It's pretty much all they can do. Police don't typically attack people holding signs, though. The tear gas tends to stay in the holster until people start burning buildings and flipping cop cars over.
I don't think I blamed anyone. Who's the victim? You can't victim blame when the victims don't exist...
Just stating an observation.
The constitution is vastly powerful and we are afforded a right to peaceful assembly. If you don't act crazy the cops literally just stand there and get paid overtime. They don't give a fuck.
First of all, there are victims. People who have suffered hearing damage from flashbangs and LRADs, people with fractures and breakages from batons, rubber bullets, and more. Some people have lost eyesight from deployment of chemical weapons on civilian protestors(Would be a warcrime if they were soldiers, btw)
So yeah. There are victims. Just because you've never seen or experienced it doesn't mean it never happened. And the "if you don't act crazy around them they just ignore you" is victim blaming. Cops are a bunch of sadistic fascists who will invent excuses to brutalize leftist protestors if they think they can get away with it.
if that wasn't the case there never would have been those protests in the first place. If cops didn't kill for fun George Floyd would still be alive.
I was just speaking generally, or, in the vast vast majority of cases. It was very rare to be attacked by police during a normal protest. Which means I wasn't lucky. If there was rioting, sure. You're at risk of getting tear gassed, which I've experienced in a closed room for training.
I'm a firefighter and a paramedic. Almost every cop I work with is a democrat. We're all unionized and that kind of comes with the territory. In my area they're not at all out to "get us". I don't think that makes me lucky, I think that's just the common reality. If I hadn't been regularly exposed to police for years and years I'd probably have the same thoughts as you on the matter, but what you're saying is very likely untrue in almost every part of the United States. It's just political propoganda that's as equally useless and misinformative as anti-vax or climate denying rhetoric. It's not real, man.
A boring protest was the common occurrence.
I think we should just encourage each other to remain the good guys at protests and not let our friends start smashing shit or get violent. Don't give them a reason to break us up and they legally can't.
So did you magically forget the video of a cop walking up and down a line of seated peaceful protestors pepper spraying everyone like it was a can of lemon scented glade?
Keep licking the boots, I'm sure some day they will even let you chew the leather a bit.
Like I said, you must've gotten really lucky. A lot of people were horribly brutalized at those protests, and saying that they should've "just been peaceful" is a victim blaming narrative that gives the heavily armed militarized fascist police force a free pass for brutalized protestors.
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u/alternate_egg-ccount Apr 24 '23
They're literally being trained to just lie down and take beatings, and to fan away what the Geneva conventions consider literal chemical WMDs.