To riot? The case of political vandalism...

[Arwon]

It's kind of a surprising coincidence that all the "thug" riots are in places with corrupt brutal racist police

 

[Commodore]

The people are lashing out due to the many injustices they face on a day to day basis. It's not right, but I understand their frustrations.

I'm not sure if I would riot.. I keep telling myself "probably not". But if I lived in a racist segregated society that didn't seem to care about people of my skin colour, I very well might.

Looting with smiles on their faces hardly seems like lashing out against injustice to me.

No what this is, is a bunch of people using injustice as an excuse to commit even more injustice against people who have no involvement in the issue whatsoever.

 

[Yeekim]

It's not very hard to find examples of violent and destructive mobs starting things that turned out well, or at least that we have a hard time criticizing.

It is also not difficult to find examples of "things that turned out well" without ever including violent and destructive mobs in the first place, so I don't really buy this line of reasoning.

It's kind of a surprising coincidence that all the "thug" riots are in places with corrupt brutal racist police

These two phenomena being mutually reinforcing makes sense.

 

[warpus]

Looting with smiles on their faces hardly seems like lashing out against injustice to me.

No what this is, is a bunch of people using injustice as an excuse to commit even more injustice against people who have no involvement in the issue whatsoever.

Some, I'm sure. Maybe a lot. I don't know if it matters. They're lashing out against the system, not against specific individuals.

 

[Light Cleric]

Violence is actually acceptable when there is no other alternative. If you have no rights and no other way to affect change, you shouldn't simply sit back and accept your oppression. The problem is when said alternatives exist but are skipped over. One of the issues with the protests in Ferguson was that there was a democratic process in place that was simply not being used; voting turnout was often in the 10% range. Expecting a government to represent the population when the population simply doesn't vote is unrealistic. In such a case, it would be much easier to affect change because you don't even need to organize that many people to achieve a majority vote.

It would help if our media didn't get a boner for chaos. I'm not just talking about cable news in this case, plenty of other media are guilty of this too. Doing so both buries the actual message behind the protests and mixes the good citizens with the bad ones, with the added nastiness of racism on top. There were plenty of stories out of Ferguson(again, just a recent example) of people helping each other and protecting one another. One of the stories I remember most is a group of young blacks helping a white store owner repair and protect his business from being attacked, but their story was pretty buried beneath the endless looping of the same clips and photos of violence.

There's also violence with a cause and violence for the sake of violence and/or getting some free loot. Again, the media lumps the two together and makes it much easier for the protests to be hijacked.

I read over this and I feel like I typed a lot of words to not say much and ended up venting, I hope this wasn't a total waste of space.

 

[warpus]

It would help if our media didn't get a boner for chaos.

It's basically just capitalism in action. Since your news stations are "for profit" enterprises, they look for any way to make more money over other considerations. Their shareholders demand it.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

"If it bleeds, it leads" isn't a truism just because journalists "get a boner for chaos."

 

[JollyRoger]

Wake me when these "thugs" get to the level of violence brought on by Shock & Awe or shelling Palestinian schoolhouses.

 

[MobBoss]

It's kind of a surprising coincidence that all the "thug" riots are in places with corrupt brutal racist police

How do we know that what's going on in Baltimore was racist?

Or is it simply an assumption since the guy was black? Do you think this had to do with him being black or the fact that he was a repeat offender of violence and drug arrests?

Well, the Chief of Police there is black. Do you think that has anything to do with it too?

 

[Berzerker]

the mayor called them thugs

 

[warpus]

Check out this dancing thug


Link to video.

 

[thecrazyscot]

How do we know that what's going on in Baltimore was racist?

Or is it simply an assumption since the guy was black? Do you think this had to do with him being black or the fact that he was a repeat offender of violence and drug arrests?

Well, the Chief of Police there is black. Do you think that has anything to do with it too?

There have been some undeniably racist encounters, but the main problem is the widespread police corruption and brutality that has wracked Baltimore for years. I think this just tipped the scales for a lot of people.

The brutality of police culture in Baltimore

$5.7 million is the amount the city paid to victims of brutality between 2011 and 2014. And as huge as that figure is, the more staggering number in the article is this one: "Over the past four years, more than 100 people have won court judgments or settlements related to allegations of brutality and civil-rights violations." What tiny percentage of the unjustly beaten win formal legal judgments?

...

Victims include a 15-year-old boy riding a dirt bike, a 26-year-old pregnant accountant who had witnessed a beating, a 50-year-old woman selling church raffle tickets, a 65-year-old church deacon rolling a cigarette and an 87-year-old grandmother aiding her wounded grandson. Those cases detail a frightful human toll. Officers have battered dozens of residents who suffered broken bones — jaws, noses, arms, legs, ankles — head trauma, organ failure, and even death, coming during questionable arrests. Some residents were beaten while handcuffed; others were thrown to the pavement.

...

Lest anyone imagine that this investigation was the only tipoff of egregious misconduct among Baltimore police, more context is useful. The period covered in the brutality investigation came immediately after the FBI caught 51 Baltimore police officers in a scheme that resulted in at least 12 extortion convictions.

...

This year a detective who retired from the police force last year demonstrated a violent streak—he allegedly took part in a motorcycle-club brawl that left a man hospitalized. Also in 2014, "a city police officer was charged with felony assault after he stormed into a home in full uniform Monday and threatened to kill his wife with his service weapon." And Baltimore police tased a hospitalized meningitis patient 5 times in the course of ten minutes. He died soon after. Prosecutors did not file charges.

Another cop was charged with an assault on a 14-year-old boy.

Even animals couldn't escape the brutality of the Baltimore police last year. In July, "Officer Thomas Schmidt, a 24-year veteran assigned to the Emergency Services unit, was placed on paid administrative leave after police say he held down a Shar-Pei while a fellow officer, Jeffrey Bolger, slit the dog's throat." A month later, a Baltimore police officer plead guilty "to a felony animal cruelty charge after he fatally beat and choked his girlfriend's Jack Russell terrier," an August 5 article noted.

...

There was a murder-suicide, with a policeman killing a firefighter, his girlfriend, and himself. There was a different officer who killed himself in jail after being charged with killing his fiancée. In yet another case, "Abdul Salaam, 36, says he was beaten in July 2013 after a traffic stop by officers Nicholas Chapman and Jorge Bernardez-Ruiz and that he never got a response to his complaint filed with internal affairs," The Sun reported. "Those officers would be implicated less than three weeks later in the death of 44-year-old Tyrone West while he was in police custody." Also in 2013, a jury acquitted an off-duty police officer on manslaughter charges after he chased down and killed a 17-year-old boy who may or may not have thrown a rock that thumped harmlessly into his front door.

...

I could go on, but I've long since started to skim past stories like "Baltimore police officer pimps out his own wife" and thinking, meh, I've seen worse from cops there. The cop who shot himself and lied about it to get worker's comp benefits? Meh, at least he didn't shoot someone else and then lie about what happened. There is just a staggering level of dysfunction in the department, and residents of Baltimore, a city that could use a professional crime-fighting force if ever there was one, have suffered under it year after year after year. Pick one. (Take 2008! A Baltimore cop shot a man twice in the back. He was acquitted, too.)

I'm not attempting to justify actions either way, but the abuse the citizens have suffered at the hands of the police is inextricably linked to what's going on. There is a legitimate reason to (at least) protest.

 

[Antilogic]

To Everyone Posting on the Boston Tea Party:

The Boston Tea Party didn't target the Crown's regiments, their barracks, or anything like that. It targeted the East India Company's ships and goods. Although the company was chartered by the crown, it was a privately held joint-stock company.

These situations are more comparable than some posters in this thread are giving them credit for.

Violence is actually acceptable when there is no other alternative. If you have no rights and no other way to affect change, you shouldn't simply sit back and accept your oppression. The problem is when said alternatives exist but are skipped over. One of the issues with the protests in Ferguson was that there was a democratic process in place that was simply not being used; voting turnout was often in the 10% range. Expecting a government to represent the population when the population simply doesn't vote is unrealistic. In such a case, it would be much easier to affect change because you don't even need to organize that many people to achieve a majority vote.

It would help if our media didn't get a boner for chaos. I'm not just talking about cable news in this case, plenty of other media are guilty of this too. Doing so both buries the actual message behind the protests and mixes the good citizens with the bad ones, with the added nastiness of racism on top. There were plenty of stories out of Ferguson(again, just a recent example) of people helping each other and protecting one another. One of the stories I remember most is a group of young blacks helping a white store owner repair and protect his business from being attacked, but their story was pretty buried beneath the endless looping of the same clips and photos of violence.

There's also violence with a cause and violence for the sake of violence and/or getting some free loot. Again, the media lumps the two together and makes it much easier for the protests to be hijacked.

I read over this and I feel like I typed a lot of words to not say much and ended up venting, I hope this wasn't a total waste of space.

Although I'm in agreement on a number of points here, you aren't going to regularly see candidates go against the police in local elections. It's like the money-in-politics thing; those who stand to have a chance of being elected are always for more of it, or are not being elected to a position where they would have the power to change it.

It requires external pressure to change that corrupt system just as it requires external pressure to change policing in the US. Sometimes that's federal investigations of corrupt and brutal departments. Sometimes that's peaceful marches and protests. And maybe, sometimes, that's rioting.

Wake me when these "thugs" get to the level of violence brought on by Shock & Awe or shelling Palestinian schoolhouses.

+1

 

[Timsup2nothin]

How do we know that what's going on in Baltimore was racist?

Or is it simply an assumption since the guy was black? Do you think this had to do with him being black or the fact that he was a repeat offender of violence and drug arrests?

Well, the Chief of Police there is black. Do you think that has anything to do with it too?

I think Baltimore's problem is that they have police that enjoy administering a good beating on a regular basis and a police administration that considers that just "part of good police work", not that their police are particularly racist by policy. However, there are undoubtedly racists on the police force who consider this state of affairs as a license to choose their beating targets based on race.

 

[Wolfbeckett]

But in the case of the Boston Tea Party, the East India Company can be considered a direct branch of the Crown in this case, because the thing that had people really hacked off was the Crown giving the Company a monopoly on important goods (including tea). People didn't just target the Company ship randomly, the Company was an active participant in the problems that people were angry about. CVS is not an active participant in the problems people have with the police these days, they were not involved, they were targeted because they happened to be there (and, presumably, because they had stuff people wanted to steal).

People want to bend over backwards to equate the people in Baltimore with the heroic revolutionaries of the past and it just doesn't fit. I'd buy that narrative if they were organized and were targeting the organizations and systems that they have a direct grievance with, but they aren't, they're just destroying randomly.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

It requires external pressure to change that corrupt system just as it requires external pressure to change policing in the US. Sometimes that's federal investigations of corrupt and brutal departments. Sometimes that's peaceful marches and protests. And maybe, sometimes, that's rioting.

The surest way to open a federal investigation is to have a riot. If a peaceful protest actually gains enough traction that it looks like it might have any impact the police show up to crack heads and you wind up with a riot. In short, rioting works, and nothing else really does.

 

[Antilogic]

But in the case of the Boston Tea Party, the East India Company can be considered a direct branch of the Crown in this case, because the thing that had people really hacked off was the Crown giving the Company a monopoly on important goods (including tea). People didn't just target the Company ship randomly, the Company was an active participant in the problems that people were angry about. CVS is not an active participant in the problems people have with the police these days, they were not involved, they were targeted because they happened to be there (and, presumably, because they had stuff people wanted to steal).

People want to bend over backwards to equate the people in Baltimore with the heroic revolutionaries of the past and it just doesn't fit. I'd buy that narrative if they were organized and were targeting the organizations and systems that they have a direct grievance with, but they aren't, they're just destroying randomly.

I'm certain all those merchants and aristocrats that owned shares of the East India Company would agree with your assertion they were just an agent of the crown and their goods were a fair target for political action.

 

[Wolfbeckett]

I'm certain all those merchants and aristocrats that owned shares of the East India Company would agree with your assertion they were just an agent of the crown and their goods were a fair target for political action.

I'm not sure how this is supposed to refute my point. Those merchants and aristocrats would not exactly be unbiased in their opinions, so who cares what they would think of it? You still haven't given any information that makes me think the buildings that were destroyed in this particular action were in any way meaningful toward what this particular action was meant to protest.

Burning down a courthouse would have been a fair political statement about how the law was treating minorities in the area. Not one I would necessarily have agreed with, but at least I would have been able to see the point they were making. Burning down random buildings is just unrestrained chaos, destruction for it's own sake, not some kind of important message about the system.

 

[JollyRoger]

CVS has a state charter, state-protected monopolies on its trademarks, and is protected by police.

 

[Traitorfish]

I'd say a riot is inherently non-political.

Do you mean that a civil disturbance can only be called a "riot" if it is non-political, or that by escalating to a riot, it loses its political character? It's not clear from your post what you mean.

Violence is actually acceptable when there is no other alternative. If you have no rights and no other way to affect change, you shouldn't simply sit back and accept your oppression. The problem is when said alternatives exist but are skipped over. One of the issues with the protests in Ferguson was that there was a democratic process in place that was simply not being used; voting turnout was often in the 10% range. Expecting a government to represent the population when the population simply doesn't vote is unrealistic. In such a case, it would be much easier to affect change because you don't even need to organize that many people to achieve a majority vote.

The existence of an electoral system is not proof of its effectiveness, accessibility or transparency.