Police Are Determined to Prove Protesters' Point

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

The United States of America is in many ways an insane country. Amid a worldwide pandemic, one promising drug to treat the disease at its center may cost more than $3,000 for a patient on a typical private health-insurance plan. In St. Louis, one couple saw protesters marching outside their home—which appeared to be a museum of Brooks Brothers artifacts—and stormed out onto their porch waving guns around haphazardly. The president of this country shared the video of their exploits, one day after he approvingly shared a video of one his supporters yelling "white power." (His spokesman claimed he hadn't seen that part, which would mean he really didn't watch the video before sharing it with his 80 million followers.) And then there are the cops.

If you were accused of abusing the power vested in you by the public, forsaking your foremost obligations to keep the peace and safeguard the rights of citizens, how would you react? If you were accused of escalating situations towards violence on a systemic basis, particularly when people of color are involved, how would you conduct yourself in the immediate aftermath? Personally, I would not go out of my way to crack down, often violently, on people exercising their First Amendment rights to speech and peaceful assembly. But I guess I'm not an officer of the peace.

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This is a protest in Aurora, Colorado, demanding justice for Elijah McClain, an unarmed 23-year-old Black man who died last year after an encounter with Aurora police while walking home from a convenience store. McClain was, by all accounts, a gentle soul, not that that should have any bearing on whether police had reason to behave as they did. He taught himself to play the violin and liked to serenade stray cats, believing it soothed them. So demonstrators organized a violin vigil, where a group of musicians played before a protest crowd that included kids and families in Aurora's City Center Park.

And then Aurora police stormed the park dressed for Fallujah and pepper sprayed people.

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https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/police-determined-prove-protesters-point-150600839.html

[marie999]

1. Who was in charge of this police brutality, and what is the city going to do about it?

Are they so stupid that they don't understand that these protests are not going away? We have reached a point in this country that we are not going to go back to the way things were. We will not allow our government to tell us how to act and what we can and can not do. I am 3/4 Southern White and 1/4 Turkish and my husband is 3/4 Eastern European and 1/4 Persian so the government considers us White. We have never stood for and do not stand for now the way our government treats POC and LBGTQ. We do not have any friends that do not stand with us and that also includes some of our family.

[tblue37]

2. K&R for visibility. nt