I don't want to live on this planet anymore

[Reincarnate]

Originally Posted by hi19hi19

I guess we just have different expectations of the police- I've always thought that in any situation a policeman should be able to keep his wits about him. It's his job.
I guess I get this perspective because my brother was an officer for a while. And any time he was talking about a particularly shitty case he had to deal with he always talked about how hard it was to keep his cool, but he would mention how during training they CONSTANTLY drilled the fact he had to remain civil, and he would just have to mentally endure. Seeing what my brother went through (I'd like to think he was a "good cop") to stay calm in situations not unlike this protest makes me disappointed to see a high ranking officer lose his shit like we can see clearly in this video. Like I said, just different expectations- I don't necessarily disagree with anything you've said.

And Crashfan3's post on the previous page was really well thought out too.

Also I'm still amused by people who keep citing the "someone somewhere has it worse" argument, as if that magically makes what happened here acceptable.

They should, but we can say that about any job. Act like a dick to the waitresses/chefs, and you can be sure that it'll come back to haunt you at some point.

Not every cop out there is a good cop. Like most things, they come in distributions. I don't disagree with you on principle -- I just don't think it's a realistic expectation.

There are plenty of great cops out there, but some people slip through the cracks and become cops because they like to occasionally abuse power. There's no 100% perfect incentive process/system of due diligence... if this were true, there'd be nothing here to protest in the first place.

Originally Posted by Artic_counter

Like a lot of people said; Just because someone as it worse doesn't make the thing in question more acceptable. Also, while I do agree about what Rubix said on the protest in itself, I do not think stress and emotions is enough of a reason to brutalize people.

Again, disclaimer: I'm not justifying police brutality. But as someone who saw the protest firsthand, I don't think the level of force used was unreasonable. Some of those protesters were *really* obnoxious and it doesn't surprise me that the chaos led to a few people getting clocked around/sprayed a bit. People would just not get it through their heads that they *were not allowed to block traffic* and that yes, they had a right to be on public property, but they were not really following the sort of guidelines you'd expect from a "peaceful protest." Policemen *should* be able to keep their cool, but what was happening was that being aggressively assertive was oftentimes not enough. Douchebag protestors would just push past the officers and go block traffic some more. Eventually they had to escalate the force a bit.