Anecdotally, I was able to spectate active looting in my own city's downtown when the protests first came to us via various livestreaming instagrammers and while it was mostly a curiosity for me I imagine it would have been useful to a dispatcher who had to decide where to send officers. I don't see why twitter couldn't serve a similarly useful purpose.
We all watched the same thing in our cities. And we watched as the police chose to launch projectiles into crowds of protestors instead of doing anything about the smashing and looting.
On the first night of large protests (May 29), I found myself in my city of Portland, OR, on SW 3rd and Yamhill. On one side of me (to the East), where a small group of matching black-clad people had gone, were the unambiguous sounds of windows being smashed and building alarms going off. In other directions, especially South and West, there were huge groups of protestors, simply occupying the area.
The police engaged, without a single exception that came to my awareness, in the latter group, breaking them up into smaller and smaller contingents as the night went on, while doing nothing about the much smaller group going around smashing.
I described my experience in detail the following morning.[0]
The same story has emerged from streamed video throughout the USA.
So I don't think there's any evidence at this time that the police view stopping rioting or "active looting" as a goal.
0: https://www.reddit.com/r/Portland/comments/gtj1zm/what_i_saw...
Let's take a moment to determine how likely it is that the cops will stop sending small battalions of riot police into situations where they are highly unnecessary. As protests have gotten smaller in many cities, police have started sending riot police that outnumber the protestors. They have shown no interest in measured responses.
It would be nice if the police used data to reduce their use of force, but that appears to be antithetical to their way of thinking.
In the US it is not legally correct to claim that the police have any duty to provide any specific police service. (Warren v. District of Columbia)
But pedantry aside, they could monitor twitter and whatnot for violence outbreak without collecting any identifyable information.
This duty has been used to justify arresting peaceful people and creating violent situations for decades. "He was gonna cause trouble".
These topics bring out a lot of emotion in people, coupled with regular HN passive aggressive snark volleyed back and forth, of which your comment<T> fits.
They sort of do, by filming it and using facial recognition to identify people.
I guarantee if Trump got legitimately reelected with 80% of the vote, you'd see every company quickly replacing those "We Stand with BLM" banners with some bright red MAGA flair.
This is the same reasoning behind the argument for putting backdoors into crypto algorithms, and it's a bad argument for the same reasons.
Much like the police when they obscure or remove their names and/or badge numbers, no?
> but in fact they do so to commit acts of violence and then meld away in the crowd, effectively taking hostage the lawful protesters.
Yep, you got that right.
Tools need to be engineered to bring murderers, killers, rapists, and jackbooted jarheads to justice.
Murderers are being let free. Society should revolt at such injustice. I wish folks talked with such conviction about the folks raping, murdering, and killing with impunity. Beating protestors without care, etc. Instead they reserve "bring them to justice" for broken windows and stolen Nikes. What a country.
Then I fell in love with an otherwise quite intelligent woman with dyslexia
At some point I just stopped trying to correct her to/too/two confusion
It would be nice if everyone used correct grammar. But you understood what they were trying to say, which is what made it possible for you to suggest the correction.
What I'm getting at is that I now think it's impolite to call someone out on their grammer in a public forum (I know you saw what I did, there)
The tone of online discourse has eroded so badly of late that I think it's best to become a politeness fascist now.
We don't call people out on their lisp, their tics, their stutter, their mumbling, their gait... but calling people out on their spelling online is OK apparently
It is much more effective at making lists of people willing to lawfully and peacefully stand for the human rights or others, -- "potential subversives", as the parties monitoring might call them.
Imagine, instead, if law enforcement were to stand outside of a marijuana-legalization rally and collect the sort of data effectively collected here: name, address, duration of involvement. They'd end up in court immediately, and it would likely be found that their actions had a chilling effect which created a prior restraint on the public's constitutionally protected speech.
Yet online this kind of data collection amasses more data and is more chilling due secretive nature since you never know when you're not being tracked.