And while we’re on the subject of dehumanization…. [See post below]
I’d like to think there’s a reasonable explanation for the LAPD behavior we see in this FOX 11 news video. But I’ll be damned if I can imagine it.
Cops roughing up and beating reporters? Shooting immigration rights marchers with rubber bullets?
Yes, it appears there was a small contingent of demonstrators who deliberately provoked the officers with tossed rocks and bottles. So, fine, subdue them.
It still doesn’t explain how police came to be whacking reporters in MacArthur Park.
This looks bad, guys.
Bill Bratton, who’s been given the thumbs up by nearly everyone for another five year term as LAPD chief, did the right thing by coming quickly to the site of the melee to announce that there’d be an investigation.
Anyway, watch the video. Tell me what you think.
I don’t condone overreaction by the police, but let’s see where this started. The police didn’t start the problem. The lady on the video admitted that some youths provoked them. The police had a reasonable goal of clearing the area before the attack against them could become larger. Being from the media does not give someone any more right to interfere or to be in an unauthrorized area than someone who is an accountant. Move means move.
The attacks on the police remind me of two old episodes. One is from Birmingham in the 1960’s, where the police ended an illegal demonstration with firehoses and police dogs–and, the demonstration was still illegal despite whatever cause it supported. I absolutely disdained Bull Conner, who was the public safety commissioner, but most of the criticism came because he was successful in clearing the streets, and the press didn’t want him to be successful in enforcing the law. It looks as if criticism in L.a. comes in large part because the police prevailed.
The second old episode is from Kent State, where protesting students threatened some inexperienced national guard troops, who had rifles. There was not adequate justification for killing students, but the students were agitating troops who had become very nervous. The lesson, as pointed out by a friend who was there at the time, don’t mess with people who have loaded guns pointed at you.
The L.A. police were forceful, but they were doing their jobs, and the community should support them and, instead, decry the attacks by the people who started the problem and the press, which is mad because it didn’t get special treatment and which it doesn’t deserve.
Does this present any reasonable explanation? And, also, be sure to get both sides before drawing a conclusion.
It would be nice if the police arrested the people who were breaking the law instead of demonstrators ————–
Wait —— I forgot most of the demonstrators are LAW BREAKERS, and many have committed felony after felony, including, breaking into this country, identity theft, using false identities and stolen SSN’s.
I began my college career in Berkeley in 1967 (yes, I’m really old). My first semester there was the first time there was a violent demonstration. For the next three years my major was actually “Anti-War Demonstration”- 15 units a semester. I saw a young man with a camera beaten and arrested for assault with a deadly weapon (after his camera was destroyed), I saw a group of students trying to disperse rounded up and tear gassed, then herded together by the police, and then tear gassed, all of this repeatedly for literally hours. I myself was shot in the back of the head with bird shot. Since it was the back of my head, it seems fairly clear that I was trying to get out of the whole situation.
Celeste’s post about the Stanford experiment is the most illuminating about this situation. When people in authority are armed and surrounded with brethern of a similar state of mind it is a small step to go from shoving, to hitting, to rubber bullets or in the case of People’s Park (Berkeley 1969)- live bullets, serious injury and death.
Of course it was wrong for the individuals who threw rocks and stones, but there was a relatively small group of them who could have been subdued with the number of police in the area. These people caused a reaction in probably a small number of police initially, but the number grew and grew and so did the violence.
The scene was so familiar and reminiscent of my college time I fear that some lessons can never be learned. Unless the LAPD makes a training film out of some of the footage from yesterday and uses it at the Police Academy as a lesson on what mistakes should never be made I imagine this will happen again and again.
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