Amid all the bad-faith cherry-picking of MLK's speeches on nonviolent resistance as a means of dismissing the valid and necessary anger in America's streets, there's a real question: why do some protests include property damage and violence, and what can be done about it?
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Let's start with when and whether "violent" protests work. Many people have cited the massive, nonviolent South Korean protests of 2016 as evidence that peaceful protest is, in and of itself, sufficient to create political change.
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But as @askakorean points out, these were the culmination of years of violent clashes between protesters and police. The "peaceful" protests of 2016 arose from increasing police violence in suppressing the more muscular protests that preceded them.
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The South Korean police had declared open season on Jeolla-do people, killing them with impunity. But student protesters weren't killed - they were arrested, beaten and maimed, but murder was out.
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In 1987, though, the police murdered two students, Park Jong-cheo (waterboarded to death) and Yi Han-yeol (gas cannister to his head); this precipitated the "June Struggle," in which the protest's vanguard was joined by a mass movement of white-collar professionals.
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The June Struggle was the death-knell for the authoritarian regime of Chun Doo-hwan.
The same thing happened in 2016/7: labor unions, farmers, and other disfavored people protested in the face of overwhelming police violence, staying on the lines.
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The same thing happened in 2016/7: labor unions, farmers, and other disfavored people protested in the face of overwhelming police violence, staying on the lines.
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The injuries and deaths mobilized white collar professionals and their families, people whom the police could not beat or murder with impunity. Those were the "peaceful" protests - peaceful because the police did not dare raise their clubs to the "protected" class.
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This isn't just a lesson about tactics; it's also a lesson about the origin of violence in policing. Indeed, as @maggiekb1 writes in @FiveThirtyEight, there is decades' worth of research on the subject.
fivethirtyeight.com/features/de-es…
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fivethirtyeight.com/features/de-es…
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The unequivocal finding of this peer-reviewed research: police escalation leads to violence. Sending police to protests in riot gear begets riots. Tear-gas begets violence. These are the findings of scholars and blue-ribbon panels alike.
They are roundly ignored by police.
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They are roundly ignored by police.
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There's a feedback loop: violent suppression of protest leads to militancy among protesters; this is the pretence for more violent suppression. We know this, we just don't act on it.
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Instead, "We live in a world where trained cops can panic and act on impulse, but untrained civilians must remain calm with a gun in their face."
blackvibes.com/features/blogs…
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blackvibes.com/features/blogs…
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Some police officials argue that de-escalation puts cops at risk - that turning the other cheek when your adversary is in a hitting mood is suicidal tactics. That may sound reasonable, but only if you fail to ask why your adversary is in that mood.
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Maybe it's because the police union has campaigned to continue violent, sadistic "Warrior training" for its officers, teaching them to treat the people they police as their enemies.
buzzfeednews.com/article/meliss…
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buzzfeednews.com/article/meliss…
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Credibility and consent of the governed is an asset that is easy to squander and hard to accumulate. But the only way out of the trap of mistrust and trauma is to demonstrate goodwill.
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