…according to this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/16/this-summers-black-lives-matter-protesters-were-overwhelming-peaceful-our-research-finds/#click=https://t.co/wR4pApRrWm
In fact, they were even more peaceful than the 60s Civil Rights protests were.
Assertions to the contrary are baseless bullshit. This has been clear, IMO, for the last year, but it’s very nice to have such solid data to back it up.
More data here:
25 deaths
around 14,000 arrests
$550 million in property damage in Minneapolis-Saint Paul as of June, 2020
$1-2 billion in insured damages in the U.S. as of June, 2020
The issue is not a matter of statistics…it’s a matter of bias in the media.
The phrase “mostly peaceful” has become a slogan and symbol for the Right.
But not because of any statistics of how much violence there was.,
Instead, the phrase has become the rallying cry for proving the bias of the “mainstream media” and those woke liberals.
And the reason for that is the famous news clip from CNN in which the reporter in the field is ignoring the violent facts on the ground where he is standing, while CNN displays the announcement that the protests are “mostly peaceful”.
(It is , of course, ironic that Fox News–the most biased of all the major media sites–, is pointing out bias in news reporting.)…
(scroll down a half a page)
But there is a somewhat legitimate point here.
Liberals do feel a deep need to show BLM in a positive light.
And they are willing to totally ignore any and all facts that get in the way of their narrative.
You know, like Fox News does every day. 
The difference is that in this case the visuals were so shockingly clear.
Often, news agencies can get away with reporting just one side of the story’, and then a day or two later somebody objects.
But here–the violence is clear. This is not a “mostly peaceful” event.
The entire horizon is in flames, while the reporter ignores the facts, to tell us what he wants to believe…
Literally the very first word on that chyron is “fiery”.
But do go on about how liberals are the ones who ignore facts to fit a narrative.
All sides ignore or hand-wave away inconvenient facts, that’s because they are humans.
All people kill, it is just that some step on ants while others shoot people.
But it is all the same, right?
No, stepping on ants is not the same as shooting people. What makes you think it is?
A couple of things:
Firstly, the BLM protests were largely peaceful. There were hundreds of them across the country that occurred without incident - something like 93-96% of them according to the Wiki article linked to above.
Secondly, for those in which violence, looting and property damage occurred, it does not follow that all (or even the majority) of the perpetrators were BLM protesters. We’ve all seen the videos of Umbrella Man smashing windows, of the police physically assaulting protesters, some of whom were merely standing there, and of right-wing vigilante groups looking to instigate violence (with the encouragement of the President and other senior Republicans). In Minneapolis the police were literally firing paint rounds at people merely standing on their own porches.
Largely true.
Considerably less true.
“Liberals” have certainly been keen to minimize the violence and lawlessness by protesters on their side. But nothing the left or the mainstream media have done compares to the massive smear campaign by the right, with FoxNews in the lead.
There’s a reason that so many on the right - including a number of people on this very messageboard - believe that all the protests were all about mindless violence and looting by black protesters rather than about, you know, police flagrantly murdering black people. Some even continue to repeat the “cities burning down” and “violent anarchy everywhere” narrative that FoxNews and friends promoted (sometimes with a little “help”).
So while one side may attempt to spin the facts to make their side look better, the other is simply manufacturing a whole new reality. Not really comparable.
I’m just going to add this in here:
Lets see, white guy, that means he can’t be a “thug,” but has “mental health issues” and “needs care.”
At first glance, the methodology that writer used seems seriously skewed in not weighting by protest size.
I’m in agreement with chappachula - even if BLM protests were mostly peaceful, the media shot itself in the foot by portraying things with fire in the background and “mostly peaceful” as a caption. That was absolutely meme-able material and it took off as mockery. That was the media scoring an own-goal.
If you want to sell something as “peaceful,” then show something that’s…peaceful. Not a blazing fire.
There were riots in the streets after the murder of George Floyd. There were also peaceful BLM marches. Republicans would really really like everyone to believe that these were the same thing, particularly Republicans defending the insurrection at the Capitol.
See, both sides do it, just like Novelty_Bubble said.
Ha! 
This bears repeating. The rioters over the summer were, by and large, the same folks as the ones in the insurrection in January. We know who they were, and they were angry white Republicans. Just because they happened to be doing their rioting in the vicinity of peaceful BLM protestors doesn’t mean that BLM is violent.
Just for the sake of facts and statistics, I randomly picked one reporting period from the reported source of data and filtered for all the anti-BLM, anti-antifa, pro-Trump… basically everything that looked like a right wing protest or demonstration. These were certainly smaller events than most BLM protests but few if any were recorded as having arrests, property damage and assaults.
So one has to ask the question, what does that actually say about the “extraordinarily non-destructive” nature of the protests the article is trying to portray? Can one reasonably conclude that right-wing protests were “overwhelmingly peaceful” as well? Perhaps we should be looking at better data,OR, looking at good data very differently - at the very least, much better critical eye towards data analysis and conclusions in reporting.
If anybody wants to take a crack at filtering the 20 or so sets of data looking only at right-wing protests for a more thorough analysis then I’m sure that might be interesting. I may well be wrong in my initial conclusions that the data about BLM protests specifically is not particularly revelatory or unique in the way that is being presented. i.e. Most protests are overwhelmingly peaceful, regardless of the cause they claim to represent.
(Notable exceptions are not being ignored so no need to remind of Jan 6 and Charlottesville).
The rioters in Chicago and the suburbs were totally NOT the same people as those involved in the insurrection. But they were also not involved in a BLM march downtown or at the State Capitol.
Certainly, there were agitators involved in the riots, but there were also just pissed off (rightly so) local rioters.
No they weren’t.
Yes they were.
If they were they would’ve been arrested instead of celebrated and labeled mostly peaceful. No one watching the videos of the burning, the assaults, and the looting really thinks they are the same group,