By definition, police who hurt people for no reason are doing something wrong. I don't dispute that at all. If they commit crimes, they should be charged for them.
Peaceful protest is a right. Throwing bottles and looting are crimes.
It's the job of the police to stop crime.
People who want to protest crimes committed by police officers shouldn't compromise the message of their protests by committing crimes.
It's amazing how many otherwise rational people are saying stupid things about this. Maybe it's their ivory tower mentality, combined with conditioning from too many movies and TV shows which have substituting breaking things and blowing them up for scripts.
Broken things don't fix themselves. People have to fix them, and people have to pay for the damage and replace what was taken. People have to walk by the places in their neighborhoods that felt safe to them and see them boarded up. People have to work in the places where they never used to think about windows being shattered and people running in to steal.
I'm not thinking of all of this as a chessboard or a movie. It's not exciting for me, and if you'd ever had police officers put their hands on you, which I have, and if you'd ever had your wrists and ankles shackled, which I have, you might have previously had reasons to think about the police in ways that aren't abstract.
I wish that people would stop projecting onto me assumptions based on my race, gender, and ability to be articulate. I am not inexperienced with the failures of social systems, and I know that gratuitous violence is an irresponsible response to those failures. Sometimes people are pushed past what they can stand until they snap, which is what peaceful protest is for.
There is also no reason for protesters to scream at police officers who are trying to keep the peace.
There is no question in my mind that these protests are being exploited by the Democratic Party and most of the media to ensure Vice President Biden's election. If that weren't the case, there would be real admonishment from both the Democratic Party and the media against bad behavior by the protesters. Maybe I should say what I have said before, which is that I have always been a Democrat. In 2010, I was shocked by how manipulative, dishonest, greedy and cruel the Democratic Party is. Now I'm not shocked. It's depressing, but not shocking.
