How about some controversial encounters between law-enforcement and law-enforcement?
Whether you believe that use of chemical weapons, including tear gas and pepper spray, are banned by the Geneva Convention is irrelevant. The simple fact is that they are. But, again it appears that holding cops to standards like ‘don’t do anything that would qualify as a war crime the army did it to enemy soldiers’ is apparently too extreme and radical for the blue line types. Refraining from using chemical weapons, torture, attacking medics, attacking journalists, and attacking observers is just too extreme.
Nitpick but tear gas and pepper spray are not the same thing. Pepper spray was not even invented until long after the Geneva Convention was written. The whole idea behind pepper spray is that, while painful, it is not really harmful. Pain compliance can be an effective tool and is really the lowest kind of force there is.The questioned has been asked but not answered - what is the correct response form law enforcement when large numbers of people refuse lawful orders? Arrest? I can just see it now. “Attention! All 200 of you are under arrest for Failure to Disperse. Please walk, single file, to the tables on the right so that you may be processed. Thank you for your cooperation.”
Many times the point of the crowd is to inconvenience the public so that their grievances are heard. Simply directing them to a more convenient spot isn’t going to work. How long do you let a group, whatever their cause, stop the rest of the public from getting to where they want to go? And what do you do when that time is up?
Not really a useful nitpick, as it is still banned from use in war.
And that @Pantastic did in fact say tear gas and pepper spray.
I don’t know, maybe sometimes you allow peaceful assemblies to be.
If you want to speak to the organizers, and threaten them with fines if they cannot get their crowd to follow the rules, that sounds like a good idea to me.
If you cannot find a way to deal with a peaceful assembly without resorting to violence, then it is you who have failed at this whole civilization thing.
Indeed. To paraphrase your question - what is the correct response from law enforcement when people are inconvenienced?
Spray people with painful chemicals?
Beat them with sticks?
Shoot them with rubber bullets?
Shock them with Tasers?
Or, perhaps we should simply not be using violence to deal with an inconvenience. Such as when angry white conservative men “inconvenience” people by taking over a federal office or parading around with loaded guns. Police seem to find non violent ways of dealing with these inconveniences.
A bar nearby was recently cited for serving drinks after Covid curfew.
Should the police have come in and started teargassing (I’m sorry, pepper spraying) patrons? Or should they, as they did, fine the owners and threaten their liquor license?
What say you @MikeF? I mean, there weren’t even any children in the bar, shouldn’t stormtrooper tactics be used?
No shit, that’s why I listed both individually. If someone says “A and B are banned by the geneva convention”, that’s a pretty clear indication that they recognize that A and B are separate things. Also, I’m not sure how you think the Geneva convention works, but ‘chemical weapons developed after the convention was signed are A-OK’ is definitely not the case - the more effective nerve agents were developed well after the convention, but are still covered by it.
“Pain compliance” is another word for torture. If you’re advocating ‘pain compliance’, you’re advocating torturing people for, in this case, walking down the street to a polling location to vote in a town that has an ongoing lawsuit for refusing to issue permits for protests. The widespread acceptance of torturing people, including children and the elderly, for failure to obey every whim of a cop is one of the reasons this thread exists.
Also, while the myth is that pepper spray is not dangerous, that’s purely ‘blue line’ propaganda. Pepper spray can cause severe issues including death in people who have underlying conditions like heart or lung conditions. Since we happen to be suffering from a global pandemic of a disease that severely affects the lungs, using an agent that causes coughing (helping spread the pandemic) and that can cause serious adverse effect to anyone who has or had the disease would be avoided if the police were acting reasonably. But police are still spraying and shooting the stuff around indiscriminately.
Well, the first question is ‘are the orders even lawful’? People defending police brutality like to use the phrase ‘lawful orders’, but it’s not clear that the police have lawful, much less moral and/or ethical, authority for a great many orders that they issue. Refusing to issue permits for peaceful protests, then ordering anyone protesting to disperse when they attempt to peaceably assemble certainly appears to be a first amendment issue to me, which would render the orders unlawful.
Forever, if the only way you can think of to deal with the crowd is to refuse to issue permits for them to march, then torture the crowd (including children) with chemical weapons when they defy you by exercising their first amendment rights while traveling to a polling place.
Caught in the act of being themselves…
We’re they black? For conservatives blackness is threatening.
Also, if you’re going to say that my position is too extreme or unusual, bear in mind that the ‘chemical weapons on children’ incident you’re talking about has spawned two federal lawsuits so far, a call from NC’s democratic congressmen for a DOJ investigation, and goes against general ‘best practices’ even according to police docs.
Two interesting side notes about arrests: Police claim that an assault on an officer is what justified the need to disperse and the use of chemical weapons to torture children. But while 15 people were arrested, none of them were charged with any sort of attack on a police officer. One person was arrested for having a fixed-blade knife on their person, which is interesting because they say it’s against state law, but Raleigh police (the state capital) have refused to arrest any of the AR-15 carrying protestors who are against masks.
Also, for further ‘fun’ in this thread, here is an article about some Durham, NC cops drawing guns on kids and trying to justify it:
You are STILL not answering the question. What should the police do when a small number of people are interfering with society, in general, because they are airing their grievances? I don’t want to hear your opinions on what shouldn’t be done but, rather, what should be done. How much should society put up with? How about 500 people block the George Washington bridge during rush hour because they feel camels are being mis-treated in the making of movies? Just let them because its only an inconvenience to the tens of thousands who use that bridge? Who is the arbiter of what is a “good” protest and what is a “bad” one? If the law requires a permit or limits a protest in some manner (like, don’t block the streets) then violations of the conditions set down in the permit are unlawful and orders to cease those actions are lawful. Break the law and face the consequences.
Also, I don’t understand the hang up with pepper spray. Why are you relying on the GC when it comes to OC spray?. Bombs, artillery and machine guns are O.K. but OC spray isn’t? The GC has nothing to do with civilian law enforcement. Have you ever been pepper sprayed? I have and, as a police trainer, witnessed hundreds of recruits go through it. Yeah, it sucks. That’s the whole point. But after 30-45 minutes its over with. Please cite cases where the use of pepper spray was the cause of death. I’m not saying it has never happened but its exceedingly rare.
Pain compliance equals torture? WTF are you smoking? An element of torture is that the person is under the custody or control of the one inflicting pain or harm. In an unlawful assembly/failure to disperse situation, that is not the case. Quite the opposite. Ideally, everyone in a crowd who fails to disperse after being given a lawful order to do so should be arrested, especially if force (including OC) was used on them but it just isn’t practical or even possible to do so. If you want to debate the “lawfulness” of something, do it in court.
It’s interesting that your justification for torturing children using chemical weapons is that you have a lack of ideas of how to deal with crowds. The simplest thing to do is to give the crowd time to disperse - this particular crowd was heading to the polls to vote, and it’s clear that whatever disruption was happening wasn’t going to be long anyway. That doesn’t fit your or the police’s ‘respect mah authoritah’ desires, but is an actual morally justifiable way to handle it - again, using chemical weapons to torture children is something that most people would only consider justified if the children posed an actual danger or were engaging in serious criminal activity - not just walking through a street.
This document funded by the Department of Justice and created by the Police Police Executive Research Forum linked below states: “Ensuring that police responses to mass demonstrations are proportional to the actions and mood of the crowd is critical to making sure the police do not unintentionally escalate tensions during protests. However, police agencies must balance this concern with their need to keep officers and the community safe. Many forum participants agreed that striking this balance requires a tiered response plan that starts soft but that enables police to react promptly to protect public safety if the demonstration begins to shift toward violence or serious criminal activity.”
The document from a professor of criminology also has a number of recommendations for handling protests without escalating violence:
https://www.hfg.org/Policing%20Protests.pdf
How about if several hundred vehicles driven by Trump supporters block traffic on the Garden State Bridge? In that case, no children were tortured, and the Governor called it “silly” and “dangerous”. Investigations are pending, but I’m not holding my breath
I mention the Geneva convention because the police are engaging in behavior that would be a war crime if the Us military took that kind of action against enemy forces in the field. As I said before and you keep trying to dodge, I think that holding the police to ‘don’t commit any war crimes, or things that would be war crimes if the police were military and the people you were doing them to were enemy military’ as a standard is reasonable. You seem to think that war crimes are cool, and that torturing children with chemical weapons is reasonable.
In other words, it kills people, you already know it kills people, I already provided a cite saying that, but you’re demanding more cites because you’re just trying to get me to waste time. Not playing that game, you’ve admitted that pepper spray is actually dangerous to use, I’ve provided a cite, and you haven’t provided a cite.
No, this is just some complete horseshit you made up or heard from a bad source. Below is a link to all of the relevant Mirraim-Webster’s defintions (the ones related to the phrase ‘a tortured argument’ are not included). When you’re so far trying to defend police brutality that you have to make up your own definition of torture, you might want to ask yourself why you are defending the use of chemical weapons to torture children in the first place. But you were a police trainer and likely learned a lot of ‘convenient’ definitions, like this one that inflicting 30-45 minutes of pain on a child doesn’t qualify as torture, and I don’t really expect much introspection.
In terms of the BLM protests, the police formed a martial-type line, faced down the protesters as if they were enemy combatants, and used the thinnest of excuses to go after them with “crowd control”.
Now, I understand the opposition mentality, inasmuch as the protesters were protesting the police themselves, but then the police proceed to attack the protesters blaming them for the arson and looting that the police themselves appeared to be doing nothing about. It appeared, to this not-unbiased observer, that the police wanted the mayhem to go down so that they could use it as an excuse against the protesters, even though there appears to be some evidence that the protesters were not the ones initiating it.
My point is, the police are supposed to work for us. Theoretically, at least. Instead of adopting a mercenary battalion formation, they should merge into the crowd, walk among the protesters, where they can quickly identify and apprehend genuine troublemakers, and act like they are working for everyone, like they really are trying to keep the peace.
As for a caravan blockading a bridge, that becomes a little more problematic. The simplest solution is to establish a deterrent in the form of “we are writing down your plate number, and next time we see your car somewhere, it is going to be towed to the impound lot”. It is almost impossible to break up vehicle blockades in the moment, but the participants can be punished.
I disagree with ‘theoretical’ - if you look at the first document that I linked, that project was funded by the US DOJ, conducted by a pro-police group, and used interviews with police departments who successfully handled protest situations. And it very clearly advocates doing exactly what you say - police should treat the protestors as citizens airing their grievances instead of enemy combatants to be attacked, unless the crowd actually initiates violence. People defending police brutality talk as though torturing children with chemical weapons is the only way to defend their cities from terrible consequences, but the real world experience shows a very different picture.
Two relevant quotes from Boston:
When I said “theoretically”, I was not talking about methods. I meant that they work for (all of) us in theory. How they operate in practice often does not align with theory.
I live in central Tel Aviv, not far from a few very popular protest sites. I know there’s a protest going on, or about to start, when I spot riot police chilling by their vehicles in side streets, out of sight of any protestors. The actual protest areas rarely have more than a handful of cops in minimal gear - unless counter-protestors show up, in which case all bets are off.
Alabama police captain calls for all Biden voters to be shot in the head.
Colorado cop put on leave after saying he wants to hurt Democrats and BLM adherents.
This particular piece of shit resigned before he could be fired.
Walden has since made a Facebook post defending his comment, saying he doesn’t care who anyone voted for, and that he wasn’t talking about liberals and Democrats, but rather people who commit treason.
But the lying liar defines treason as voting for a Democrat. Fuck this guy.
One of the Ahmaud Arbery shooters immediately called his former boss, the local DA, asking for advice on how to proceed.