Riley24

​And you're allowed to voice that opinion because of the First Amendment, the same Amendment that the peaceful protesters that put up the memorial were exercising. This is how freedom works.

​But THEY are not the ones burning police cars. THEY are not the ones lighting fires or looting. THEY are exercising the same exact constitutional right that THESE people are:

​But there was protesting (some peaceful, some not) all across the city. Its still unacceptable, under nearly any circumstance, to bring an APC and a small army of cops to a group of people exercising their right to assemble. Standing on the sidewalk with a sign is not a crime, its a constitutional right. And that's not what happened on the first night. What happened on the first night was a K-9 officer allowed his dog to urinate on a memorial for Michael Brown, and police vehicles crushed the memorial a short while later. The looting happened the next night. If you're going to go into specifics of the situation, please make sure you get the timeline right. Source: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/08/ferguson-st-louis-police-tactics-dogs-michael-brown The overall problem here, and why this policy is being put in place, is because as we found out, police departments aren't well trained enough to know how to handle these types of situations without completely destroying their relationship with the community the protect. There is a time for gear like this, and there is a time for the police to be violent, they just need to be better at knowing when that time is.

​Here is just one image, pulled from twitter, of heavily armed police in camouflage that brought an armed vehicle to a peaceful protest. A more appropriate response would have been a few patrol officers standing next to their cars

​Because gear-nuts think gear is cool. There's no reason for cops to be in camouflage with assault rifles on the back of an armored vehicle when responding to a protest, but boys that are given toys are going to want to play with them. And now they are butthurt because the president is trying to take away some of their toys.

They're being phased out, but they're still very common. More so with yellow cabs than NYPD cruisers.

Video games. Everyone told me I would grow out of it....still haven't.

Oh boy. Our country has literally been built upon civil disobedience. Literally nobody is justifying harming police or destroying property, I don't know how you got that impression. Sure, some young and dumb kids might be running around saying "f*** the police", but they don't represent the entire movement.

​So you don't support civil disobedience, ever? Under any circumstance?

​Typically what happens in situations like these is that the peaceful protesters are shouting and screaming at police, and the police begin detaining people, often violently, which fuels the flames even more and the situation spirals further out of control.

​But that doesn't the police should escalate the situation with tear gas and batons, because as we've seen, when they do that it turns into a riot. People that are peacfully protesting don't just all of a sudden say "Hey, why don't we light a car on fire?"

​That's just not true. There have been plenty of instances of militarized police assaulting journalists and peaceful protests, and even sending in undercover officers to incite violence, although the last part is hard to prove definitively. The Civil Rights movement practiced civil disobedience, and so are the current peaceful protesters.

The right to assemble is a fundamental constitutional right we are as Americans. You don't get to pick and choose who gets to protest based on whether or not you agree with them. I doubt you would support violent intervention of a peaceful protest in favor of the cops. But by your logic, if all riots started as protests, we should be making sure nobody protests ever. It is unconstitutional and un-American to shut down a peaceful protest, more specifically one that challenges the government. Police have to wait until violence erupts before intervening, that's just how our country works.

​Why are you looking at it in such a broad scope? If there is a peaceful protest occurring, and police respond to it with tanks and tear gas and disperse the crowd, that is unconstitutional.

​Approval rating =/= popularity of policies. I would be shocked if this policy was unpopular among American voters.

​Its just that you've brought up his approval rating multiple times in this thread...I was curious if that was relevant.

​Putting aside the entire discussion we could have on approval ratings, how is this relevant to this thread?

And you think that this new policy (that most Americans probably haven't heard of) is responsible for a 2% decrease in approval? And Obama's approval rating is fairly standard, unless you have anything that shows otherwise..?

​Well he's not running again...and approval ratings go up and down. Its a silly point to bring into this thread.

​He was also elected for president twice. So that's something.

Nothing. I'm not talking about those protests. I'm talking about the peaceful protests. The huge amount of peaceful protests that go unreported.

This isn't directed at patrol officers, this is in response to the DHS policy that retired military equipment and vehicles to local police departments. There are small southern towns that have Armored Personnel Carriers, think about that. This is in response to the militarized police we saw dispersing protests in Ferguson and Baltimore. People don't want to see tanks and snipers at peaceful protests. Obviously there's a time to escalate the situation, but departments across the country have shown that they don't know when that time is. Instead, they've adopted the "boy with a new toy" policy. When a boy has a new toy, he can't wait to play with it. Listen, I defended militarized police after the Boston Bombings, because there's a time and place for everything. If a local department can't answer the question "why do you need tanks and explosives?", then they shouldn't have them. That's just common sense.