This is a pretty thin hair to split. The police can’t ‘tell you what to do’, but the law can and part of the job of the police is to communicate and enforce the law.
Anyone going to a protest is definitely advised to understand their rights at the local, state and federal level so you can differentiate between the two.
What world do you live in? I could just go on a murder spree and when police come to arrest me I can just tell them "you can't tell me what to do", and they'll say "shucks, he's right, guess we'll let him on his way".
By the way, you're being doublespeaky when you say "protest is legal". It sure is. But the vast majority of these altercations come from after a group has been declared a riot, a public safety hazard, and ordered to disperse. They're no longer peaceful protesters when the cops have to use force to shut it down.
This is typically after police have antagonized the situation and created it through tactics like kettling and surrounding protesters and then throwing grenades of tear gas and misusing rubber bullets in potentially lethal ways on nonviolent crowds.
"declared a riot" is political speak for when the police don't like a protest and begin attacking.
Here is a video of the recent Seattle protest from an aerial view. There’s no escaping this. https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/gv0ru3/this_is_the...
You say this like it's a conspiracy when there are clear maligned motives for cops to approach these things in this manner, as well as a history of it.
Sometimes, but not often.
More often, when there is a gross “overreaction”, it's a calculated attempt to suppress the message of the protestors, coordinated by leadership and instigated by various means including feeding false intelligence to the cops on the line that distorts their interpretation of facts.
But in the case of race-related issues it's often much worse than that, and this is apparently the case now. The infiltration of American law enforcement agencies by white supremacists is long-documented, there is, at the moment, an active white supremacist effort to trigger a race war, and the President of the United States is actively using language invoking historical racist government violence, and directly initiating violence against peaceful protestors. This isn't impulsive police violence, or merely violence as instrumental to winning a political debate, this is a (mostly loosely) coordinated campaign of racist violence where the violence and the harms it inflicts is, itself, a goal, and not just a callously accepted cost of some other end.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/gv2ogk/news_ch...
>Tinted windows, have to verify not occupied, 200$ insurance claim vs. potential gun in the back of your neck, stop being ignorant
For all Americans talk about having rights and freedom you do seem incredibly quick to give them up in the face of authority.
If you don't want to be told what to do, don't riot, loot, and destroy.
If you're trying to say that our citizens can just burn our cities down, and there's nothing that can be legally done about it, I really don't understand you.
In all the clips you see, they're no longer peaceful protesters. All of the clips cut out all of the context. That's the piece you're missing. Peaceful protests happen every day and the police don't order them to disperse. Police only order them to disperse when they've become a public safety hazard.
Categorically false
There are hundreds of videos showing the police brutalising peaceful protest. Watch them.
Single example - How about peaceful protestors at the Whitehouse being tear gassed, batoned and charged to make way for the president's photo op?
[1] https://twitter.com/GarrettHaake/status/1267824405876359173
Or maybe you think that holding an umbrella wrong is reason to gas and throw explosives at an entire crowd of people.
Well, to be clear: they can. Courts have given police very wide latitude on what they're allowed to compel from the public in the execution of their duties. This is sort of the problem.
That said, your second point is really the meat here. Faced with civilians refusing their orders, it is not appropriate for the police to resort to any and all means to compel obediance. No one thinks it is. Especially conservatives, under normal circumstances (who, it seems, are a little confused right now).
I mean... most of the same people who two weeks ago were all "You can't tell I'm supposed to stay at home, that's tyranny!" are now all of a sudden all "You can't stay in that park if the president wants to be there! You should be tear gassed![1]"
[1] Excuse me: "pepper balls", which is totally not the same thing because it disperses a fine suspended powder and never enters a gas phase.
That’s like the whole point of the police.
If someone's protesting they are exercising their rights and the police has no right to intervene. If someone is looting however, sure, then they can step in - with appropriate force, which in most cases does not involve shooting them in the face.
What ACTUALLY happens is that they cut out all context of what led up to the situation, and cut in to a point where anybody with half a brain could see that the cops had been giving lawful orders for rioters to disperse, for what was probably a long time, they're on a loudspeaker giving them lawful orders to disperse, warning them that if they don't disperse force will be used against them, they decide to ignore lawful orders, and force is used against them to make them disperse.
The way the headline makes it sound, they were just nice peaceful protesters, not causing any problems, and police just rolled in and started beating them.
Protest is legal, and ignoring a "lawful police order" is also legal. The police can't just tell people what to do. Neither of those things warrant being assaulted by a police officer. Your own description of what happened is that the police used force to disperse peaceful protestors, which is obviously unacceptable.