Locals

[Phoebe]

What's happening where you live? Where I live things are not so good! We have had a few bright moments where things went well, communication was good, people took care of each other. They have been profoundly overshadowed by so many bad moments, and the hits just keep on coming. Not only the usual stuff like peaceful kneelers being tear gassed and thrown onto the pavement, but many elected officials fumbling the ball on big matters, and rubber bullets being shot at people's heads, and so on.

[akiva]

Lots of protests and burning in DC. We live about 11 miles from the White House, and so far nothing has spilled out of the city.

[Phoebe]

I heard also about the young man at Howard University, freshman I think, who was apparently shot by someone who didn't like the protests and decided to fire on the crowd. Did they ever find the killer?

[akiva]

[poorpete]

Locally things are ok.

Protests in the local city was attended by the police chief so that's good. It's important even if just words. Words is modeling and modeling is important.

Too many people I know said nothing about any of this until the looting started. Now they're sad something got set on fire or a statue was vandalized. A man is murdered by police but let's sob over property.

[Kyle]

About half of my family is going to protest in Austin this weekend, and we're all going to a BLM protest in our small town the weekend after that (unless it becomes a prayer vigil, which it looks like a real possibility). The damage is nominal and the turnout here has been amazing. They've shut the main interstate down several times. It's wonderful.

[Phoebe]

That is good! Things here have been pretty bad. We have seen some police really communicating and showing respect for the peaceful protesters and vice versa, but unfortunately the takeaway for thousands of people will be that starting on Friday, police escalated into violence against peaceful protesters. Every time the protest leaders somehow managed to push things back to peaceful protest again, the police have ended up firing tear gas and rubber bullets. Meanwhile, the majority of people look on the situation and see only a younger and whiter and more male crowd running around at night smashing windows, and they conclude that all the protesters are violent and wild. So I'm not optimistic about change. We need an entirely different set of elected leaders and I doubt we're going to get it, but it's worth a try. And I will say an entire generation of thousands of young people just got a terrible lesson that someone in leadership should have thought twice about. When kids are sitting on the sidewalk not causing any problem and you pepper spray them in the face, you just taught them that peaceful protest doesn't work, at an age and in a set of formative circumstances meaning they are unlikely to ever forget it.

[Tahlvin]

[Phoebe]

The whole Nextdoor neighbor app is an anthropological fascination during this time. Some wackadoodle who lives near me started spread rumors because she saw a lady driving a car down her street (!!!!) and decided that the woman was part of a crew of out of state rioters who were scoping out houses to target for mayhem. Truly. So police ended up being called by someone, public announcement to stop calling police for bs reasons, and we added to the list of "insane racist neighbors who claim to be heavily armed and willing to shoot" - yes I find it handy to keep such a list In These Times, because I live among maniacs who cheer on the idea of shooting protesters on sight. The droll sarcasm of other neighbors who thought it was a bit of an overreaction was, however, encouraging.

The attacks on journalists who have clearly identified themselves, no possible mistake in identity, are terrifying, as are the wanton attacks on protesters who are speaking while sitting, kneeling, or laying. If they don't like what is being said, off that person goes - there are awful examples of this from KC, NC, MN, etc.

In a town near ours a well-known local newspaper journalist was tackled to the pavement despite wearing his press vest and hat and displaying his press credentials. It is unreal how calm he remains. In other such videos usually you at least hear a little heavy breathing or change in the person's voice, but this dude just continues calmly narrating. The pepper spray is hurting my eyes, and I am on the ground here telling them I am press. Now I am being arrested; he is handcuffing me. Someone else captured it from another angle, but of course, the maga people do not believe the evidence of their own senses because the inner realization that they've been conned is too awful to face.

These events are really different in the age of cell phones and people being able to locate one another online via contact with the same event postings. You see people identifying one another and sharing video angles so they can demonstrate they aren't misrepresenting what happened.

[Phoebe]

Our mayor is so bad. It's easy to forget how important every little local election is, but today we are really feeling the effects of every city council rep, prosecutor, etc. We seem to have two kinds: "awful", and "want to do the right thing but utterly blind to my own biases."

[akiva]

[Phoebe]

That woman is both hilarious and a boss. I dropped my entire jaw when I saw it. There were no really good pictures because they were still painting it but now I need to get a picture of that somehow.

Reading last night - people are starting to collate all the instances where journalists were knowingly attacked, where people were assaulted and then arrested simply for offering free speech and not violating any laws, and where protests in general had been peaceful until suddenly escalated into violent conflict by police. The pattern is scary and pervasive.

Surreal that we have tremendous protest all across the nation against systematic police violence, and they're being met with escalation of police violence and all sorts of examples of abuse of power. It's like some of them set out to prove the protesters' point.

The Buffalo situation is a new low because instead of responding appropriately, the department has lied and doubled down on its lie, and many expressed support for what happened. Sick.

The unmarked troops at WH thing is truly scary.

[Phoebe]

Read through some of the list of hundreds of incidents from around the country where protesters, journalists, medics, uninvolved bystanders, and more were brutalized or killed over the past week. It was so depressing and prevents me from having a clear sense of the overall picture, like I cannot consider the forest because so many bloodied, broken trees are immediately in the way, making me nauseous and overwhelmed with grief. The old man with the cane (not the one in Buffalo) who obviously could not walk faster than he was - stiff on one side as if he had suffered a stroke or had Parkinson's or something like that. No threat whatsoever, struggling to turn around, unable to lift himself up without assistance after he was brutally slammed to the concrete with a shield. I can't concentrate after seeing it.

But am I wrong to think the forest (or as they say on the internet, the Orchard of Bad Applies?) is very much infected with rot? The places where protests are being met with an approach of "let's keep everyone safe" seem so far outnumbered by places where at least some of the police are forgetting that their role is to keep everyone safe, not just the people they like, and to refrain from abusing the public trust required to permit the use of lethal force.

[bralbovsky]

If we needed evidence (beyond that of our own eyes, or collectively of decades of statistics) that the system is broken, we finally have it.

This is a system that can't work. Zimbardo and others have basically proven that huge imbalances of power, whether realized by weapons or badges or wealth, fundamentally breed abuse. Regardless of whether it's a causative relationship, the correlation is universal.

Reimagining what might be better is hard work.
Can a social worker effectively answer some 911 calls? (given the wild variation in the competence of social workers I know, this would only be a modest upgrade)
I can think of some global changes that would help, but American style policing isn't inherited from Scotland Yard, but from the plantation. It's not really a surprise it hasn't moved too far from its roots.

[poorpete]

Didn't know if this should go here, or if we need a separate thead...

The Nascar Noose ended in a way that I didn't think it would. Like. Everything is kinda ok! I mean, deep trauma is exposed, but of all the ways it could have gone, this is the most.... okay.

With cases like these, I never know what to say until the dust settles (if it settles). Am I being a bad ally? Probably. Am I protecting myself over helping others? For sure.

It's like. if what they are saying it's true: it is terrible. If what they are saying is a lie: that is terrible!

This falls in between, and shows how even in a more-perfect-world-than-this, conflict will always exist. It's how we react to it that matters. (And the major players here acted... good!)

[Tahlvin]

I'm concerned about the happenings last night in Madison. There was a Black activist arrested yesterday. He was carrying around a baseball bat and a bullhorn and was harassing some patrons outside (and inside, I believe) a restaurant near the capitol building. Police showed up and arrested him for armed harassment. He struggled with the arresting officers, and jumped out of the patrol car and was tackled by the officers before being taken to jail. So a crowd of protestors gathered yesterday evening demanding his release. They blocked traffic and were yelling obscenities at people that refused to get out of their cars and join the protest. Then they proceeded to tear down two statues around the state capitol, one called the "forward" statue to celebrate Wisconsin's and Madison's progressive nature, and one of a Union Civil War colonel and abolitionist who died at Chicamauga. And at some point, they assaulted a Democratic state congressman who was walking to the capitol building to do some work and stopped to record the crowd on his phone.

[FlameBlade]

My understanding of what happened in Madison is that it was peaceful until few people like you described showed up and started to whip up crowd in a bad way.

[poorpete]

to assault a democrat politician and destroy a statue of an abolitionist
is at-the-very-least irresponsible moves by allies
at worse by some accomplishing what they wanted

[Tahlvin]

Apparently there was another incident where a white man trying to get to the hospital to pick up his girlfriend turned onto a street that was blocked by protestors. A protestor threw a bicycle and hit his car, and he stopped and got out of his car to ask why they did that, and the crowd proceeded to beat him up, stole his wallet, broke his car windows, and stole his cell phone.

Another small group of people threw a Molotov cocktail through a window of the city-county building, which houses the 911 call center, a juvenile care facility, and a short-term jail facility, all of which had people in them at the time of the incident. The 911 center had to be temporarily evacuated while they put out the fire.

[Phoebe]

The recent events in Madison have been extremely suspect all around. I think this is more of a Todd Osmundson situation, where the people who have been organizing peaceful protests for weeks now are not the ones involved in this, and some other parties really want to make the protesters look scary. My first question in a long list of a few dozen is why the police didn't intervene for most of the night? Certainly from the arrest video of the guy with the megaphone and the bat, non intervention is not their go-to method. They needed several cars worth of police to take down this one guy.

I don't think Republicans in Wisconsin can afford to have a situation where the police look bad. If people aren't terrified of those protesters, or thinking that they're just disorganized, unjustified, and violent, how are they going to tip Wisconsin, which is widely predicted to be one of the most important states for the whole election outcome? The only platform at this point is stoking racial animosity. I would add, you know, skepticism about covid, except that too is being subsumed under the racial animosity platform.