I warned you that someday there would be a pop quiz to see if you've been paying attention to me, and today's the day. Please explain what's wrong with this infographic:
The key result here is that 38% of protests turn violent if police are present, while only 7% turn violent if police stay away. It's the police who cause the violence!
It wouldn't surprise me if this is often true. But this statistic is meaningless. Police are obviously more likely to show up at protests that pose a high chance of danger in the first place. If you want the formal academic explanation, here it is:
Tests of dominant explanations of police presence using logistic regression analysis indicate that the best predictor of police presence at a protest event was how threatening the event was—police attended larger protest events and those that used confrontational tactics.
Confrontational events are the most likely to have a police presence, and confrontational events are also the most likely to become, uh, confrontational. That's all that's going on here.
Sudden deaths investigated by a coroner are more likely to be the result of foul play than sudden deaths certified by a doctor as arising from natural causes. I don't need no graphic to tell me that coroners are responsible for most murders.
That's not what's being listed here. The coroner wasn't there in the first place.
The 1990s urban kid attends a suburban high school bit was a nice touch though, if a little dated.
Your evidence doesn't change what we see with our eyes, which is police, wilding-out like gangbangers, on innocent civilians. Even on pretty young white girls, as it turns out (we saw that in the 2020 Floyd protests, live on TV!) Regardless of whether protests turn violent or not, those police need to prosecuted and sent to prison. And they're not are they?\
Instead their Major buy's 'em a case of Bud for the barbecue afterwards.
In the Bay Area, the other thing that goes with violence is: bringing in officers from outside the city.
The other one is how the police are dispersed - police that are confrontational are met with protests that are confrontational.
Here on Santa Cruz, the police have moved to make the protest hosts manage traffic or be liable for traffic problems - while the police spread out in the blocks behind the protest, where hangers-on are more likely to do damage. It's almost always after the protestors's attention is elsewhere.
Fox News also seems to only show up at violent protests. Imagine that.
It's starting to remind me of the Viet Nam years. Let's hope guys like Johnson don't push all this to the Kent State level.
Tom Cotton is agitating for National Guard units being sent to put down protests and clear the campuses. Perhaps he's not big on US history. Or he is.
I get the bigger point: correlation does not equal causation. But… can we trust the judgment of those who proactively determine how threatening an event will be. What was more threatening, January 6 or a random BLM protest from the summer of 2020? The threat judgers are not infallible, and they tend to be influenced by their existing biases.
Correction: correlation does potentially but not necessarily equal causation, the default "null hypothesis" assumes that correlation does not equal causation, an "explanatory hypothesis" assumes that correlation does equal causation, and the null hypothesis is confirmed UNLESS the explanatory hypothesis is conclusively (beyond a reasonable doubt) confirmed.
My potentially erroneous but testable hypothesis is that police behavior is sometime a contributor to violence. An extreme example is freedom summer (1964).
At the other end of the spectrum, put half a million people in a farmer's field for a three-day music festival with virtually zero planning because of a last minute venue change, put Wavy Gravy's "Please Force" in charge of security, and you get virtually no violence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavy_Gravy
Why are firemen present virtually every time a house burns down?
Twitter post with that image has (as of this writing) 24K views, 233 likes, and 1 comment - which agrees with poster's "Aggressive law enforcement" is why protests turn violent.
This analogy clearly doesnt work, firefighters are not called out to a house in advance to control the risk of fire.
But if they were and we saw the rate of house fires was dramatically higher only at the homes being protected by the fire dept......that would certainly be suspicious and worth noting.
Bad analogies that turn the context on its head are always painful to read.
So if there is a group of Nazis marching for white supremacy and Antifa decides to have a counter march the police shouldn’t be there because their presence might spark violence?
While I may have missed it, I dont believe that anyone is making that argument. But please go ahead and beat up that strawman if it suits you.
Also, firefighters are called out in advance to control the risk of fire. They do things like controlled burns, get homeowners to clear brush that’s too close to their house, install smoke alarms, and various other things to mitigate the risk of fire. If there is a fire approaching a group of houses the fire department will get there before it reaches the houses and attempt to control it so the homes don’t burn.
Yes, and it's considered a failure if a fire breaks out while firefighters are there. And it does happen that back fires or controlled burns get out of hand - there's a fire chief who's under charges in Oregon right now for that.
Of course, the charges are bullshit, not based upon any liability or mistakes found - but there are police found to have violated process at many of these protests.
Even in your example the firefighters are called out to provide protection only after the fire has started and is presenting a risk to the other homes.
Let the bad analogy die. Or make it worse I suppose.
No one stated that, but it makes a good strawman. However, since you brought it up, please explain how they defused the situation, helped, or did anything of value in Charlottesville.
“CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — There was nothing haphazard about the violence that erupted today in this bucolic town in Virginia’s heartland. At about 10 a.m. today, at one of countless such confrontations, an angry mob of white supremacists formed a battle line across from a group of counter-protesters, many of them older and gray-haired, who had gathered near a church parking lot. On command from their leader, the young men charged and pummeled their ideological foes with abandon. One woman was hurled to the pavement, and the blood from her bruised head was instantly visible.
Standing nearby, an assortment of Virginia State Police troopers and Charlottesville police wearing protective gear watched silently from behind an array of metal barricades — and did nothing.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/police-stood-by-as-mayhem-mounted-in-charlottesville
They were only there to earn OT. Heck, they probably were there to facilitate the white supremacists having the upper hand from other reporting I have read.
One does not need a psych major to know that when attention is pointed your way you react differently. In sporting events, we see the crowd goes nut when the camera is pointed their way, you really didn’t think they were all yelling like raging lunatics during the whole festivity. Same here, the presence of police of course stirs up action. Think of Fox News and their treatment of news and how it affects the whole industry. Emotive response is a base human trait and the presence of cops would trigger such on young adults who are already in a demonstration mode. How one handles such situations really is key.
Out of control New York University protesters swarmed and berated an NYPD chief and his officers – calling them “f–king fascists” – after they cuffed one of the demonstrators at an anti-Israel rally, wild new video shows.
The viral video, shared on X, shows NYPD Assistant Chief James McCarthy and his officers being chased and surrounded by protestors on Monday night while trying to get inside the NYU Catholic Center after arresting one of them.
“F–k you! F–k you, pigs,” the crowd could be heard shouting as they harassed the officers and demanded they release the woman in custody.
😂
NY Post
https://nypost.com/2024/04/25/us-news/nypd-chief-swarmed-by-anti-israel-protesters-and-berated-while-seeking-shelter-in-nyu-building/
😂😂
Familiar with the NY Post?
I watched the video and it doesn't seem particularly outrageous. A girl is arrested and the other protesters are angry and yell at the police about it. No violence, no physically blocking them, nothing like that. The cops showed restraint and the protesters did not do anything other than yell and occasionally swear at them, which is not nice but within bounds I think.
I disagree with the protesters myself but I don't think that they were particularly out of bounds here.
“A girl is arrested and the other protesters are angry and yell at the police about it. No violence, no physically blocking them, nothing like that.” -Tango
No silence, no peace or non-silence is violence are the new mantras and slogans of the thoughtful right.
“The other night I watched a dad coming from the protest with his little girl, giving a good hard few final snaps on the drum he was carrying, nodding at her in crisp salute, percussing his perspective into her little mind. This is not peaceful.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/opinion/columbia-protests-israel.html
Threatening or confrontational to who?
*Family Guy Skin Color Chart Meme*
I doubt that the evidence exists for people to make sound systematic claims on what caused some protests to become violent and some not. It would require knowledge of activities at a very small scale like "what caused the initial exchange of blows between that group of protesters and the police" which are typically ambiguous, subject to point-of-view disagreements, and unrecorded.
So in many ways, we all are just using anecdotes based on a few news reports and claims by various people who often have an interest in putting forward one point of view.
Back in my younger days, I did some protesting. Too many idiots around me to ever do it again. Or just people who are there for the adrenaline rush. No thanks.
FWIW, the pie chart lower left is not depicting 38 percent, either. More like 28 percent.
Good catch! And the source of this crappy infographic? Ah—somebody on Twitter. Of course.
Good observation!
I was with Kevin until the last sentence. "That's all that's going on here." Nah, *this statistic* doesn't show that a police presence triggers a response. But it may well be that a strong police response also triggers violence. There's no proof here that it does, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Solid reasoning.
This is one of those disappointing articles where Kevin decides to resort to glib wordplay instead of observing what happens in reality. In the overwhelming majority of demonstrations that go bad, it is the police who initiate violence and who sustain violence. Most often, the people who try to defuse the situation are the first people clubbed and arrested.
Exactly.
At the protest in Austin, the local Fox affiliate is reporting their reporter was swept up in the arrests.
It's this stuff that should prove the police in these actions often foment the violence.
Well... in addition to the items already mentioned, such as the botched pie chart for protests with police presence:
23,000 is an astonishingly round figure for protests from 1960 to 1999. Another unexpectedly round figure is that there would be 16,300 non-violent, no-police protests.
Also of interest is the fine print, saying this is something from 2020, but using data ending 20 years earlier. Nearly a generation's-worth of protests not included.
I cannot say I have dug deeply into the link(s), so probably not deeply enough, but I haven't found a definition of what constitutes a protest.
It was 23,593 protests. The text stated 23k, but the numbers added up to 23.6k.
who gets to determine " how threatening the event was"?
"Events in which subordinate groups and social movement organizations participated were also more likely to draw police action."
I think we're at a point where the police and the media are going to be as responsible for what happens on college campuses -- and what you think happens -- as anything the students do themselves.
I was just on a UC campus that Politico reported was "in turmoil." Which sounds pretty bad. What I observed was a small, peaceful protest in one little spot on a campus of more than a thousand acres. The protest went on without incident, and without getting much attention, honestly, from the hundreds if not thousands of students who passed by. If there was turmoil on that campus, it was very well hidden, and if turmoil is not visible, why describe the campus that way?
Because "just another day on campus" is not news and "campus in turmoil" is.
That's not to say there are absolutely no incidents on campuses worth reporting, but my guess is that "the turmoil" is greatly exaggerated.
One way to give the reports of turmoil more credibility is to create turmoil where none exists. How do you do that? The easiest way is to bring in the cops and start making arrests. Why do you think Republicans like Johnson, Cotton, an Hawley are for calling in the National Guard, and Abbott called in the state troopers in Texas? No, it's not to establish order. It's to create incidents that will play on television and right-wing media will replay every hour from now until the election. They WANT turmoil. If you think they are driven by concerns about antisemitism, smarten up. Conservatives are at war with higher education, and always have been. That's one reason why the House has been hauling in (mostly women) college presidents. So far they have two resignations, and they want more. The prexy at Columbia knew the one thing she couldn't do is be seen as soft on antisemitism. So she calls in the NYPD and they make arrests. There! Little good it did her. There was the little weasel Mike Johnson yesterday speaking at Columbia and demanding her resignation.
The way cops create turmoil hasn't changed much over the years. They come in force and often arrest people at the slightest (or without any) provocation. That's how it was on many weekends in my college days. It wasn't in the local news, let alone national news, at the time. But it was part of the college experience.
It certainly happened during the George Floyd protests. A poll in 2020 showed 47% of people believed the majority of the protests were violent. An analysis published in the Washington Post showed that 93%-to-96% of the protests were in fact nonviolent, and where there was violence, most of the time it was initiated by the police themselves.
The public tends to give cops the benefit of the doubt. So when there are arrests, the cops are doing their job. If there is violence, all the more reason the cops needed to show up.
The reality is something different.
The GOP pressure to amp up police presence is designed to spark an incident, not quell it. All they need are a few examples of students getting out of hand, even if they're within their rights or just protecting themselves, and pretty soon half the country will be bemoaning the turmoil on campus and those terrible kids who the cops gave just what they deserved.
This is the kind of depth I read the comments here for ^-^
Great overview of the situation as it will probably develop.
If my math is correct, 14.8% of the protests turned violent, which is higher than the Black Lives Matter protests. Worth noting since Fox News has probably convinced a lot of people that the BLM protests were exceptionally violent.