#But no turning away because you can't do stuff. Disability friendly city.

[crooked-city]

Moving to The City is ridiculously easy, it's just like "What are your intentions? It's fine if you just want to have a nice place to live, we get that a lot. Do you have any particular work you enjoy or are interested in trying? No, no we don't need you to do work if you can't or don't want to, we just want to make sure you have the basic supplies to do that work if you'd like to. If you change your mind you can always contact the officials to get you set up with new supplies. Any specific accommodations you need for your home or for life in general? Yeah we can do that. Welcome home."

[star-anise]

Can you or someone kindly explain to me why violent riots are necessary? Why we apparently need to fight fire with fire? I just. Similar to your recently reblogged post, I cannot fathom how it is helpful. I understand that people are angry and they shouldn't be condemned in the way they are being condemned for property destruction (though people seem to forget that a lot of people, especially poor and disabled people, can't afford that) but like. What is this actually going to achieve?

The specific “point” of the current protests is addressing racist policing practices, an end to police brutality, and/or the abolition of the police, all of which have very actionable goals--for example, increasing crisis mental health resources, decriminalizing stupid shit that it doesn’t benefit society to police, changing how police are funded to de-incentivize unnecessary arrests or tickets, or increasing police accountability for harm. But I’ll address your question less as “what do these activists want to achieve” and more as “why are riots occassionally necessary praxis.”

The one thing I can’t comment on is how much the appearance of armed counter-protestors changes things. That’s new, partly in the last couple years and especially this week, and I haven’t got a solid grip on how that plays out. So I can just talk about my general knowledge.

The violence isn’t the inherently necessary part, it’s the protest. Protests and demonstrations are necessary; to create political change, it helps to demonstrate that a fuckload of people care deeply about this thing and are willing to take time out of their day to show that. It shows other citizens that this is an issue they could care about without being alone, and it shows the people in charge that if they don’t pay attention to this issue, a large proportion of their constituents are going to be unhappy. Sometimes the protest is also instrumental to the change, like occupying a building so it cannot be demolished, or occupying a road so that troop convoys cannot drive down it. My ex-girlfriend’s involved with a group that puts cups of paint on bike lane markers to demonstrate how frequently cars drive into bike lanes if they’re able to, in an attempt to get the city to invest in bike-friendly infrastructure. There are a lot of tactics out there.

Most protests are nonviolent and many are successful. They achieve small goals. An elected official may have so many people sitting in their office waiting room that they are forced to talk to them so that they go away and business as usual can resume. A cause may get on the news because people want to understand why a road was shut down or what all the people standing out there are talking about. People in power have to listen to activists and make concessions to them to make them go away. Stuff like that.

Some people believe that violence is intrinsically necessary--that’s the point of the Black Bloc, who think that property damage is a positive good in itself, or that nobody will listen unless you damage things and cost people money. That, to be honest, I... mmm. I think many people with violent leanings love violence in itself and will justify it more often than someone looking at the situation with dispassionate eyes will say, “What we need here is to break a bunch of shit.” 

But the more common cause of violence in protests is when people want the protest to stop or go away. That is, when the elected official’s secretary says, “Look, he’s not going to meet with you, please leave,” or a boss says, “I’m not going to increase your wages, so go away and stop telling the customers about your grievances with me.” Part of what makes a protest successful is saying, “No, I’d really rather stand here and talk about my goals than go away and make your day easier.”

That’s when it escalates to force. When they call security or police to get them to force the protesters to leave. It turns into a game of chicken; as a protestor, it doesn’t do to show that you can be easily made to back down, but your opponents are going to use an increasing level of force to make you want to leave, or to physically remove you. And when that escalates--for example, when the riot squad shows up and starts physically attacking people--protestors often find that sitting there and letting someone attack you isn’t a good strategy; keeping yourself safe and continuing the protest are generally preferable. Responses can range from putting people who’d make the police look bad for attacking in front (people in wheelchairs, people in nice clothing, people with bicycles, Nice White People, whatever), to having medics on hand to treat people who have been injured, to using umbrellas to ward off tear gas, to, yeah, the use of violence in defense. If a cop is beating up your friend, and you can beat the cop up so they stop, that makes a material difference to your friend.

This is why even Fox News has slowly started to cotton on to the fact that forceful police responses to protests, like calling out the riot squad, are the key feature that escalate protests and turn them really nasty. Only a small number of people at any protests actually want things to turn violent or loot things; the majority of people would rather use peaceful means if they were available, but they’ve found that nothing else worked so now they’re protesting. But once people are under physical threat, they get scared and desperate, and things get ugly.

Especially at Black Lives Matter protests, the police often have a very direct and vested interest in making sure the protestors don’t get listened to. They don’t want to be criminally responsible for the things they do in the line of duty or have the news talking about what a bad job they’ve done. Therefore, there is a lot of incentive for police to make the protestors look bad--so they’re very likely to use police tactics that they know will escalate the situation and turn it violent. And since that’s the exact thing BLM protestors want to draw attention to, it to some degree proves their point to be able to demonstrate the police responding to nonviolent people with violence when the cameras are rolling.