Interactions between police and protesters are, by their very nature, tough to study. But what we need to know as professionals is that there are times, if we go one step higher, we are forcing them to go one step higher.” “The adrenaline starts to pump, the temperature in the room is rising, and you want to go one step higher. “There’s this failed mindset of ‘if we show force, immediately we will deter criminal activity or unruly activity’ and show me where that has worked,” said Scott Thomson, the former chief of police in Camden, New Jersey. But if we know that (and have known that for decades), why are police still doing it? In fact, disproportionate police force is one of the things that can make a peaceful protest not so peaceful. One thing they will tell you is that when the police respond by escalating force - wearing riot gear from the start, or using tear gas on protesters - it doesn’t work. Researchers have spent 50 years studying the way crowds of protesters and crowds of police behave - and what happens when the two interact.
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Turns out, we do know some of these answers. Three federal commissions concluded that when police escalate force those efforts can often go wrong, creating the very violence that force was meant to prevent.
#RIOT CIVIL UNREST CAN YOU KILL POLICE HOW TO#
When protests take a turn like this we naturally wonder … why? Was this preventable? Does anyone know how to stop it from happening? There has been a lot of hard the past few days, as people in dozens of cities have released pent-up anger against discriminatory police tactics. Watching a peaceful protest turn into something much less palatable is hard. It feels like the beginning of the end.” The end of what? “What we’ve been going through,” he said, referring to heavy-handed and often deadly policing of African Americans. With no police presence to be seen, he and other protesters were celebrating a victory. On Thursday night, he returned to the same spot to watch the precinct burn. Harris said he had used his backpack as a shield and maneuvered close enough to take the baton of the officer who shot him.