The Protest Thread

[McParadigm]

Why....why wouldn’t you hold authorized, trained and armed law enforcement to a higher standard than everyday citizens?

99.999 percent of interactions being safe is actually a higher standard, bud

Made up statistics often are.

[verb_to_trust]

Why....why wouldn’t you hold authorized, trained and armed law enforcement to a higher standard than everyday citizens?

99.999 percent of interactions being safe is actually a higher standard, bud

Made up statistics often are.

They go on millions of calls and there are 1,000 police involved fatal shootings. Are those stats made up Mcgiantbrain?

[Mickey]

Why....why wouldn’t you hold authorized, trained and armed law enforcement to a higher standard than everyday citizens?

99.999 percent of interactions being safe is actually a higher standard, bud

I don't think "not dead" is a universal equivalent to "safe," but of course this is precisely my point with the protest data--how many cases of unprovoked attacks on bystanders have there been? I count two cases in this thread (Provo and that family in Virginia)--which would be .04% if we're counting each protest as a discrete unit, or .000002% if we're counting each protestor as a discrete unit, both of which are higher standards than the one you're applying to police, who are being judged here based on individual interaction.

[Mickey]

The Seattle utopia lasted what, two weeks before murders shut it down?

Anarchist experiments and defunding the police are, of course, not the same thing, but don't let a little thing like conceptual rigor get in the way of your boring white-guy nihilist schtick.

[McParadigm]

Why....why wouldn’t you hold authorized, trained and armed law enforcement to a higher standard than everyday citizens?

99.999 percent of interactions being safe is actually a higher standard, bud

Made up statistics often are.

They go on millions of calls and there are 1,000 police involved fatal shootings. Are those stats made up Mcgiantbrain?

If we’re only counting shootings, and not brutalities or intimidations or undocumented violence that only ever gets revealed if someone nearby had a cell phone on hand...if we’re only counting shootings, full stop....then let’s do the math.

800,000 cops in America produce 1,000 shootings a year.

6% of American adults say they have attended a protest this year. That comes out to about 12,000,000 people. To equivocate, they would have to shoot 15,000 cops.

[McParadigm]

Or I guess they could run 15,000 cops over. I assume that would count too

[Norah]

Sounds fair to me. Mods, make it happen.

[The Argonaut]

Sounds fair to me. Mods, make it happen.

[Mickey]

As the NYT article I posted earlier notes, the current estimate for protest attendance is anywhere from 15 to 26 million--so you'd need even more cases, but the point remains that it will be difficult to argue that these protests are exceptionally violent with just a handful of examples. And McP makes, in the reverse, the argument I was making earlier--if you want to compare protestors and cops, you'd have to apply the same metric to each, whether that's total interactions or group population vs. instances of violence, but you can't (so long as you want to retain any credibility) cite the police's number of interactions and then, on the other hand, count each protest as a single, unified occurrence.

This is all, of course, under the understanding (drawn from Argo's post) that there is some parallelism between holding the cops responsible for unjustified shootings and holding the protestors responsible for isolated acts of violence. I can't speak for everyone--surely there's someone who thinks that the problem with cops rests entirely with the number of shootings and that, more or less, it is a case of bad apples and a question of ratios (racial or otherwise). But I don't think that, as I've noted elsewhere on this board--the problem with police is the structural role they play in our society as agents of the state's monopoly on justified force and the extent to which they are relied on to rein in the social antagonisms fostered by historical patterns of racism, dispossession, and exploitation. The racially-weighted assassinations are a symptom of this, but they are not the problem itself. I do not think you can make a similar argument about the protests, which are a symptom of something, sure, but which do not correspond to a group that plays a structural role in the distribution of power within our society (especially as the protests are multi-racial, multi-generational, heterogeneous, and disperse in terms of organization). In other words, the issues which motivate calls to defund the police go far beyond individual acts of violence (i.e. the "few bad apples") to a structural rot, but the issue of violence at protests doesn't occupy a structural position. The only argument left to people like Bi_3 is to argue for the prevalence of these instances of violence like what happened in Provo, which, to return to the first part of this post, is going to be quite a challenge, given that the number of protestors is well into the millions.

[elliseamos]

But it's all funded by soros?

[simple schoolboy]

The Seattle utopia lasted what, two weeks before murders shut it down?

Seattle authorities seem to consistently do the right thing (shut down CHOP, enforce the laws regarding pedestrians on freeways) only after the body count gets sufficiently high.

[verb_to_trust]

Why....why wouldn’t you hold authorized, trained and armed law enforcement to a higher standard than everyday citizens?

99.999 percent of interactions being safe is actually a higher standard, bud

Made up statistics often are.

They go on millions of calls and there are 1,000 police involved fatal shootings. Are those stats made up Mcgiantbrain?

If we’re only counting shootings, and not brutalities or intimidations or undocumented violence that only ever gets revealed if someone nearby had a cell phone on hand...if we’re only counting shootings, full stop....then let’s do the math.

800,000 cops in America produce 1,000 shootings a year.

6% of American adults say they have attended a protest this year. That comes out to about 12,000,000 people. To equivocate, they would have to shoot 15,000 cops.

How many calls a year do each one of those 800k cops go on? You can play all the little games you want with the numbers but it won't work.

[The Argonaut]

Argo's post was a joke. FTR

[verb_to_trust]

Argo's post was a joke. FTR

You are a joke, yes

[Mickey]

Why....why wouldn’t you hold authorized, trained and armed law enforcement to a higher standard than everyday citizens?

99.999 percent of interactions being safe is actually a higher standard, bud

Made up statistics often are.

They go on millions of calls and there are 1,000 police involved fatal shootings. Are those stats made up Mcgiantbrain?

If we’re only counting shootings, and not brutalities or intimidations or undocumented violence that only ever gets revealed if someone nearby had a cell phone on hand...if we’re only counting shootings, full stop....then let’s do the math.

800,000 cops in America produce 1,000 shootings a year.

6% of American adults say they have attended a protest this year. That comes out to about 12,000,000 people. To equivocate, they would have to shoot 15,000 cops.

How many calls a year do each one of those 800k cops go on? You can play all the little games you want with the numbers but it won't work.

How many bystanders do you think each of the 15-26 million protestors came across while protesting?

[verb_to_trust]

Why....why wouldn’t you hold authorized, trained and armed law enforcement to a higher standard than everyday citizens?

99.999 percent of interactions being safe is actually a higher standard, bud

Made up statistics often are.

They go on millions of calls and there are 1,000 police involved fatal shootings. Are those stats made up Mcgiantbrain?

If we’re only counting shootings, and not brutalities or intimidations or undocumented violence that only ever gets revealed if someone nearby had a cell phone on hand...if we’re only counting shootings, full stop....then let’s do the math.

800,000 cops in America produce 1,000 shootings a year.

6% of American adults say they have attended a protest this year. That comes out to about 12,000,000 people. To equivocate, they would have to shoot 15,000 cops.

How many calls a year do each one of those 800k cops go on? You can play all the little games you want with the numbers but it won't work.

How many bystanders do you think each of the 15-26 million protestors came across while protesting?

This is just getting fucking stupid now.

[Mickey]

I agree, trying to argue that the protests are violent because of a handful of cases is stupid. Don't let the depression win, you're better than this BryBry.

[BurtReynolds]

"Handful of cases" lol

That's not even what you're arguing. You are arguing that the violent cases relative to the non violent cases are small (using cherry-picked "stats"), but who cares?

[Mickey]

The cherry-picked stats about the... total number of protestors? Fredo is back y'all.

[verb_to_trust]

Being in the vicinity of other people at a protest is exactly comparable to a police officer being dispatched to deal directly with a volatile situation!!!