OldCannon wrote:gigag04 wrote:"Compliance tools" are a loosing battle when it comes to 4th amendment seizures. You didnt listen to me so I'm going to Hurt you is just plain bad, and looks worse. I prefer a strategically placed hand or finger (google transport wrist lock or mandibular angle) for less violent and equally as effective methods to gain control.
Escalating up and down a use of force continuum with a violator is generally the appropriate response.
So you're saying that physical contact should have been used? That seems unclear to me, given a) they were in lawsuit-happy California and b) they were clearly "turtled up" for resistance to physical manipulation.
What is clear, however, is that the demonstration's sole purpose was to provoke "police aggression."
I not only remember the protests of the '60s, but in my misguided youth I participated in them. My brother was at a demonstration which was held at or near Dodger Stadium. To hear the protesters' side of the story, the LAPD rioted. My brother wound up running up a street with a bunch of others, trying to get away, and they were getting tear-gassed.
Now, I can well imagine what probably actually happened..... It is far more than likely that a hardcore dedicated group of radical provocateurs among the protestors were the flashpoint of the whole thing. For better or for worse, most of the people who used to show up to these things were peaceful but naïve. Regardless of politics, most were there for the following reasons:
- FUN! It was just plain fun to be part of a large gathering of hippies and try to "out-hippy" one another.
- Political outrage.
- Reassurance....in the sense that if there were enough like-minded people there, then they were reassured that they must be right
- Meet chicks and hook up.
- Get high.
Now mind you, I'm not saying those were all good reasons, I'm just explaining it. And, I am sad to say that at that time of my life I was in wholehearted support of these kinds of things. It is not something I am particularly proud of today.
Anyway, in any such gathering, there were always organizers. And among the organizers, there were usually factions representing sometimes radically different philosophies. There were usually those who were followers of Martin Luther King's philosophy of non-violent civil disobedience, and there were those who advocated escalation into violence. Those who advocated violence did so not because they thought they could actually win a fight with armed police, but they did so cynically because they knew that news cameras would see it as brutal police beating the tar out of non-violent demonstrators, and they didn't care that anybody would actually bleed because of their immoral tactics.........and of course the instigators would be leading from the rear. They did not mourn when 4 students at K-State were killed. They rejoiced because they now had a
cause celebre and they could portray protestors as martyrs and police as brown-shirted thugs.
The problem for police, of course, is that there is no way to tell (unless you have someone on the inside embedded with the organizers) who is a violent instigator, and who isn't. In fact, large agencies at the time such as the FBI, LAPD, etc., did try to infiltrate the leadership of protest organizations exactly so that they could know what was planned, and by whom, and which leaders were distinct threats to public safety versus which were simply ardent protestors.
But the vast majority of protestors now are like my brothers and I were back then, simply useful idiots, easily swayed, but not particularly individually inclined to violence.
I often am drawn to compare our society then and now, and there are
some parallels, not the least of which are a former Senator as a sitting President with an imperial sensibility (Johnson/Obama); students with little or no life experience who imagine themselves to be wiser than their elders protesting situations over which they feel (wrongly) that they have little or no control over their destinies and who have been pampered by a life of never having had to make
hard choices; a growing sense of entitlement on the part of people who do little to contribute to the funding of entitlements..........I could go on. I'm not saying any of these things are good....just that they
are.
Whatever the motivations of people, it is a lose/lose situations for police. They get ordered to break things up, and they get pilloried for breaking things up. It is impossible to exercise restraint with protestors who know no restraint themselves. And that is exactly what radical provocateurs count on. They know that cameras will not see the escalation on the part of the radicals, and will only see the response of the police. When it goes on the air, the natural instinct of viewers is to perceive it as "police riot" because that is exactly how the media, which is generally sympathetic to leftist causes, portrays it.
The only truly effective counter to these kinds of things is to infiltrate the organizers, identify those leaders who advocate violence, kidnap them in the middle of the night, quietly execute them and disappear the bodies. This is, of course, how repressive societies remain repressive. They have no particular moral constraint preventing this kind of behavior, and that is how a Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro remains in power for so long.
We are better than that, and so we have to deal with these things differently.
MY intuitive response is to suggest that the police ought to organize
themselves into a protest, and they should picket the homes of university administrators. When the reporters show up, as they inevitably will, police representatives will have an opportunity to explain to interviewers why they are protesting, and they can put the ball squarely back into the administrators' court. They can also issue their own ultimatum to administrators:
- "We are serving notice that we will no longer respond to administration requests to clear student protestors from campus facilities. Because of student intransigence and a demonstrated willingness on the part of students to escalate into violence, we have no choice but to leave protestors in place. There is no known way to remove determined protestors from a facility without exerting a judicious combination of physical force and compliance techniques—including the use of chemical compliance techniques. Compliance techniques work exactly because they cause physical pain without traumatic injury. If we cannot use these techniques, then you leave us with only one tool, and that is physical violence—something which all of our officers would prefer to avoid as it inevitably leads to physical injuries to both officers and students.
You have placed us into an untenable position, and you do not support us after placing us there. You criticize, but you offer no alternatives. This is the attitude of cowards, and we will not be made your scapegoats because you are unwilling to accept the adult responsibilities of administering a campus populated by people who know no restraint on their own behaviors.
From now on, you deal with them. Let us know how that is working for you. In the meantime, we will continue to perform traffic functions, collect parking fees, take crime reports, and other such mundane duties. When you come to your senses, we will be ready to listen."
If that doesn't work, then the campus police should do the unexpected....resign en masse and leave the university administrators to deal with their mess.
I won't happen, but one can dream, can't one?
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
― G. Michael Hopf, "Those Who Remain"
#TINVOWOOT
