Guyanese Online

Comments

• Gord  On 06/02/2020 at 12:34 pm

  Permalink | Reply

  Are you kidding? With all the looting and burning,how can you say its peaceful.Which planet are you from?

• guyaneseonline  On 06/02/2020 at 8:30 pm

  Permalink | Reply

  BLODGET & PLOTZ
  protests george floyd new york
  How to calm American cities and end the chaos.

  Americans have settled on “protests” as the sweeping term to describe what’s happening on the streets of our cities. But that single word is doing too much work, encompassing everything from quiet marches to looting and police assaults.

  We won’t have calm until we recognize that we’re actually dealing with four different kinds of disruption, each of which requires a different resolution.

  The first and most important activities — the ones that should be called “protests” — are the largely peaceful marches, demonstrations, and occupations happening in response to the murder of George Floyd.

  These demonstrators are protesting against police violence targeting black Americans, and demanding change. Some of these protests are tightly organized, some are looser gatherings. Some are extremely peaceful, some more chaotic. All draw on the deepest American traditions of activism. They are free speech of the highest order.

  What will defuse these protests? They will quiet down as soon as mayors, governors, prosecutors, and police chiefs appear to take seriously the demands for reform. Here, for example, are eight reform ideas. Here are 10 more. If local leaders proposed serious dialogue about the issue of police violence, created commissions including protest leaders, and cracked down on episodes of police impunity, the street protests would ease off and the quieter work of reform could begin.

  But it’s too chaotic for local officials to do that right now. That’s because they’re too distracted by the second kind of disruption: vandalism and looting. The chaos agents are the array of vandals, looters, spray-painters, and window-breakers who loosely attach themselves to the protests, and cause mayhem at the edges of them. There’s no one way to characterize them: They seem to include leftist anarchists, greedy looters, and perhaps alt-right provocateurs. (They also seem to be disproportionately white.)

  Until the chaos agents are stopped, cities won’t feel safe and local leaders won’t be able to talk productively with the protesters. So stopping them must be the first priority, and it requires three things. The protesters must continue to disavow them. The police must focus on arresting and deterring them, which is much more important than confronting the peaceful marchers. And the public as a whole should be encouraged to stand up to them (though not in the Philly vigilante baseball-bat way).

  Curfews are keeping well-behaved citizens off the streets, leaving them empty for the forces of havoc. Busy streets are safer streets, and there might be less chaos if the public was out, reinforcing community unity and providing visual deterrence.

  But this brings us to the third kind of disruption, which is the police themselves. In many cities, the police have become counterprotesters. Rather than acting as neutral peacemakers, they’re responding furiously and violently to the protests.

  The cops’ emotional response is understandable: It must be agonizing to be called a murderer or to see all those ACAB signs. But it’s not excusable. The unwarranted acts of violence against law-abiding protesters and working reporters escalate the conflict, and turn some peaceful demonstrators into chaos agents.

  If police chiefs and mayors can’t get their officers to calm down — and in many cities it looks like they can — then the National Guard should take over the job of monitoring the peaceful protests. It’s a bad precedent as the domestic use of the military is a step toward authoritarianism. But as we learned during peaceful civil-rights marches, when the police see themselves as foes rather than protectors, they cause disorder and deepen the conflict. The National Guard, who are less personally invested and aggrieved, are more likely to defuse the situation.

  Finally, there is the fourth kind of disruption. Last night President Trump ordered the teargassing and dispersion of peaceful protesters so that he could stage a bizarre photo op outside St. John’s church. The violence against the peaceful crowd was unprovoked and unnecessary.

  The president now seems eager to deploy police and troops and brutal methods. There is no easy solution for this, except for local officials to try to keep him as far away from their cities as possible, and for all citizens to condemn his authoritarian tactics. —DP