They want the story to be about rioters so they're letting them riot. It's a way to shift the public opinion (same way some cops have been seen breaking car and store windows).
https://twitter.com/MplsWard3/status/1267891878801915904
> Politicians who cross the MPD find slowdowns in their wards. After the first time I cut money from the proposed police budget, I had an uptick in calls taking forever to get a response, and MPD officers telling business owners to call their councilman about why it took so long.
In practical terms, they already do it and US law allows them prosecutorial discretion.
Local news reporting tries to explain what's going on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJGT06zIUiY&t=2m01s
"What you've been seeing is basically a cat and mouse game all night. The police have been here with a huge show of force, but they can't stop people, because they don't know that they've necessarily been looting. And so they're waiting for somebody to do something, police move onto the next block, and then someone does something."
I don't know one way or another whether this is the whole truth, but it appears to play a significant role according to the reporter.
Not showing up can be a tactical decision: you don't have to generate more bad press and more cries about police brutality and you also don't need to quasi-officially hand over the area to the looters.
The state's power isn't real as in "we can crush you", it rests only in everybody's fear of the state being able to crush them. If there's a chance that the state has to back down, not seeking the confrontation sounds like a smart choice to me, even if it comes at the price of a day or two of looting.
Your argument can't possibly be "Because they didn't want to escalate" or "They didn't want people to think they're violent" when they did escalate and were violent elsewhere.
I am in full agreement that it was tactical - it allows them to punish a neighborhood and to shift the story.
Failing to respond to looting damages the state's legitimacy. Responding to looting and failing to stop it damages the state's legitimacy. Even responding to looting and successfully stopping it damages the state's legitimacy, because mass looting signals that looting has become more acceptable.
Germany has an issue with criminal clans from the Middle East, our law enforcement system isn't equipped to deal with them and our laws in general aren't either. The approach is pretty much "try not to engage", because while it's damaging to have "extended families" with hundreds of members where basically everyone of them has a criminal record, the other option is either locking up everybody (terrible idea in Germany) or trying to reason with them and failing (showing the state tried to handle it but failed). Not engaging is just the cheapest option and does the least amount of damage (I'm not suggesting that's necessarily true for the situation in the US, I don't know it well enough).
If the Leviathan shows its teeth and the problem doesn't go away, it has to bite. If it doesn't, everybody will see that the teeth aren't that sharp any more, and that will encourage more challengers.
> The state's power is not just fear alone, it's legitimacy.
For the people that don't require laws and punishment to behave morally, yes. For those that do, they obviously don't care about legitimacy or that looting (or any crime) is wrong, otherwise they wouldn't commit it. It's only those people that any society needs to worry about, and it's only those people that the state needs to convince that it is stronger than them.
There is a big disconnect between the crime statistics in Germany, that show low crime levels by international standards and recent reductions in crime levels, and what the German public believe about the prevalence of crime in Germany due to alarmist tabloid reporting.
Cf. e.g., https://www.dw.com/en/crime-in-germany-drops-10-percent-in-2...
But that's effectively what doing nothing does. The state has teeth (the police) and it doesn't bite.
That's a completely unambiguous signal to both criminals and law-abiding citizens. And the results of this policy anywhere in the world is the problems have just grown in size and gotten worse.
> because while it's damaging to have "extended families" with hundreds of members where basically everyone of them has a criminal record
Remember when these "extended families" were an order of magnitude smaller and we applied the same policy of non-intervention? And look what that got us!
When are we finally going to apply the only acceptable course of action?
Kind of, but not really. If you send the police to confront the looters, you are showing your teeth, you're saying "this will stop right here and right now, or else". You have to have a plan for the "or else" part.
If you don't send the police, you're not saying anything. Everybody is aware that the police exists, but unless you assert your power, there is no challenge.
This is obviously not a possible long-term strategy, because not having any power and never asserting the power you have are functionally the same. I don't think that anybody assumes the rioting will be a long-term problem though, so that may not be an issue.
> When are we finally going to apply the only acceptable course of action?
We won't. We're doing harm-reduction, both on a society level and, for politicians, on an individual level (and for management in large companies). Kick the can down the road. Attacking the big problems before they become unavoidable isn't something our systems are set up to do, not causing disturbances is incentivized, be that in law enforcement, dealing with dead industries surviving only on subsidies, education, pollution and emissions, health care, public infrastructure etc pp. "Spending $5m on that bridge now will save us lots of money in the future" isn't what the public sees - it's "they want to waste $5m on a perfectly fine bridge".
They have no (personal) reason to stop the looting, and at the same time, occupying their attention, the opportunity to strike out at that (very personal) threat.
For what it's worth, this is why people hate cops! No one said anything about all cops being worthless, and you're saying that victims of crimes deserve it for not praising police brutality.
Cops that are busy kettling up protesters for later official intimidation and violence are not available to respond to crimes happening elsewhere.
Business owners are better off with insurance, alarms, and dedicated private security that won't abandon their protective duties every time they feel like pepper-spraying a liberal in the face for no apparent reason.
There is no reason to have police that don't follow the Peelian principles.
We can’t not have police, don’t be ridiculous.
We need something closer to social service workers, the vast majority of which do not require arms.
It is not a binary choice between the militaristic, public-hostile police we have now, and no police at all.
As it is, the police in schools frequently do inappropriate things, such as bodyslamming 40kg girls or putting children in handcuffs for acting up in class. A school security guard, charged with protecting the students and staff, with no authority to arrest or punish anyone, would do fine.
There are other examples all over this thread. Nobody is complaining about a specific cop, they’re generalizing everything to “cops”. That’s what that is.
you're saying that victims of crimes deserve it for not praising police brutality
How do you expect anyone to take you seriously with such absurd fabrications? Anyone can scroll up and easily see that I did not say any such thing.
> You decided you were better off without me, fine, save your own store.
That was you saying that people who don't support police don't deserve police protection.
I guess it's too much to ask that police obey the law they are supposed to be enforcing.
This is why the country is in flames right now.
Historically, we see that any group given power eventually starts abusing it. For modern definitions of abusing power, anyways. Past societies would have seen it differently, perhaps the divine right of kings or some such nonsense.
A fascinating example would be the wealthy nobles of the late (western) Roman empire. They shielded citizens from military service, and in exchange expected work from them, generally on their vast estates. After the collapse of the empire, this relationship eventually evolved into the feudal lord/serf relationship. Also, Diocletian's reforms didn't help, but that's a topic I'll leave for another post.
I guess this is kind of a long-winded way of saying this, but what you're asking for does seem unreasonable in the long term. Human beings don't seem to work that way.
That all being said, the long term I'm referring to is the 250+ year timeline. We might be able to goose the current system along for another few generations if we do it right. If it's worth it or not depends a bit on your perspective.
How should we have read this sentence?
Why couldn't you have instead said, "You decided you were better off without a shitty abusive police officer, fine, call me or other police instead." ?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Since 2001, police have taken more American lives than all other terrorist activities combined.
Supporting protestors and civil unrest doesn't mean you support violence, but I'm not a naive child that thinks great change happens without bad things accompanying it.
Extraordinary enough? A birds eye view, of a protest that was peaceful for hours, until police grab for an umbrella, and start attacking the crowd.
Here's an ant's eye view of the same event, by the way. @26:30 - the gas masks arrive, @28:20 - the gas masks take their place in the line, @30:00 - the umbrella gets grabbed, and the crowd gets attacked.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1022002103584874...
I walked down third street until I reached the point where the riot police set up a barricade and didn't allow the protesters further. It was really a peaceful scene where the police were setup, and I thought it was being handled very professionally with the goal to not incite violence (There were also 6 police helicopters circling the area) Everywhere the police were not there was looting.
The amount of misinformation being circulated is staggering.
This has been a long time coming, too. In the last few years, many police departments around the country have thrown their hands up and publicly stated they won't be bothering with most property crimes. The way they see it, the only crimes worth their time involve people not committing real crimes at all or crimes involving guns or knives. Anyone who doesn't get why people don't trust the police has been living under a rock. This goes beyond just racism.