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Looting Word Choice & More
Dec. 10th, 2014 01:09 pmHere's a quick tip for journalists. It's incorrect to say, "Safeway employees clean up after protesters looted their store." It's correct to say, "Safeway employees clean up after criminals who coopted a protest looted their store."
They are protesters when they're marching.
They're probably protesters when they're blocking highways and locking up BART. It seems to piss people off as much as the looting, but this sort of criminality-of-inconvenience is much more a part of the country's history of civil disobedience. Mind you, it's not without consequences: Monday's blocking of the highway apparently caused one woman to give birth on the asphalt and could easily have killed two men, one who had a heart attack and another who had a stroke, neither of which could get off the highway.
Anywho.
They're definitely not protesters when they're smashing windows, stealing liquor and dog food, and setting fire to recycling bins. They're criminals. They're vandals, looters, and arsonists. And, there's no longer a protest. It's become a riot.
Words matter.
Here's another fun word fact. Police force is not by definition excessive. If you're breaking the law, you can expect the police to try and stop you, and if you keep breaking the law, you can expect force to be applied to make you stop. That's sort of what we pay the police to do.
I suspect most people would agree that there was excessive force in the cases that are theoretically being demonstrated against — that young black males regularly face excessive harassment and excessive force from police officers all across this nation. That's a problem. A big problem. It's worth protesting against.
However, that doesn't mean that you necessarily faced excessive force if you got tear gassed or hit by a rubber bullet or a bean bag when you were part of a mob that the police had already asked nicely to disperse because of illegal actions. Not even if you were one of the peaceful members of that unruly mob. Not even if you were a journalist who decided to embed himself in that unruly mob.
No, it means that you're paying the price that you opted to pay when you decided to engage in Civil Disobedience. Just like Thoreau opted to go to jail. Maybe it's an honorable wound that you've taken, or maybe you were a masked coward who wanted a bottle of vodka. In any case, it's what should be expected when you decided to break the law and then decided to keep doing it when asked to stop. I mean, what were the officers of the law supposed to do? Stand by and watch?
(Now hitting people with batons may be another issue, since it's even more likely than rubber bullets or beanbags to cause permanent harm [though they can too], and at that point I think you have to ask whether the police officers felt they were in real danger from the mob, and that goes back to the whole question of lethal police force that kicked things off. Some folks say tear gas may be questionable too, and I'll opt out of discussing that for lack of knowledge. Suffice to say, all non-lethal force can become lethal in some circumstances, so the question becomes which ones best combine safety with efficacy when trying to break up a law-breaking mob.)
Monday night, after my work was done and Kimberly had gotten home from her appointments, we were both feeling a bit shell-shocked after two nights of helicopters, sirens, shouting, and tear gas. We both sort of wanted to go out for dinner to feel like we weren't jailed in our house, but we were a bit reluctant because of the mob violence that had burned through Berkeley the night before. However, as I've said before I opt not to let those *((*#$#es keep me from doing what I want to do. So we went out to Smart Alec's for dinner. We got lucky; that was the night that the protesters (and they did seem to be protesters that one night, with no violence reported) blocked I-80.
On the way home we decided to visit Cream, mainly to show our support, since we knew that one of their windows had been broken during the riots on Sunday night. While there we had really a great interaction with the owner. First, he seemed extremely touched when Kimberly told him that we'd visited his store specifically to show some support for his business. Second, he told us what had happened.
As the mob had approached Cream, one of the people in the mob had leapt up to try and protect the business. Other members of the mob then began to assault him like rabid dogs — something that has happened multiple times in the protest: it resulted in a man getting sent to the hospital after being hit in the head with a hammer about two blocks from our house earlier that Sunday, and it caused a kid to lose two teeth in the riots last night. Anywho, one of the Cream employees ran out to save this kid, dragging him back into the ice cream store and locking the door. So the rioters showed their displeasure by breaking Cream's window.
OK, I'll admit, in writing that it was hard not to use the word "protester". Part of that is because of the fuzzy line between a protest group and a mob. Part of it is that there doesn't seem to be a noun for a member of a mob. Mobster? Rioter? Maybe that expresses when the fuzzy line is crossed: when a protest is no longer a group of individuals, it's become a mob.
Despite that fuzziness, I remain very, very convinced that the peaceful protesters have a responsibility to react when their protest becomes a shield for violent and destructive criminal activities.
Perhaps you can excuse them on Saturday by saying that the UCB students at the heart of the protest were too stupidly naive to realize that their protest was going to be hijacked by violent criminals. I mean, anyone who lives in this area long-term knew that was going to happen (and if anything we're shocked by the one day of protest out of four, Monday, when violence didn't occur). But UCB students are a pretty self-absorbed bunch, and I say that having once been a pretty self-absorbed UCB student, so maybe they didn't know.
But once they knew, by Sunday, the day of Berkeley's worst rioting, it became their job to figure out how to protest without shielding criminals. They should have been working with the police to figure out peaceful ways to identify criminals and get them out of their crowds. They should have been expelling those looters and vandals, not protecting them. By failing to do so, they became accomplices to those crimes.
Sucks that protesters in this area have to worry about this. Sucks that the police haven't been able to figure out a better way to separate the wheat from the chaff. But when you're the organizers of the civil disobedience, it becomes your job to either deal with this problem or else to accept that you have willfully become a part of that culture of looting, arson, vandalism, and assault.
And that crosses the line from potentially progressive civil disobedience to meaningless criminality.
They are protesters when they're marching.
They're probably protesters when they're blocking highways and locking up BART. It seems to piss people off as much as the looting, but this sort of criminality-of-inconvenience is much more a part of the country's history of civil disobedience. Mind you, it's not without consequences: Monday's blocking of the highway apparently caused one woman to give birth on the asphalt and could easily have killed two men, one who had a heart attack and another who had a stroke, neither of which could get off the highway.
Anywho.
They're definitely not protesters when they're smashing windows, stealing liquor and dog food, and setting fire to recycling bins. They're criminals. They're vandals, looters, and arsonists. And, there's no longer a protest. It's become a riot.
Words matter.
Here's another fun word fact. Police force is not by definition excessive. If you're breaking the law, you can expect the police to try and stop you, and if you keep breaking the law, you can expect force to be applied to make you stop. That's sort of what we pay the police to do.
I suspect most people would agree that there was excessive force in the cases that are theoretically being demonstrated against — that young black males regularly face excessive harassment and excessive force from police officers all across this nation. That's a problem. A big problem. It's worth protesting against.
However, that doesn't mean that you necessarily faced excessive force if you got tear gassed or hit by a rubber bullet or a bean bag when you were part of a mob that the police had already asked nicely to disperse because of illegal actions. Not even if you were one of the peaceful members of that unruly mob. Not even if you were a journalist who decided to embed himself in that unruly mob.
No, it means that you're paying the price that you opted to pay when you decided to engage in Civil Disobedience. Just like Thoreau opted to go to jail. Maybe it's an honorable wound that you've taken, or maybe you were a masked coward who wanted a bottle of vodka. In any case, it's what should be expected when you decided to break the law and then decided to keep doing it when asked to stop. I mean, what were the officers of the law supposed to do? Stand by and watch?
(Now hitting people with batons may be another issue, since it's even more likely than rubber bullets or beanbags to cause permanent harm [though they can too], and at that point I think you have to ask whether the police officers felt they were in real danger from the mob, and that goes back to the whole question of lethal police force that kicked things off. Some folks say tear gas may be questionable too, and I'll opt out of discussing that for lack of knowledge. Suffice to say, all non-lethal force can become lethal in some circumstances, so the question becomes which ones best combine safety with efficacy when trying to break up a law-breaking mob.)
Monday night, after my work was done and Kimberly had gotten home from her appointments, we were both feeling a bit shell-shocked after two nights of helicopters, sirens, shouting, and tear gas. We both sort of wanted to go out for dinner to feel like we weren't jailed in our house, but we were a bit reluctant because of the mob violence that had burned through Berkeley the night before. However, as I've said before I opt not to let those *((*#$#es keep me from doing what I want to do. So we went out to Smart Alec's for dinner. We got lucky; that was the night that the protesters (and they did seem to be protesters that one night, with no violence reported) blocked I-80.
On the way home we decided to visit Cream, mainly to show our support, since we knew that one of their windows had been broken during the riots on Sunday night. While there we had really a great interaction with the owner. First, he seemed extremely touched when Kimberly told him that we'd visited his store specifically to show some support for his business. Second, he told us what had happened.
As the mob had approached Cream, one of the people in the mob had leapt up to try and protect the business. Other members of the mob then began to assault him like rabid dogs — something that has happened multiple times in the protest: it resulted in a man getting sent to the hospital after being hit in the head with a hammer about two blocks from our house earlier that Sunday, and it caused a kid to lose two teeth in the riots last night. Anywho, one of the Cream employees ran out to save this kid, dragging him back into the ice cream store and locking the door. So the rioters showed their displeasure by breaking Cream's window.
OK, I'll admit, in writing that it was hard not to use the word "protester". Part of that is because of the fuzzy line between a protest group and a mob. Part of it is that there doesn't seem to be a noun for a member of a mob. Mobster? Rioter? Maybe that expresses when the fuzzy line is crossed: when a protest is no longer a group of individuals, it's become a mob.
Despite that fuzziness, I remain very, very convinced that the peaceful protesters have a responsibility to react when their protest becomes a shield for violent and destructive criminal activities.
Perhaps you can excuse them on Saturday by saying that the UCB students at the heart of the protest were too stupidly naive to realize that their protest was going to be hijacked by violent criminals. I mean, anyone who lives in this area long-term knew that was going to happen (and if anything we're shocked by the one day of protest out of four, Monday, when violence didn't occur). But UCB students are a pretty self-absorbed bunch, and I say that having once been a pretty self-absorbed UCB student, so maybe they didn't know.
But once they knew, by Sunday, the day of Berkeley's worst rioting, it became their job to figure out how to protest without shielding criminals. They should have been working with the police to figure out peaceful ways to identify criminals and get them out of their crowds. They should have been expelling those looters and vandals, not protecting them. By failing to do so, they became accomplices to those crimes.
Sucks that protesters in this area have to worry about this. Sucks that the police haven't been able to figure out a better way to separate the wheat from the chaff. But when you're the organizers of the civil disobedience, it becomes your job to either deal with this problem or else to accept that you have willfully become a part of that culture of looting, arson, vandalism, and assault.
And that crosses the line from potentially progressive civil disobedience to meaningless criminality.