Nobody managed to get a video of the rioters? Doesn't that seem odd to you? Additional context is welcome as long as it's either verifiable or doesn't serve an obvious agenda.

Here's some additional context that's just as valid as yours: the "rioters" were actually defending the neighborhood from the police who had been there before your context began. The police were beating random people and shooting pets. The person that told me this lives in one of the houses in the video and she's a retired nurse who volunteers to care for hospice patients.

Both your claim and the parent's claim are equally shocking, and the evidence for both is hearsay from someone who lives on the street. How do we know who is being sincere, who is pushing an agenda, who is mistaken, who is experiencing cognitive dissonance, etc.

The history of police being bastards towards protestors? If you think you have no way of establishing priors you aren't examining the facts.

I think there could be an aspect of availability heuristic. You don't watch news of police not acting aggressive towards protestors. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen, or doesn't happen even more often than it does. Same with the comment below about why cops aren't speaking up. I've read some articles where they are, but again... it's not going to make news nearly as much as the bad apples do.

This doesn't negate the bad apples and all the bad things that have happened or in any way go against the protests. Just try to be aware when classifying an entire group as bad based hand picked information presented to you.

Of course there is that history. But there are also people who paint the police in an unwarrantedly bad light. People tend to forget that humans are overwhelmingly cooperative and good. Society would not be as stable as it is if people were as consistently bad as some people make them out to be. There are ideologies misrepresenting reality on both sides of this situation. It's so hard to concretely say anything in these situations without examining all the context available.

It’s not a difference of ideologies: one class of people can almost always murder with impunity and the other class of people can’t.

Does that mean we take away the benefit of the doubt for an entire class of people as soon as one person cries foul?

Yes! Now we are making progress.

Police do not deserve the benefit of the doubt, ever, when they are working in their official capacity. They should have to bring proof.

Well, if the police are overwhelmingly good, where are the representatives of the police unions that are condemning the “few bad apples” that are killing unarmed Black people?

Where are all of the “good policemen” who are saying racial profiling during “stop and frisk” is wrong.

If they are complicit and silent they are not “good”.

And I bet you have never been thought of as “suspicious” for walking from your house down the street to your mailbox.

> The police were beating random people and shooting pets.

Well, at least there'll be evidence for that, right? Dead pets?

This doesn't pass the sniff test. If they were rioters, they would likely not be rioting on their own porch. Hence, ordering them to go inside would mean breaking into someone else's house. On the other hand, if they're legitimately on their own proerty, and if they're not being disorderly, then what is the rationale for that use of force?

I hate to say it, but I'm doubting the veracity of this account. There's nothing in the video - trash or debris from a large crowd, in particular - to indicate that the area they were in, specifically, was in need of such force. And, again, the curfew did not forbid being outside on one's own property.

If we're going to second-guess what we see with our own eyes - that these people were shot at by police without provocation - it's perfectly reasonable to then continue to drill down on what happened; question accounts, question logic. Or, we could employ Occam's Razor.

Anyway, as a practical matter we should also be asking for the RUF that these police were operating under. That would clear up a lot.

I’m not disagreeing with anyone about the inappropriateness of the police actions, but the account is not claiming that those shot in the video are rioters. Simply that the police we see were actively clearing rioters from the neighborhood and the porch people were caught up in it.

The alleged presence of rioters in the neighbourhood justifies the police being there in armed convoy through the neighbourhoods. It doesn't justify any of their actions shown in the video, which shows a large section of street with no evidence of rioting and unprovoked fire on people in their gardens to a enthusiastic call to action usually reserved for strikes on military targets.

The area does look remarkably clean to have just had rioters on the street. There’s zero trash or debris on the ground, zero evidence of paint or smoke canister usage anywhere, and all of the houses and cars are immaculate. If there were people on the street prior to these police/soldiers arriving, it’s hard to imagine that they were looting or rioting.

So that makes it a lot better that police made a mistake and did it.....

The assertion that shooting someone on their own porch is wrong doesn't invalidate the claim made by the OP's friend. I completely agree with you that an unnecessary amount of force was used though, to the point where it almost seems criminal.

Where's the actual source? Given that it's using hashtags at the end, it's either a compilation of tweets or a post on some other site.

If the upstairs neighbor didn’t even know there were rioters nearby there weren’t lmao.

Screaming isn’t rioting.