Police Are Determined to Prove Protesters' Point

From Esquire

The United States of America is in many ways an insane country. Amid a worldwide pandemic, one promising drug to treat the disease at its center may cost more than $3,000 for a patient on a typical private health-insurance plan. In St. Louis, one couple saw protesters marching outside their home—which appeared to be a museum of Brooks Brothers artifacts—and stormed out onto their porch waving guns around haphazardly. The president of this country shared the video of their exploits, one day after he approvingly shared a video of one his supporters yelling "white power." (His spokesman claimed he hadn't seen that part, which would mean he really didn't watch the video before sharing it with his 80 million followers.) And then there are the cops.

If you were accused of abusing the power vested in you by the public, forsaking your foremost obligations to keep the peace and safeguard the rights of citizens, how would you react? If you were accused of escalating situations towards violence on a systemic basis, particularly when people of color are involved, how would you conduct yourself in the immediate aftermath? Personally, I would not go out of my way to crack down, often violently, on people exercising their First Amendment rights to speech and peaceful assembly. But I guess I'm not an officer of the peace.

This is a protest in Aurora, Colorado, demanding justice for Elijah McClain, an unarmed 23-year-old Black man who died last year after an encounter with Aurora police while walking home from a convenience store. McClain was, by all accounts, a gentle soul, not that that should have any bearing on whether police had reason to behave as they did. He taught himself to play the violin and liked to serenade stray cats, believing it soothed them. So demonstrators organized a violin vigil, where a group of musicians played before a protest crowd that included kids and families in Aurora's City Center Park.

And then Aurora police stormed the park dressed for Fallujah and pepper sprayed people.

The first question to ask is why police needed to wear riot gear at all. They couldn't have kept the peace, and safeguarded these folks' right to peaceful assembly, in normal uniforms? That would imply that they were interested in prioritizing these citizens' rights over their own prerogatives, which apparently include "shutting these people up" and "getting them out of here." A police spokesperson claimed there were a small group of protesters "arming themselves with rocks and sticks" and "throwing water bottles at the officers," but provided no evidence, and we know we cannot just take their word for it. They said they told protesters to move to a parking lot, but was breaking up this gathering justifiable even if their claims about a few people are true? Until they do produce some evidence that it was a dangerous situation, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the Aurora police believe that if they don't like what you're saying, it's their right to just declare your assembly unlawful and silence you.

Even if there was some small group of agitators, this represents a complete failure of policing on every level. Unnecessary escalation, introduction of violence, failure to prioritize constitutional rights. They could have dealt with the mythical Small Group without running roughshod over everybody else. It's also just profoundly ill-advised as a public-relations exercise. It's not the first time in recent weeks that a police force has seemed determined to make protesters' point for them. In their ridiculously overwrought gear, they also provide a stunning advertisement for American authoritarianism while doing so.

Anyway, here's the scene that played out soon after.

There is beauty in the madness. But if police continue on this way, greeting legitimate expressions of dissent and demands for a redress of grievances with militant force, they will make it harder for municipalities across the country to chart a path that accommodates police prerogatives while reforming departments to meet protesters' demands. This kind of behavior lends credence to the idea that these departments cannot be reformed, that they no longer have any grasp of their legitimate role as public servants, paid by taxpayers. I mean, you pepper sprayed the violin vigil.

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