[tw000001]

>bizarre because it's so stupid. Normally, police don't beat journalists because they're conscious that if you force the media to side with the protesters, it's pretty much all downhill from thereon in. Once the media has a narrative, politicians will start picking up on it for political capital, and then it's only a matter of time before low and mid-level police start getting thrown under the bus

This was all going on from day one of the reportedly "peaceful" protests. I've watched multiple anchors on CNN and MSNBC discuss "peaceful" protests against backdrops of live rioting/burning/looting.

The police need some degree of reformation but journalists chose a side at least as early as 2016. This is what happens when activist journalism is completely normalized. Police are humans too. You can only expect them to take so much targeted abuse before they target those who are amplifying threatening voices.

What are the common refrain on every single stream after the sun goes down? "FUCK 12". People openly threatening to murder police. All night long. These are the people journalists are defending. These are the agitators that the police have to deal with. Where are news reports of protesters throwing rocks at riot police? Multiple incidents of people throwing artillery shells (fireworks) into police crowds?

You shouldn't trust the media any more than you trust the current administration.

[craftinator]

That's one reason I prefer live reporting and live streams to the highly curated content the news shared. The funny thing is, every single live stream I've seen (30+) features the police starting violence first. I discount the looters in this, cause thieves gonna thieve given the chance, but I haven't seen a rock thrown that wasn't in response to getting tear-gassed. Maybe cops are just used to absolute, unquestioned authority, or maybe they just have a high percentage of bullies and assholes, but after tens of hours of footage I've watched live, the cops use violence first. Which is a breach of our Constitutional right to protest. I personally swore an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States against all threats foreign or domestic, and breaching constitutional rights domestically makes these cops a perfect description of that threat.

[mellow2020]

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Byk2axDVNHE

These are the people you are defending.

> Where are news reports of protesters throwing rocks at riot police?

Yes, where are they? After all, you have to have this from somewhere. And after seeing the above scenes, keep in mind that this isn't two soccer teams who both have the same job. The police's job is to uphold the law, citizens don't have a job as such. They don't get paid to not break the law, they pay for the apparatus that punishes them if they break it (and let's too many cops go free when they do). The cops are armed, they get paid, they have special privileges to prevent such things, not to use them to do them.

Imagine a little child hitting an adult with all their force, and then the adult hitting back with all their force, and someone just saying "they're both being bad". Not that the cops are adults versus infants, but they do have levers and enjoy protections -- all paid for by the people they or their colleagues brutalize -- that multiply their force by many orders of magnitude.