De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer
We should expect police to us less use violence and improve their crowd management and deescalation skills.  The increasing militarization of police is a trend that must be reversed.  However, we should not neglect the other side of the equation either.  This article is, in large part, about just that.<p>The article points out that many protests in the U.S. went smoothly through the practice of police and protest organizers meeting and jointly managing protests, but that this practice fell into disuse after the 1999 Seattle WTO meeting in which protesters violated the negotiated terms and police responded with violence.<p>While some recent (and ongoing) protests have turned violent, many didn&#x27;t.  In the coming months we&#x27;ll have time to do a postmortem.  I strongly suspect spontaneous protests without organization will be found to have the most potential for violence, while those with organizers committed to self-policing and, ideally, cooperating with police will be found to have fared much better.<p>Individual people may be intelligent and responsible, but crowds have their own rules of behaviour and need to be managed.  Protests are more dangerous when unplanned or when their organizers give no thought to self-policing.<p>There will always be organizers who <i>want</i> violence because it reliably brings press coverage and attention to their protests, but social media is also creating new problems.  Coordinating a large number of people to show up at the same time and place used to take considerable planning and effort.  When you have to work <i>hard</i> just to get the even to happen, why wouldn&#x27;t you plan how it will unfold as well?  Now a couple of tweets or posts on the right reddit subs will suffice.  How can police meet with the organizer of a protest when it&#x27;s really just some dude who had a lot of social media followers and might not even bother showing up himself?