Judging by what the Black Panthers used to do, it’s almost the opposite: when the other side pops up with guns (which in many places in the US is entirelly legal), the police suddenly loses the will to beat people up.
Well, I imagine, when it’s an angry mob where you don’t expect anyone to start shooting, but you don’t know for sure, then you gotta do your job and try to avoid it escalating by shutting it down as hard as possible. But if you know that the group is willing to shoot, then you’d rather lose your job than your life, so abandon ship as quickly as possible…
You’re operating under the incredibly incorrect assumption that US riot cops are there to protect people. They get off on hurting and maiming people, it’s specifically why they took the job.
I think the exact same thing applies as it did in Uvalde Highschool - the cops don’t want to get shot so they come up with excuses not to intervene thus reducing the risk of getting shot.
In the case of a demonstration their “intervention” would actually be to hurt and even harm those demonstrating, hence them not intervening is a good thing for just about everybody, in the case of Uvalde their “intervention” would probably have saved lives so them not intervening resulted in more lives lost.
Either way, the individual police officers are just following “I only care about what best for me” logic and that can be used by demonstrators to influence the actions of the police, which what IMHO the Black Panthers did.
Judging by what the Black Panthers used to do, it’s almost the opposite: when the other side pops up with guns (which in many places in the US is entirelly legal), the police suddenly loses the will to beat people up.
Well, I imagine, when it’s an angry mob where you don’t expect anyone to start shooting, but you don’t know for sure, then you gotta do your job and try to avoid it escalating by shutting it down as hard as possible. But if you know that the group is willing to shoot, then you’d rather lose your job than your life, so abandon ship as quickly as possible…
You’re operating under the incredibly incorrect assumption that US riot cops are there to protect people. They get off on hurting and maiming people, it’s specifically why they took the job.
I think the exact same thing applies as it did in Uvalde Highschool - the cops don’t want to get shot so they come up with excuses not to intervene thus reducing the risk of getting shot.
In the case of a demonstration their “intervention” would actually be to hurt and even harm those demonstrating, hence them not intervening is a good thing for just about everybody, in the case of Uvalde their “intervention” would probably have saved lives so them not intervening resulted in more lives lost.
Either way, the individual police officers are just following “I only care about what best for me” logic and that can be used by demonstrators to influence the actions of the police, which what IMHO the Black Panthers did.