[bananaface]

I think you're way off the mark to be honest. Riot police broadly follow orders, they aren't acting on their own to any significant degree to begin with, let alone enough to express these motivations. I'm with you that riot cops tend to be thugs, but... So are rioters.

I don't think the riots were the result of police escalation, that strikes me as an attempt to sell snow to eskimos. I think they were the result of people realising they could get away with it, which is why they stopped when the national guard stepped in. People aren't torching car dealerships and looting flat screen TVs from Walmart because of the police, they're doing it because it's fun.

[jrochkind1]

I dunno what I have seen and what matches the experience of most other people I know who have been there, is some parts of the crowd do SOMETHING illegal or 'inappropriate', sure, the cops respond with force or chemical weapons, which escalates the situation by angering/triggering the crowd to be more aggressive towards the police, rinse repeat.

I am not denying some kind of provocation from the crowd. What we're talking about is if the police respond with escalation or de-escalation. Separate from an issue of "fault", just an objective observation of what happens.

I'm not talking about whole-scale insubordination from the police. I'm saying individual cops and unit-leaders have discretion of when to respond with what force -- like cops do generally.

I think one reason the national guard makes a difference is because they have very different training, risk-tolerance, different ingrained norms about when it's appropriate to use force against civilians. Military is trained to try to avoid using force against civilians; police not so much because that's literally their job. We are seeing lately how often the police respond to any perceived risk with overwhelming force -- that is what they are trained to do. National guard, when facing civilians, are trained to use it as a last resort, police seem trained (whether explicitly or implicitly) to use it as a first resort, at least when dealing with certain populations (protestors, poor people) where traditionally mainstream society sees them as "dangerous". Honestly, I think the national guard is a lot more likely to respond to "provocation" from civilians with de-escalation or just holding ground; the police much more likely to respond by escalation, some form of violence against the crowd in general, in a way that brings an escalated reaction.