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by makomk
2159 days ago
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The feds have allegedly been arresting people "just" for dressing entirely in black - or at least, that's the narrative the press has been pushing to convince people that this is some kind of totalitarian military occupation. The thing is, the entire point of the Black Bloc tactic of dressing everyone like this is to make it as hard as possible to identify which specific "protestors" tried to burn down the federal courthouse, and which attacked law enforcement officers, and so on - in short, to turn protestors into a monolithic entity where crimes cannnot easily be attributed to any specific individual within the entity. |
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But even if we take that as a given, it seems to me that everyone wearing the same color clothing—and thus it being harder for the officers to distinguish protestors from each other—works against the probable cause argument, and not in its favor. I'm far from an expert on this, but my understanding is that in some (most?) applications of probable cause, individualized suspicion is a requirement; if officers are unable to distinguish protestors from each other, it seems like that would make it harder for them to meet the necessary standard to justify an arrest.
The argument that innocent protestors didn't make it easy for the police to distinguish them from criminals in their midst does not seem like it modifies the probable cause requirement; officers can't go around arresting (or, worse, using violence against) peaceful protestors simply because the officers are unable to easily identify the minority who are lawbreakers in their midst.