered a black man over an agonizing seven minutes suffocating him while he was pleading for his life. So I think a lot of police are very conscious that they have to distinguish themselves from that and don't want to look like they're defending that kind of police behavior. That makes this different from the Michael Brown case, where the shooting officer's narrative was that he was being attacked and he was absolved of charges. That was much more a clash of conflicting narratives that set in than is possible here. Here, you really have to focus on vandalism and looting and blind yourself to the cause of it pretty much altogether to push that kind of heavy-handed narrative.

It's interesting. I just read Ellison's Invisible Man (great book!), which ends with riots in Black Harlem I think around the 1930s, and the unnamed protagonist was kind of reveling in the dual identity of the Rinehart character, who was both a gangster and a preacher, and when he was mistaken for the guy, he adopted the dual character for himself. And it was in the context of the Harlem riots happening all around at the time. Even though it was a century ago, it's interesting to see the parallels with today, this kind of paradox of uninhibited lawlessness and righteous purification being unleashed as part of the same movement.