> NYPD polls well

This is one of the first things criminal reform advocates in New York are taught. The police is well-funded and powerful and strong because it's popularly supported, and the political class knows that.

And no amount of protesting is likely to change that. Not in the near term. This is why "f* the police" styled slogans are discouraged. They alienate the only responsive audience: reasonable New Yorkers, who [EDIT: by virtue of most New Yorkers supporting the NYPD] likely support the NYPD in general, and have simply not prioritized your reform policy as a talking point with their friends and elected.

So easy to be "reasonable" when life is good.

> So easy to be "reasonable" when life is good

This is a good point. Most protest is about priority. It isn't going to change many peoples' minds. But it will make them prioritize thinking and talking about, and maybe even voting for, your issue.

Michelangelo said "the sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.” Effective protest is similar. It isn't about creating a new view. It's about uncovering, and refining, instincts that were already there.

As such, a core part of effective protest is problem projection. That is, forcing people who don't have a problem to empathize with those who do. Protest should target those who have it good. To get them to empathize with those who don't. (Community organizing is about getting people who share a problem to prioritize it together.)

To be honest, the protests have actually opened up my view and forced me to think deeply and project myself as being in the same situation as many minorities. So yea, you’re right on the money here imho.

Fact is, the majority of people are generally happy with their life, attacking those people and their life just makes them hate you and support whomever is trying to stop you. I don't see why that is unreasonable or unexpected.

Agree on this. Ive seen social media post portraits the message in the lines of "if you don't support us, then you are part of them". I believe this is a bad tactics to gain support in a movement.

Excluding people will only lose support, instead they should've pushed for more social media post on explaining in an objective way why police brutality and racism exist, and how it will impact us (not only African American but POC as well as innocent civilians).

Yea my first thought is the absolutist slogans and chants can turn away those in the middle. I’d rather see facts and have smart people plan and debate. On the other token, as in politics, it’s the one liners that get spread far and wide and affect more people (positive or negatively). Obama said it best that the protests essentially make the issues front and center and in everyone’s mind, but the rubber hits the road only when electing local officials that can make permanent changes.

I agree with your second point. American federal politicians and political organizations seem to care less and less about the middle.

Change happens at the edges, and sadly people deal more and more in extremes + absolutes. There's not much room for nuance.

>I believe this is a bad tactics to gain support in a movement.

That depends on the size of the movement. "Support us or lose all your friends" is a valid tactic that has been successfully used since long before written history. Requiring members to perform an action (unfriend people, post harsh messages, etc.) also induces deeper commitment (psychologically and materially) then merely someone saying they support a movement.

If you are happy in a country built on the sweat and blood of enslaved people, and then simply not willing to listen to their suffering, you are an aweful human being.

I'd appreciate it if you didn't put words in my mouth or throw insults at me.

I'm merely pointing out that violent rioters will elicit negative responses from people who don't want society to burn down and those who stop said rioters will elicit positive responses.

There is no faster to alienate people and get yourself off with smug superiority than to comment like this.

We can go down the path of how much has been built by slaves, what you mean by enslaved, and how I am somehow responsible for that, especially as an immigrant from a country torn apart by American imperialism.

You are not the judge of what is an aweful human being, seriously, you’re just not that free of sin or amazing.

In your smugness you no doubt increase the wealth of other such “aweful human beings” by working for them, paying them for goods, paying taxes, etc.

This attitude is tiring and counter productive.

TIL that there are still enslaved people who suffer in your country.

Indeed. Welcome to politics.

> Holy dog whistle, Batman

Unreasonable people are not a protest's priority. They are entrenched. If they're with you, you won't lose them. If they're against you, you won't win them.

Note that this bias towards the reasonable only applies at the early stages of organization. When one is building awareness, before specific policies have been mooted. Once policy fronts develop, the unreasonable play their part. They create your battering ram of a base that focusses elected leaders on ensuring your policy remains a priority.

Putting the unreasonable front and centre too early leads to each camp preaching to its choir while the masses disengage.

I think the problem he is pointing out in your statement is that you effectively just said everyone either agrees with your or is unreasonable. There is no middle ground. I can not be a reasonable person who disagrees with you.

My interpretation is reasonable not in the senses of being establishment, elite, or some other socioeconomic signifier, but as in literally amenable to being convinced by reasoned argument, based on evidence and logical relationships between premises, evidence, and conclusions.

Contrasted with insensitive to reason.

So no, not a dog whistle.

A more charitable reading: a large subset of all reasonable New Yorkers support the police in general. Not sure if that was what they meant, but it's how I read it.

Where you say reasonable, I think you mean to say mainstream.

> Where you say reasonable, I think you mean to say mainstream

Able to be reasoned with?

Mainstream pertains to "ideas, attitudes or activities" [1]. A protest probably wants to appeal to those who hold mainstream views. Or bring its supporters' views into the mainstream. But the whole point of the protest is something isn't mainstream that should be.

[1] https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/mainstream

Reasonable seems valid. With the information they had, those New Yorkers reasoned that the police were doing a good job. Likewise if you were to bring them new information, they might reason that the police are doing a bad job. And there are also reasonable people who think the police are doing a bad job, they were just exposed to a different set of information and/or different values than the people who think the police are doing a good job.

And then on the extremes are the unreasonable people. Those who will support the police regardless of any negative change, and those who will oppose the police regardless of any positive change.

Grandparent comment did not say that people who disagreed were unreasonable. It said that reformers are taught to target to target people who, reasonably, are NYPD supporters. It does imply that being a supporter is within reason, but more so indicates that set intersection exists and is both large and who can be influenced through reason (due to them being reasonable).

It does not purport to limit those who are reasonable. The phrasing could have been used in a dog whistle which does, but this particular remark isn't it. Moreover, there is little audience for such a dog whistle in the midst of a conversation about practical ways to effect meaningful reform.

This should not be a wedge between us that impedes us from working together towards justice and peace.

> target people who, reasonably, are NYPD supporters

Slight edit, to target reasonable people. Period. Reasonable people can hate the NYPD. But because an overwhelming majority of New Yorkers support the NYPD, the average reasonable New Yorker is likely to as well.

Speaking to the current environment, I believe there is overlap between support for the protestors' cause and the NYPD in general.

> NYPD polls well.

oh its more extreme than that. a majority of people support actual military augmentation for the police during these riots

https://assets.morningconsult.com/wp-uploads/2020/06/0118162...

> its more extreme than that

If you're trying to convince a majority to change its views, labelling them as "extreme" is unhelpful.

Many New Yorkers are within living memory of the Cold War-era crime peaks that almost destroyed our city. 9/11 and the Boston Bombing normalized a more-militarized police, as well as the NYPD building up an intelligence agency that rivals some countries'.

Looting isn't terrorism. And we have had zero mass violence from protesters. But there are good reasons for an island as dense as Manhattan to be hyper-sensitive to incipient lawlessness. (There are also bad ones.)

One of the big problems is that processes and tactics that might be reasonable for a huge city like NYC or LA get picked up by smaller cities that probably don't need a more militarized police force. There's no reason East Podunk Noweheresville PD needs military-grade tactical gear and armored personnel transports.

The types, frequency, and severity of crimes are different in different sized communities. The tactics and responses should be different. But somehow, policy-makers and police chiefs see something happening in NYC and think, "Yeah, we need that here to."

In tech, people say "You are not Facebook, you are not Google, you are not Amazon. The solutions that work for them and the huge scale at which they operate are going to be overkill, or flat-out not work at all, for your 10k user start-up." And yet, people expect the tactics of a PD in a city like New York to work in a city like Raleigh, NC.

9/11 and Boston did not normalize a militaristic Police force. It is not normal. It’s 3rd world country.

When I initially read your comment, I assumed that it conflated the military and the national guard. Nope. That was a separate (and even better supported) question.

I’m curious how much this correlates to police shows on television. At best, they are romantic depictions of policing. Even the “gritty, realistic” ones like “the shield” or “the wire” don’t really convey the complexities of how policing culture (both internally and with the wider community) varies even from neighborhood to neighborhood. In all likelihood you have no clue how your community polices.

Yea I think one missing piece is that the public isn’t aware of the strategy, tactics, planning and challenges from modern policing. We just see the good and bad highlights and think it’s so simplistic.

Modern policing is full of contradiction: it should be non-violent, but it should also evict people, even from the streets. It should be anti-racist, but most prosecuted crimes are against the poor. It should protect the community from loss, but most of what is spent on policing is lost in wage theft. It should protect the community, but death by policing and incarceration are major causes of death.

> In general in America, police are very trusted and even in years with significant issues, that trust did not sharply decline

Exactly what I expect nothing will come of all this chaos. Sure on an individual level they'll sacrifice a few of their own to pacify the crowd, but Americans are too infatuated with the police for any real change to happen.

Unless 51% of any city is minorities, any PD polls well.