Yeah, pretty much what I figured.

[trinityvixen]

On the heels of xannoside's post, and my response to it, evidence of what I was talking about. With numbers and everything. Non-lethal weapons may decrease the numbers of deaths in violent confrontations, but they increase the numbers of incidents that use force, period. Suddenly, you've got a lot of people being harmed who might not otherwise have been. It's problem.

So's this:

Understanding the psychology of policing is also very important, said Dunham.

“In their culture, it’s important to have authority. Most policemen will say that the only thing they have to protect them is authority, and they’re very sensitive to people who do not respect their authority,” he said. “When an officer gets on the scene, the number-one thing they’re supposed to do is take control” — and that dynamic is heightened when they know that other police will judge their actions.

Though I am equally troubled by the notion that policemen and women are thinking of how they'll be judged by their peers rather than by the people whom they serve (also: troubled that, in the estimation of police, acting with less force is the thing they perceive their colleagues will like less), I think the bolded portion makes me most nervous. The vast majority of people do respect, and, I think, even fear the police. The fact that respect is policed so heavily should worry everyone.

Comments

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I care about this a lot, actually. I've been following stories of tazer abuse for a while, very chagrined the whole time. It has nothing to do with it just being used against protesters; clearly, as the article mentions several studies that investigated use of non-lethal weapons in years prior, most researchers aren't exclusively focused on anti-protest spraying.

I have to call bullshit on this, though:
After seeing the damage done by Occupy Oakland and in London, it's tough to fault police for taking a hard line against young, leaderless anarchists.

It is hyperbole to call the OWS people, smelly and intrusive though they may be, anarchists. It is just wrong, according to the defition of the term anarchy/anarchists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism). You can throw the word around all you like, but you just sound like you don't know what it means. Do not use words incorrectly.

It is likewise inaccurate to link protesters to rioters like the ones in London, despite however many rhetorical points you think you score for that analogy. You do it to condemn the one (protesters) by linking it to the other (rioters) and fail to make any other cogent point. It's inflammatory rhetoric, not evidence, not even psychology. (Except yours, really.)

But most importantly, you are basically calling the police reactionary cowards. It is the job of the police to react to the situation at hand, not to be scared by unrelated situations half a world away that have been over with for months before the situation they ARE facing happened. Your assertion that not-so-current events have made the police more on edge and thus could not be expected to respond with less force than they have. This is bullshit. The police are expected to be, above all, professional. Excusing unprofessional behavior, like using pepper spray in non-threatening situations, does greater discredit to the police on top of their already lamentable overreaction.

Frankly, I'm not at all distracted by your transparent attempt to change the subject from something that is legitimately a problem that you claim to agree is a problem. You're committing common strawperson arguments--"You can't be upset about this unless you're also upset about this!"; "Where were you when this happened?"; "Yeah, but [X] isn't as bad as [Y]."--otherwise known as your arguments, "What about the puppies?"; "How come you didn't talk about pepper spray when it wasn't in the news?"; and "The OWS are lucky they're not rioters because they could have it a lot worse." None of these arguments in any way derails the righteousness of pointing out injustice suffered now. My failure to be vocal before--to you; I would note that I have been vocal to others--does not therefore invalidate my points now.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

I'm not criticizing you for failure to talk about the problem outside the protester context, I'm criticizing the media. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

As to anarchists, though...when the guy leading your march is carrying the black and red anarchist flag, it's fair to call your protest anarchist (firsthand experience last Thursday). When the protesters in Oakland try to disassociate themselves from violence by saying it was done by Black Bloc anarchists, it's fair to say that the protests have invited anarchist violence.

I don't excuse pepper spray at UC Davis, where there was no threat. I could excuse pepper spray in NYC (in the Bologna incident) where a mob of protesters was climbing on cars, blocking Broadway, and trying to break through police barricades. I can easily excuse tear gas in Oakland, where protesters shattered store windows and shut down a major commercial port, and where the city has experience with protests like this getting out of hand.

And yeah, we are allowed to look at the London riots as a cautionary example. Those riots started as a protest, and turned into riots and looting when the police failed to keep order. That doesn't necessarily mean that OWS would have turned into a riot, but it does set a worst-case scenario to be avoided. And frankly, having seen the scenes from last Thursday firsthand, I'm quite comfortable saying that without the overwhelming police presence, there would have been terrible property damage and violence in the Financial District.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I'm not criticizing you for failure to talk about the problem outside the protester context, I'm criticizing the media. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

Sorry for the overreaction there. You're absolutely right that this isn't covered nearly enough. Just read about a 61-year-old disable man tazed to death. He fell off his bike and was having a seizure. Someone reported him as a drunk and the cops tazed him instead of trying to restrain him. He's DEAD. It's just...wow, the first thing you do when someone is having a seizure, whether it's a drug fit or not, is not taze them. That's not recommended by any group that makes tazers.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

If you persist in keeping with the riots-were-protests, I'll have to note that the protests escalated to violent protests pretty much right away. A months-long peaceful protest does not deserve the reaction it got because one protest somewhere ever got violent. End of story. You cannot use past precedent in dealing with every new situation. Every new situation will not devolve into violence.

And frankly, having seen the scenes from last Thursday firsthand, I'm quite comfortable saying that without the overwhelming police presence, there would have been terrible property damage and violence in the Financial District.

An unprovable assertion about events that did not happen cannot really be a credible argument. I hope you realize that. It is just as likely that had the police not rousted the protesters, nothing would have happened. They would have just kept staying there doing whatever they were doing. There were things that changed that led to confrontation; it does not follow that confrontation/destruction would have happened had the changes not happened.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

A months-long peaceful protest does not deserve the reaction it got because one protest somewhere ever got violent. End of story. You cannot use past precedent in dealing with every new situation. Every new situation will not devolve into violence.

By itself, no. When you have guys on videotape shouting that they're going to hurl Molotov Cocktails at Macy's, and the OWSers around him aren't shouting him down, you start getting concerned. When the movement's website openly says its goal is to shut down Wall Street, an act that if successful would cause massive financial damage, then yes, I think it's fair to call out the riot squads.

And in practice, their anger wasn't directed towards the police--the goal was to shut down Wall Street. The morning mobs on November 17 were trying to forcibly stop Wall Street workers from getting to their jobs. The Oakland rioters were part of the same movement, and they didn't limit their attacks to police officers. The New York protesters were harassing little girls on their way to school! So yeah, I think it's fair to think that massive police response was necessary to keep downtown businesses safe.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

When the movement's website openly says its goal is to shut down Wall Street, an act that if successful would cause massive financial damage, then yes, I think it's fair to call out the riot squads.

Well, I can stop talking with you on this subject right here because that crosses a line with me. You openly advocate the use of force to protect money. I think we're at another one of those points where I will never agree with you and further discussion will only leave me further in horror of your opinion.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

So you don't believe self-defense is justified to prevent robbery? Because that's "use of force to protect money."

If you have so little regard for property rights that you think it is wrong to prevent people from invading private property to prevent a business from opening, then I suppose we do have nothing to discuss here.

[xannoside.livejournal.com]

Those riots started as a protest, and turned into riots and looting when the police failed to keep order. That doesn't necessarily mean that OWS would have turned into a riot, but it does set a worst-case scenario to be avoided.

Oh come, on. The root causes weren't the same, the provoking incident wasn't the same, the places and the people weren't the same, the actual protests weren't the same.

Setting London as a worse-case scenario would be no different from telling the NYPD that if they talked to the protesters, they would get set on fire.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

See my response to trinityvixen above. And as of November 17, if you don't want to consider London a worst case example, make it Oakland, which was quite bad enough. Same root causes, same movement, same sort of provoking incident (the eviction of an Occupy camp). As of mid-October...there wasn't really a good precedent, but it was clearly the same favor of protest as other left-wing anticorporate protests such as the WTO protests. The Seattle protests were bad enough; put them in the much denser and much more sensitive Lower Manhattan environment and you get a much bigger threat.

[xannoside.livejournal.com]

Except that there were actual riots in Oakland, despite the amount of police presence and their use of CS and rubber bullets. Police presence and "non-lethal" methods /= no riots.

And I'm truly amazed by your willingness to treat anti-corporate protesters as a monolithic singular mass of political identity, especially after you yourself have talked about their general disorganization and lack of message after having talked with them.