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Alianora La Canta:

--- Quote from: Andy B on June 23, 2020, 04:14:05 AM ---I look at the TV and see the "Black lives matter" demonstrations around the world and the violence that is going with it and become confused as to why is a Frenchman/Brit/Spaniard/Italian (the list goes on) are attacking cops in their own country because of what a cop/cops have done in the US?

--- End quote ---

Can't speak for Spain, but France and the UK started because of police violence that pre-dated the George Floyd murder, that was simply waiting for something to provide enough unity for the protest to happen and overcome their fear of what happened in the last set of protests in France and the UK. France is reeling from last year's protests, which from what I gather black people got the worst of it. The UK's black population has a lot of repressed anger from the 2011 riots.

Even then, it might not have got so bad had the police not been caught on camera doing deliberate kettling (to break social distancing, thus perceived as a deliberate attack against protestors) and unprovoked direct assaults (including at least one unprovoked neck lift) against black people in London demonstrations. Other forms of police brutality have also contributed. In the UK, mistreatment in custody and COVID-19 mishandling have been at issue (non-white people have not only been far more likely to die of COVID-19, but appear to have been deliberately targeted for fines due to actions for which white people have merely received an unofficial warning or been told was legal). In France, immigration woes and semi-open racist conduct towards the African and Arab communities have been hotly debated. Both have also had problems with:

- poor mechanisms to correct police brutality
- disproportionate imprisonment of minorities
- unequal sentencing practises (both when the minority member is the convicted and when they are the victim)
- discriminatory use of stop-search powers and police being sent to the wrong address (the latter particularly jarring as that was part of how Breonna Taylor got killed - the police were supposed to raid a house 10 miles away but raided the house she was in by mistake).

In both cases, "we are seeing behaviour like that in our own police, and only social opprobium discourages them from being exactly like their American counterparts, so let's make that opprobium as obvious as possible" is the reason they have joined in so powerfully with the protests. That, and lots of them have lost/paused their jobs due to COVID-19 and have little else to do. The latter is the only reason I can think of for nearly 10% of Barnsley joining a Black Lives Matter protest despite being almost completely white. (My hometown, similarly sized and also similarly white, had a protest too - beautifully socially distanced and 50% mask-wearing. As you'd expect from a protest of 6 people).

Italy's situation is different. There's a lot of repressed anger, and it's erupting into protests about pretty much everything. There are also pro-fascist, anti-fascist and the near-annual "just change the government" protests going on, with the Black Lives Matter protests being used as a political football by all three sides. Black Lives Matter there is providing an outlet for general anger by people who don't identify as particularly political - or don't want to identify as political, or are actually fascist but consider the pro-fascist demonstrations too dangerous (among other things, they're associated with anti-mask and anti-vaccination propaganda, even though the majority of pro-fascists don't believe in either as national policy).

While some Italian Black Lives Matter marchers actually believe in the things Black Lives Matter is about (and indeed some of the marchers are black), a lot are there for reasons that aren't really related to the movement. For the record, Italy definitely has issues with police racism and near-impossibility of formally protesting police maltreatment, but so far, I've not seen any reports of the police responding to the Italian protests with violence, let alone the unprovoked variety.

(I'm also going to add that the Bristol statue which sparked the statue removal campaign had had a campaign for its removal for over a decade, which the council had ignored. Part of the anger about that one was about locals having their wishes ignored. If the council had wanted to put a plaque near it for education, it had over a decade to do it. That no such plaque or similar device ever appeared or was even proposed, indicates that education was never part of the goal of that statue. It was only for glorification of its subject and what it stood for (which to the eyes of pretty much every Bristolian with an opinion who was not on the council, means "slavery". The council claimed it was because of the philantropy in his will, but there's plenty of precedent for people being dishonoured when the money enabing such philantropy turned out to be ill-gotten, and the slaver boats were never a secret...)

This is also why the other statues aren't (or mostly aren't) getting "education plaques" or the like - because the people who are protesting them know that few people will read them and that most people, especially those most in need of the education, will simply assume the statue is there for celebratory reasons because that was why it was built).

cosworth151:
The Breonna Taylor incident was made even worse because the police used something called a "no knock warrant." The police don't even announce who they are. They just smash down the door & storm in.

Another disturbing trend we have here in the States is the militarization of the police. It is federal government policy to make surplus heavy military equipment available to law enforcement at little or no cost. Here in Lancaster law enforcement has two army surplus armored personnel carriers. One for the Lancaster P.D. & one for the Fairfield County Sheriff. Nobody seems to know why we need them. The local joke is that it's in case we get invaded by Rockbridge, a tiny village right across the line in Hocking County.

John S:
Don't really see the problem with 'No-knock' warrants per se, we've had them for years in the UK. Especially necessary if trying to catch drug dealing activity, no chance of suspects flushing or disposing of substances when surprised early in the morning.

The issue with 'No knock' raids, if there is one, must lay with the judicial system not having robust enough checks & balances protocols when giving permission for such actions.

Mind you in the main we don't have loaded weapons in our homes over here, and the police are usually unarmed when carrying out the majority of dawn raids.   

cosworth151:
The difference is that in most places over here, smashing into someone's home unannounced is an almost sure way to get shot by the residents of the home. That was the case here. They smashed into the apartment after midnight and her boyfriend understandably opened up on them.

lkjohnson1950:
The other issue with the Taylor case was that the guy they were looking for was already in custody and the raiding group was not informed.

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