trickybeck wrote:
Eric Garner was exercising civil disobedience. Not violence.
He was resisting arrest. I'm not sure what hair you think you're splitting here.
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He was "resisting arrest" only in the same sense that protesters do when police arrest them for blocking traffic and they hold their arms stiff instead of putting them behind their back.
He was resisting arrest in the same manner that most people resist arrest. Again, what's your point? People refuse to allow the cops to arrest them. Eventually, it ends out with a physical struggle. Pretty much every single time.
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It's crazy that cops respond to this with the same urgency and violence that they do to an armed felon. Why not just talk to the guy for 15 minutes? Tell him "I'm going to put these handcuffs on you" and them keep talking to him until he calms down. He'll relent eventually.
It's cute that you think this. What will happen is that they'll sit and talk to him, and then talk some more, and then some more. Eventually, they'll go to put the cuffs on him and he'll do exactly what he did here. Only it'll happen 15 or 20 or 30 minutes later.
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He wasn't being violent, wasn't making threats, wasn't running away. But to cops, any pushback against their authority is tantamount to assaulting them.
Do you think that the officers really want to physically tangle with a large person like that? Really? That's... insane. They do it because they are required to do it. You or I can just walk away from the guy and let it go. The cops are the ones paid to do precisely what they did. It's a sucky job, but someone has to do it. And while I agree that we should endeavor to ensure that our police are using the best and safest techniques possible, I also think we need to have some kind of reasonable balance between safety and the need to resolve conflicts like this.
Unfortunately, what we see happen time and again is that someone escalates an encounter with the police to the point where they must use physical force and then the community cries foul that the police used "unnecessary force". Um... define necessary then. The police generally give people they encounter every reasonable opportunity to avoid a violent encounter. I think what you are labeling as "any pushback" I'd label as "ridiculous and intentionally antagonistic pushback".