[_yt0l]

There are ~10 million arrests per year in the US. That google doc includes non-US cases as well (but is also limited by what’s caught on camera). Still, 0.0007% of arrests leading to a case like this doesn’t seem as horrible as the raw total in isolation.

[fnord123]

There is one UK example which is actually a counter example where the police allowed a statue to be destroyed instead of intervening and creating a potentially dangerous altercation.

[pjc50]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Edward_Colston

The statue of a slaver and mass murderer had been controversial for the past 30 years. I wonder if things would have gone differently if the "recontextualisation" plaque had been allowed.

There has, predictably, been a backlash. Resulting in this fiasco where a guy came from Essex to defend some statues he didn't understand ended up urinating on a monument he didn't notice. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-53040301

[UncleMeat]

Symbols are more powerful than words. Statues have always existed to project values. A plaque adding context won’t actually achieve the goal.

[Chris2048]

> a guy came from Essex to defend some statues he didn't understand ended up urinating on a monument he didn't notice

That article doesn't say much about the guy who urinate, how do you know what he knew/understood, or where he came from?

[pjc50]

via https://twitter.com/CourtNewsUK/status/1272478151143313408

[bazzert]

The police did that in Portsmouth, VA ie. stood back and allowed a mob to pull down a statue which struck a man causing what is probably a life long injury.

[koheripbal]

So they allowed a mob to circumvent the legislative/democratic process of monument removal and it's an example of a "good" action?

Mobs are not the law.

[lagadu]

The alternative would be intervening and things possibly getting violent. The well-being of a statue isn't worth the possibility of causing harm to someone.

[koheripbal]

I suppose then I could organize a mob to vandalize anything I want because the police should prioritize the well being of the mob over that of property?

Seems like that would embolden mobs to destroy whatever they want. Doesn't seem like an intelligent or sustainable strategy.

[derivagral]

The mob may leave after the destruction, but that doesn't mean that the police don't later conduct investigations, arrests, etc based on tracking/video of the members of that mob.

I'm curious how many protestors or rioters keep their phones on them (with location/COVID apps or otherwise.) Even if they don't, plenty of others are taking the videos.

[hef19898]

Risk management. Allowing htem to tear it down vs. intervening with force to safe a piece of metal on a piece of rock. The latter can be put back up. The former carrers quite a risk for everyone involved. Sunds like a reasonable call to me.

[koheripbal]

If this were a one-time event, I suppose that might be true.

...but the unfortunate reality is that allowing mobs to destroy property become a feedback loop because they then realize that mobs can destroy anything they like with impunity.

That's no way to run a civilization.

[fnord123]

Safely allowing protests to take place and let people have their say without fear of rubber bullets in their faces is a fantastic way to run a civilization.

[jpxw]

Oh yeah, we should just let the rioters destroy public property. If the police just didn’t enforce the laws, there’d be no problems!

[fnord123]

That's right. Depending on the law and the context, if the police don't enforce it then there are fewer problems. That's pretty much what Superintendent Andy Bennett said in the video.

[stbtrax]

are you comparing a year timeframe (10 mil) to that of incidents recorded in the scale of a few days/weeks?

[alkonaut]

That's one in 30 being arrested in the US every year. How does that compare to other countries? Is that something that could be improved? It sounds like a lot.

[newacct583]

Exactly. I genuinely don't think US police are individually that much worse than they are in other industrial nations (though obviously they have abusable tools available that many other regimes don't). But the US does an extraordinarily large amount of policing. On average, a US resident is far, far more likely to be confronted by police in routine circumstances where they would be ignored in the rest of the world.

Which at the end of the day is what BLM is about, not so much the individual abuses. All that extra policing isn't distributed fairly. There are some communities in the US where the police are the kind of hands-off/come-only-when-called benefactors people expect, and there are some communities where they act more like a street gang controlling their territory, stopping and confronting anyone who seems likely to challenge their authority.

[pjc50]

Given that's not going to be evenly distributed, there will be a chunk of people who are never arrested in their lives and another group of people who get arrested all the time.