Wellsy wrote:I do wonder if there is reslly an identity or false conflation between rioters/looters and protesters.
In that some of the wild shit of smashing up stores seems random and not necessarily targeted in the way protesters have been. When they burned cop shops and slavery buildings, that didn’t seem the same as stores getting looted.
I am skeptical of the degree to which the two are the same group/phenomenon and rather the circumstances for protest can create opportunity for looters and such but this is no mark against protesting and fucking shit up against police and that.
Because when i hear bad shit happening to cops its in the context of some looting shit but ive not seen a cop getting fucked up by what are clearly protesters once.
You'll have to elaborate on what "fucked up" means in this context, but yes violent protesters and looters are not the same group of people. There's probably some overlap but they are mostly composed of different people.
One way to further differentiate between both is that there are looters in neighborhoods that have seen no protests.
This is not to say, of course, that having a group of people who protest violently and overwhelm the police force has absolutely no effect on looting in other parts of the city or else we wouldn't be seeing the looting we are seeing. It absolutely does matter for policing a whole city (and even suburbs), and a lot, that suddenly it becomes necessary to have a massive police presence in parts of the city that usually don't need nearly as much of it. It's not necessary for protestors to engage in the looting themselves for them to be the main reason why opportunist looting is going on.