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Pastimes : No to WTO! Seattle 1999
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To: PMS Witch who wrote (138)12/6/1999 11:40:00 AM
From: The Philosopher  Read Replies (1) of 187
 
Wise people would assess the situation and
realize that with the number of people involved, NO human, police or otherwise, would
be able to determine with any accuracy an appropriate response to their presence and
that given the overall behaviour of the crowd and the spirit of the gathering
(confrontational) the police would treat everyone as a threat and respond with force.

You sound very much like the police in Birmingham and Selma who set fire hoses and police dogs on the civil rights marchers. Their excuse was that they were faced with a confrontational gathering, and treated everyone as a threat and responded with force.

The job of the police is to differentiate. It is hard to believe how a responsible police officer could look at a medic giving attention to a person lying on the ground and determine that the medic was a threat who needed to be gassed. If police can't make these distinctions, they shouldn't be out there taking the public's money.

Our country in the past few decades has seen a number of civilian-police (used broadly) conflicts in which the police forces have gotten out of hand. The civil rights marches and demonstrations had numerous examples. Kent State. Chicago, 1968. Ruby Ridge. Waco. Now Seattle. These are, unfortunately, not isolated examples, but part of a pattern in which law enforcement officers go overboard, themselves becoming subject at times to a mob rule mentality, basically without accountability.

It is another example of the truth of the adage: Power corrupts.
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