The last 10 or is it 12 days have seen violent protests in most cities in the US of A and in some other cities around the world following the police killing or is it murder of George Floyd and there have been arguments about whether the violence is really useful?
I have seen a post that calls the violence immoral and ineffective. Immoral because the destruction of property of bystanders and ineffective because it will not earn the demonstrators any sympathies.
Should the demonstrators adopt only non violent means to achieve their ends?
I want to suggest here a unpopular opinion. That violence seems sometimes to work & its only downside is that it costs lives & property. Independence was warn in many places because of sustained violence against the colonial authorities. America has mastered the art of spreading violence all round ( cloaked in spreading democracy).
What do you think? I am not asking you to support violence but only to comment looking at history if there are situations where violence has led to progress? How can the same be achieved without resorting to violence?
Random thoughts 
If the cops who did this get off or just a wrist slap, like I surely think will happen, there will truly be violence erupting. Vast, vast majority of the protests have not been violent. I was in a march on Monday here and there was no violence at all. ALL the protests WILL be violent if officer “Kneel On Your Neck” gets off with some stupid-ass ruling such as “temporary insanity”. Just watch what happens then. I’d really rather it not come to that, but I know damn well how the American justice system works.
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Having been in many demonstrations this side of the ocean myself, most usually start out peaceful and it is police action that brings chaos. And of course there a few opportunists too.
The justice system often protects its officers. So such a ruling might not be a surprise. Delay the case until tempers cool and then give a shitty ass ruling.
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Yeah, I doubt it will matter when the bad ruling comes. It’s gonna be very bad.
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We can all hope it doesn’t get there though
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Indeed, and, hopefully it won’t come to such a ruling.
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The Mpls cop who shot Justine Damond (a barefoot women in PJs who sought the aid of the police on behalf of someone else) did get a significant amount of time in prison. Some people are saying he was only convicted because he was a black cop who killed a white woman, but what happened to her was so obviously out of line I don’t believe any cop could have gotten away with that. I have to believe Mr. Kneel On Your Neck will get the same…it was such an obvious and grievous act, prison is a must. Or perhaps I’m naive in thinking so.
I have some mixed feelings about charging the guy who was only on the police force for 4 days when this incident took place. The power dynamics of the cop team were clearly not in his favor, and I don’t know that throwing him in prison for decades is justice.
Divine, I miss you, your toga, and your little (but fearsome) lightening bolt. I do think you have the best avatar, and humor, of anyone on WP! 🙂
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Yeah, you are probably right, and I sure hope you are, but I would not remotely be surprised if Sgt Murder-Boy got some kind of bullshit ruling like “Not Guilty By Reason Of Getting Up On The Wrong Side Of The Bed” syndrome or some other b.s. That dude belongs in the general population of a prison. Let’s see how tough he is in that situation.
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Jeff how do you even come up with some of these lines
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I’m bat-shit crazy! Such things are always floating around in my mind. 🙂
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Makes life more interesting
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I don’t think this would be just.
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There’s lots of debate about this. Turns out TWO of the cops had only been on the force for 4 shifts total. The police chief says they deserve to go to jail for 40 years for standing by and watching a man die. I just don’t know about that. There are power dynamics on any team, and senior team members are expected to be obeyed.
I ran into a similar problem when I was a new psych nurse. I had a suicidal patient who tried to hang herself….the procedure for any suicide attempt is to put them on a 24 hour camera, which required more staffing to monitor the cameras. My charge nurse, a man who had worked on the unit for 35 years, screamed and yelled at me, threw a stapler at me, and refused to put her on the camera. I backed down. The next day my boss called me into the office and said if the girl had died, I would have gone to prison. I was 24 and unfamiliar with unit protocols, so I obeyed my charge nurse. Such is life in high stake jobs. 😦
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40 years is a long time but i think there is some level of culpability, even with power dynamics. They could try to handcuff the fellow, anything. But not stand by & just watch.
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Agreed.
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A professor in college once noted that the threat of violence by radical factions increases the chance of success by the more moderate factions. I thought it was self serving nonsense when I first heard it. (The professor had pretty radical views.) But as the years have passed, his words have rung true more often than I would have thought.
Although I don’t know that the radical faction has to necessarily be violent. It just needs to present an alternative that scares the population at large, enough to make the moderate option more palatable by comparison.
All that said, it’s worth noting that the vast majority of protests have been peaceful. The news media just focuses on the violence.
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I think the threat of violence is sufficient.
Peaceful protests don’t sell newspapers or increase viewership.
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And to be trite, sometimes you have to break a lot of eggs to make an omelet. SelfAware is right, in thinking about this: “misbehaving” at that level, and that pitch, makes the lesser violent protesters seem much more ‘sensible’.
It can also serve as a warning: keep up the barricades, the poor governing behavior, whatever, and this is what we ALL will be doing very soon…
Way way back in the dim mists of time I remember that there were TV commentaries about the incredibly violent riots and protests happening in (I think) Iran. Or Iraq. The cameras showed streets jam packed with protesters, waving bottles and chanting and bouncing placards up and down… and then one night the cameras pulled back and back and back, and suddenly you saw that outside this moshpit of protesters, the business of the city was going on around this , quite calmly. The ‘countrywide riots” were actually about the width of two streets, and nowhere else in the city.
It’s what the cameras choose to show us, and what the commentators choose to mark in red pencil.
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I can tell you to always take with a pinch of salt whenever Int’l media tells you Africa is on fire. I think most journalists don’t give a hoot. The more sensational the better. Facts be damned.
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I’m from MN, about an hour away from the most violent riots in Minneapolis. I’ve been thinking about this topic for some time now. It has been said that peaceful achieves nothing, but I’m not sure violent protesting achieves anything either. Perhaps this is a fatalistic view, but people can’t force the world to see things their way…people will make up their own minds and it will not always be in our favor.
For example, my city of Rochester has many thousands of peaceful protesters. Our ridiculous government kept saying the protesters were “honoring Floyd.” Well yes, they were honoring Floyd, but what they really wanted was CHANGE. Will they get it? I think they’ll get some, but will it ever be enough? Will there ever be true equality for everyone? I doubt it. Nonetheless, we must not stop striving for the ideal.
What did the violence in Mpls achieve? To burn down low income housing, grocery stores, pharmacies….to do $55+ million dollars worth of damage? To burn down the businesses of innocent bystanders, many of them black owned businesses? It may achieve disbanding the Mpls police dept. Know what kind of calls the police dept responds to the most? Domestic violence. As a woman I think it’s unwise to take that away.
I think about how long women have been trying to achieve reproductive freedom. Many women never could and still can’t get gynecological or maternity care, even in the US, let alone decent birth control. I don’t see that changing ever. I’ll still fight for it, but that fact remains that women on the whole have been unable to get the world to care about these issues.
I think I’m beyond the point of hoping for anything anymore. The world is what it is…and it seems bent on self destruction. Giving up is not the answer, but I have learned to temper my expectations.
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This is a nice summary. I am also…cynical…about some of the activities associated with the protests. We are talking organized gangs of looters using the protests as an opportunity. How is looting the corner pharmacy going to change 400 years of racism?
I am also really, really skeptical about the “abolish the police. Community will solve the problems themselves.” In the United States, the “best” examples of community justice were the lynch mobs. Or, not to pick on the U.S., my favorite story is the village elders (no evil corrupt police involved) deciding that a young girl and a boy were of the wrong caste, should not be dating, and the punishment was the young girl was raped by every man in the village. For honor and Allah, of course.
Bureaucracy sucks. It is complicated, unresponsive, can be coopted. But I am really, really skeptical of the various flavors of anarchy.
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I agree that “community justice” can be even worse than our very imperfect legal systems. Giving ourselves over to mob rule isn’t the answer…or in the US, giving ourselves over to the people who own the most AR15s.
That said, we must continually improve how justice is delivered in our legal system and strive for fairness to the highest possible degree. How that can be managed is the question of the day.
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This, V, is the million dollar question
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We MUST find a way to do it. The systems are broken and biased against many kinds of people, but I have to believe there are ways to repair it. Perhaps the idea that they can be repaired is naive, but it is a hope I will not give up.
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Here is a perhaps…hopeful…spin on your comment, Violet: Hasn’t the systems always been somewhat broken? In most places but perhaps especially in the United States? The very fact that there is loud opposition to this, conversation about what would have just been accepted in the not that distant past might be a sign of hope? Heck…usually I am Mr. Gloom and Doom. And I am not minimizing what needs to change…and the opposition to such change!
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They can be repaired. It takes time and dedicated effort.
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I find nothing to disagree with here.
Looting shops mostly owned by the locals is in itself counterproductive. It is insane, so to speak.
But i think we are all agreed there is need to reform the police somewhat. They can’t always resort to violence even when there is no threat to their lives or others.
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Giving up is not the answer, but I have learned to temper my expectations. Very well put!
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I agree
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Tempering one’s expectations is a good way to live.
Some little progress is usually made whether the protests are violent or peaceful.
Equality/ equity may not be possible. But we can strive to reduce the gaps.
On reproductive health, I think a lot of progress is held back by religion and culture.
And I am happy to see you here. Hope you are keeping well. You haven’t written to me in a long time
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Hello Mac! I try to stay off social media for the most part in the interest of my mental health, but I still sometimes read a couple blogs I love (yours!). I have tried to restructure my attitude about having and voicing my opinions on everything, as I’ve noticed the world keeps turning regardless of my thoughts on various topics. I once read a quote that sums it up: “Take life as it is and not as you want it to be.”
I hope you are well my friend…I think of you often!
many hugs,
v.
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I am well my friend and think of you often. Social media can be damaging to mental health. My social media interaction is limited to this blogs only.
Makes life bearable.
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Violence only works as an application of force. It’s why the random violence in the riots aren’t effective, but police violence towards protesters is. Police are exerting force directly on people. Rioters are destroying stuff that can get replaced or rebuilt.
Admittedly, non-violence is more effective against violence. It’s how legal segregation was ended in this country. Footage of police tear-gassing peaceful protesters has worked to keep support of what the people are protesting for. Non-violence highlights how unreasonable police violence has become.
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An important point is being made here. Much of the violence is police-initiated violence. Not all. The looting is not even as directly associated with “protest” per se but is somewhat…opportunistic. As is always the case during any kind of social disorder (see natural disasters)
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I’m trying to remain neutral with regards to what’s getting started and where. I’d also like to clarify that the riots and looting have no established connection with the protests. Sadly, I know people who want to think it’s all the fault of protesters – despite all evidence pointing elsewhere.
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What do you mean when you say, “the riots and looting have no established connection with the protests”? This was initially thought to be the case in MN, with our democratic governor stating all the rioters were whites supremacists, and our republican lawmakers saying they were all antifa. There was a big deal made about how none of the cars had license plates on them and so they must be from out of state.
Later they had to walk back those statements. It turned out that over 80% of the rioters arrested were MN residents from the area…they removed their license plants to protect their anonymity.
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What I mean is that nobody’s shown that people have organized a protest in an effort to start a riot. Almost all of the protesters I’ve seen interviewed have made it clear they want things to be peaceful.
While there is a connection in time and place (like riots occurring at night after a protest), there’s no responsibility on the part of the protesters.
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Ok, I get what you mean, but no one has proven it wasn’t the other way around either. Maybe some of the protesters WERE rioters too, who believed that after what happened to Floyd, violence was warranted (like Mac was proposing). I can’t imagine anyone would admit to rioting during a public interview, so I don’t think we can draw any conclusions from that.
From my perspective as a resident of MN, there is plenty of fury by normal, everyday people about what happened to Floyd….more than enough to drive some to set fires and such. I have no proof of it, and if evidence comes out showing differently, I’ll stand corrected. Until then my personal thought is that there is some correlation. As always, you’re entitled to your own valid thoughts about these things. 🙂
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I’m driving at more of a lack of central effort on the part of rioters. I live with people who are convinced that the protests shouldn’t be happening in the first place. They’ve been talking about some conspiracy theories, which are entirely unfounded.
I also think that rioters are opportunistic, and that some are genuinely angry. But I don’t think they’re starting secret cabals trying to overthrow the government.
Stay safe up there. I have family in that area, but they’re outside the Twin Cities. Though I haven’t heard from them now that I think about it.
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Agreed! I don’t think there’s some “master riot plan” going on either.
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One aspect of the allistic (non-autistic) community that we in the autistic community often joke about is the susceptibility of “normal” people to the herd effect – mass hysteria or mob rule.
I can just about guarantee the most of those involved in the violence and looting had no intention of doing either when they went out to protest, and most in hindsight will be appalled that they acted so. They got caught up “in the moment” so to speak.
To us autistics, it’s almost as though in these situations, there’s an emotional feedback loop that amplifies whatever emotions are out there until many are no longer aware that the emotions they are experiencing are not their own but that created by the group.
In the parody allism: an introduction to a little-known condition this situation is described below. There is some truth in the description, although highly exaggerated. Perhaps there weren’t enough autistic individuals among the protesters to dampen the mob effect 🙂
2.2. the allistic mob effect
—————————-
Special problems occur where a group of allistic people interact with each other. Emotional states, once introduced to the group, get reflected back and forth between allistic people, in a feedback loop. With few or no non-allistic people to provide a damping effect, it is possible for the emotions passing among the group to become significantly amplified. Any change of mood can spread rapidly through the group, like a highly contagious disease, affecting all the allistic people as one.
This leads to a mob effect, where the entire group of allistic people experience emotions that are unusually strong and are the same as what the rest of the group is experiencing. The group acts as one emotionally unbalanced and highly suggestible mind, and may perform acts that no individual member of the group would desire when not affected by the mob.
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oops. Don’t know what happened, but wordpress stripped out all the paragraph formatting. Hope it’s still readable
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It is readable and I haven’t seen no problem with the formatting.
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I think there is truth in what you say. There are some who looted simply because an opportunity presented itself and may even want to return the pilfered goods.
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Opportunists. That’s what I would call them
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An unfortunate byproduct of disasters. I have seen whenever a goods truck has an accident, bystanders take whatever they can.
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Did legal segregation end? The actions of police against black people in America would suggest otherwise.
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I’m referring to the version of segregation that was sanctioned by states and federal courts. What’s been happening for the past 50+ years has been a whole lot of denial about what illegal things police are able to get away with.
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Of course, if you look at the increasing efforts of Republican office holders to game the system and ensure their reelection (reduction of voting stations in black or historically “liberal” areas, lost votes, gerrymandering), I think follsmusings has a point. We even still have the beatings by the police, with often minimal punishment of those involved.
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Exactly
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This is true.
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It’s funny that when it’s an act of war it’s considered noble but when protesters resort to violence they are thugs worthy of death. The hypocrisy of the far right is palpable.
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all sides in every social conflict justify violence in support of their ends. Nobody wants to be a “baddie”.
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This, my friend, is it.
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One of the more interesting police reform thought exercises was developed by Marcus over at stderr:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/stderr/2020/06/09/what-might-post-police-policing-look-like/
Issues of practicality aside (and he has more faith in “community members”), this was really interesting and there are a lot of concepts worthy of thoughtful adoption. The United States is not a thoughtful nation, so …
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I worked as a psych nurse on a locked hospital unit for over a decade, and we had similar problems to the police. More than 3/4ths of our patients were brought onto the unit by the police. Of those patients, 80% of them were totally nonviolent. 10% of them gave us some violence. The last 10% gave us severe violence that ended the lives of both patients and staff.
The problem is that people are unpredictable and things can escalate very quickly. While the vast majority of community interactions won’t be violent, when it does get violent your life is on the line *immediately*. Our nurses were taken hostage and had to be rescued by the SWAT team twice in my time there. A total of one staff member was killed by a patient while I was there, three patients were killed by other patients, and there were a multitude of people (both staff and patients) who received life changing injuries when patients became violent.
Sending in an unarmed “community member” to handle a situation that could evolve into violence very quickly seems like a recipe for disaster. By taking this road this we might save the lives of some residents from killer cops, but who will save these “community members” from violence when it happens? Because it WILL happen. This seems unacceptably risky to me, but of course others are free to have their own ideas about it.
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V, I didn’t think working in the hospital can be this dangerous.
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My son worked as a security guard for a while and was at times rostered on shifts at the the Emergency Department at the city hospital. Distraught, intoxicated or angry patients, but more often whānau (family) and friends do often become irrational or violent. Security personal in NZ can never be armed under any circumstances, but just the presence of someone in uniform is usually enough to deter most violence. But he has described situations where it required the effort of several security guards, doctors and even police to restrain the most violent. While working for the security company, he dreaded the shifts at the ED. Unfortunately he had an above average ability to calm situations down and so was rostered there there more than other security staff.
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It has hardly ever occurred to me working security at the hospital can be that dangerous. I have always thought what you are likely to deal with (especially where bills are high) are patients who are trying to bolt without paying
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Bills no doubt would add to the problem, but hospitals are free here.
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At this rate I will hike to NZ if I have to
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I’m not sure how anyone can hike to NZ given the amount of water that surrounds us 🙂
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hike the land, and raft the oceans maybe 🙂
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That might work. Hike to the southern tip of Africa, and raft from there. the prevailing winds and current will eventually bring you to NZ 🙂 Given the length of time of such a sea voyage, the 14 day isolation period will have been well and truly past by the time you reach our shores 🙂
But if you suffer from motion sickness, I advise caution. Due to global warming, waves in the southern ocean can now reach over 20 metres (100 ft) in height!!
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No one bolts because you don’t have to pay right then and there. You have to give them all your info (with valid ID) before they even treat you. If you don’t have valid forms of ID (and update your info every 6 months), they refuse to treat you. Then they bill you by mail when you get out of the hospital. Trust me, they have your social security number and know everything about you…ain’t no escaping the medical bills!
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Ah I see.
Here there have been cases of people either detained in hospital because they can’t pay or a hospital delaying emergency care before some amount of money is paid as deposit. But this I must add is common only in private hospitals
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No one I’ve met believes hospital work could be so dangerous, but it is…areas like the emergency department and the psych dept are very violent indeed. I was accused of being a liar so many times I simply stopped talking about my work. I feel like the biggest trauma from my experience there was not the violence itself, but the fact that people called me a liar when I spoke the truth. Alas, not being believed is a common human condition many must learn to deal with.
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I feel your frustration.
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Violet: These are interesting observations. The numbers related to police violence that Marcus (rightfully) hammers on are bad (and far worse than in many other countries), the militarized police DO escalate things, and there is differential policing across class and racial lines in these benighted states. And yet, the United States has always been a more violent country than, say, Sweden (although there are now “honor car bombings in Malmo, I hear).
Marcus also has a typical educated person’s faith in “psychiatry” and “mental health professionals” and social services in fixing people. People are hard to fix. Especially if they don’t want to be fixed. If, as some (not necessarily Marcus) advocate, we no longer have detention, surveillance, or strong policing, many of our more challenging citizens may refuse to change their ways. Being a bad ass is fun (see SOME of the looting and violence).
I am also more skeptical than Marcus of “community members”. What if the “community” has been totally intimidated by a violent subset? What if this subset infiltrates or dominates the “citizen patrols” and uses it to further their intimidation. What if the “community” is dominated by a rigid religious minority and these community patrols become “virtue and vice patrols” with the force of law? See how some Haradim communities…and the Amish…use “community policing” to effectively instill a rather rigorous theocracy in their territories. Finally, I am not sure I like the implication of significantly differing law enforcement in various “communities”. Especially given differential power relationships within many such minority communities
While I agree with Marcus that the Voelker Act and subsequent war on drugs have been horrible, I am not sure legal sales of Fentanyl and Meth are the answer either. And as we are discovering with cannabis, legal, highly controlled, and highly taxed psychodestructive drug markets are often not that competitive with existing black markets. I cannot agree with a 19th century free for all approach which may be ultimately what Marcus would suggest.
Finally, Marcus is a little too blithe about pre-policing security. For one thing, most people did not live in large, anonymous cities. for another, many of the larger towns and cities were very unsafe unless one was wealthy enough to have a personal guard accompanying one on one’s errands.
And yet, I like so much of what Marcus proposes. I do like the fundamental idea of changing the basic culture of police forces away from militarized enforcers heavily armed and too ready to escalate.
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Well I suppose the answer lies somewhere in the happy medium, with our police becoming less swaggering badasses, and our communities having the resources to step up a little…but they must be given the money, training, and support to do this. I’m not sure the government will actually do that. I’m also not sure that when the community finds out what is involved in this, they’ll want the job either.
I agree that a major problem is that most educated people in the US have no experience in working with/dealing with criminals, or the severely and persistently mentally ill who are prone to violence. Average Joe’s simply have no concept of what they’re up against.
I’m a “community member” who is a licensed psych RN, and I’ve had extensive training and experience in deescalation techniques. There is no amount of money you could pay me to do that job.
Our Warming Center is the perfect example. In Rochester, MN our city council decided we’d have a warming center during cold weather to help the burgeoning population of homeless. They poured millions into this project and said it would be staffed by volunteers. Among much celebration, the center was opened last December. On the first night a female volunteer was punched in the face so hard she was in a coma for days. Alas, they had some troubles finding volunteers after that, and the whole project was shut down within a month. They council did not consult with local psychiatric or criminal experts…they consulted with churches who said they’d provide the volunteers.
This does not even address, like you said, how some communities in the highly religious Midwest and South tend to devalue certain kinds of people (women, gays, and non believers). People of color are usually welcomed as long as they convert…but I’m not denying systemic racism exists here as well. I will say I absolutely do not trust “community members” to keep me safe.
May the nonexistent gods help us all.
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Violet: With your permission I would love to post this over at Marcus’ thread (or you can do so, of course. 🙂 This is very perceptive. Marcus can be a little blithe, verging on blasé with respect to these issues. Others in his commentariate, I fear, would sympathize more with the violent crazies and ask why the community is forcing them to conform. I may be exaggerating, but I get that tone in some people. Nonetheless, along with our host here, stderr is one of my consistently regular stops.
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Feel free to post my comments where you will…I know most won’t agree with my thoughts, but I do believe people need to be educated on how these things really work. 🙂
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Top down approach to governance. We know better.
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In all fairness, I think they actually tried to do the opposite…run the shelter from the bottom up with volunteers.
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Running it with volunteers when it was already up. That’s where the gap is.
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Having read his proposals, I also do agree with some of it.
For one, I think most policing doesn’t include changing society dynamics and is usually about adding “boots on the ground” so to speak. Lighting a dark alley, providing clean and safe play spaces, funding education, creating employment opportunities would go along way to reducing the demand for hard policing, but this takes work and requires money. So arm the police. Train them badly and voila, you have a recipe for chaos in your hands.
The war on drugs wasn’t meant to warn and I think in some instances, it has made some places much more dangerous.
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I don’t want to sound too negative on Marcus’ Master Plan. I found it a fascinating proposal!
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It was fascinating. It can be improved
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Is violence productive? Let’s put it this way: when I see people looting and burning and rioting, my support for their “cause” dwindles to zero. The end result will be that affected businesses will close or relocate to more friendly environs, leaving the neighborhoods they left further impoverished.
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So you are absolutely fine with the police sodomizing an immigrant with nightsticks, Ron. Or deleting camera footage that shows them beating someone to death? Because that is “the cause” which you are dismissing because of some stupid punk kids stealing liquor from a CVS. I guess as an older, white middle class + guy, you feel that the police will never do “those things” to you, so you can be blithe about it. But I would not be so sure. Corruption and violence can spread and pretty soon everyone who is not part of the cossetted 1% is a potential victim.
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So the most effective way to demonstrate one’s detest for police.brutality is to riot, loot, vandalize and burn down the buildings of hundreds of small, immigrant- and black-owned businesses located in minority neighborhoods? How’s that been working out for you?
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Nobody here would disagree that random looting is not a very effective political technique. With certain caveats, of course. YOU, however, made a blanket statement that you disdain the cause entire. The “cause”, the “issue” is not the looting or the violence, but the horrific levels of police violence and the challenges in militarized police culture. Thus, by saying you reject the cause, that must mean you are A-OK with the sodomized immigrant street peddlers, shot down 13 year old boys, and the hundreds of other violent acts.
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Your argument might have merit if I’d actually written the thoughts you’re attempting to project into the conversation. But I specifically wrote:
And the reason I put “cause” in quotes is because their (i.e. the rioters’) “cause” is not a cause at all–it’s merely a pretext to engage in wanton lawlessness.
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Thank you very much for this interesting post! It was great to read it and listen to your thoughts! I have recently published an article on my blog about the dangerous impact of violent protest and why non-violence is the only way to move forward and achieve equality in the black lives matter movement. If you have time, it would be great if you could check out my article and let me know your thoughts! Thank you and wishing you all the best during this period 🙂
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I will check it out.
Thanks for visiting
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Thank you!
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