Using race as an excuse to trigger a street war..

… to steal Pringles and Arizona Tea

… and to steal toilet paper

and more toilet paper

I’m sure everything they are doing must be making public opinion towards them all the better.

http://nypost.com/2015/04/27/at-least-7-cops-injured-as-riots-break-out-in-baltimore/

Still better than using race as an excuse to execute unarmed men.

thats not even the good iced tea

+1

https://www.facebook.com/COEDMagazine/videos/vb.112025945495938/949662471732277/?type=2&theater

Hope he looted the high quality, really soft 3 ply.

Never heard of 3-ply. Better not leak that to my wife, or we will go broke supplying her with high dollar TP.

http://savingtherepublic.com/blog/2015/04/baltimore-mayor-we-gave-those-who-wished-to-destroy-space-to-do-that/

Where does it say that they are using race to justify criminal behavior? It just looks like a bunch of loser jerks who would have done the same without the racial context.

What’s going on with the racial thing on the intrawebz ?

Is it really? There’s no excuse for Freddie Gray’s death, but there is also no excuse for burning down other people’s property, looting, assaulting police officers and national guardsmen, etc. Perhaps the riots should move to your neighborhood and they should burn down your house. Would that still be a better idea?

To me there’s a point where rioting may serve a purpose. They’re trying to effect major introspection and change in a bureaucracy that is known for neither. Sometimes you need to force a sense of urgency to the discussion.

The statistics on this are nearly as appalling as the anecdotal evidence. People are trying to oversimplify this into either an issue of police oppression or race and in my mind it’s an entwined issue of both.

Peaceful protest is often touted as the best and only agent for change but for every MLK and Ghandi there’s a complete failure of peaceful protest that is widely ignored. The peaceful protest failed in Nazi Germany, pre-revolution France and Spain, and for 200 years under the US system of open slavery. All of which were halted with non-peaceful means. There is in my mind a time and place and degree to everything in a complex world. To this day everyone remembers the name Rodney King for a reason.

The U.S. Ended both the civil war (Sherman) and WWII (Hiroshima) with what can only be described as celebrated war crimes. History is often a matter of perspective and if I were a black man in 2015 I can’t say I wouldn’t be frustrated to the same point of action.

The change that needs to occur is massive, yet the mayor of Baltimore spent the last two months focusing discussion on the prohibitive cost of data storage for body cams. Maybe a desperate time calls for desperate measures because I’m still not sure white people are getting the message.

Probably the most telling part is that when the first CVS got looted it was all over every news channel but the first time I heard about Freddie Gray initially because I googled it. To white people apparently, the only thing worse than property damage is corporate property damage.

Also, would we be having this discussion without the riots? Now tell me they weren’t successful.

You can learn a lot from looking at the statistics. For instance, if I want to know the weather in any region of the U.S. at any point in the last 20 years the national weather service has it. If I want to know how much income or taxes were generated from a region at any point the IRS has it. If I want to know the GDP or consumer spending levels for the nation, the BEA has it. If I want to know how many people were killed by police officers in any year, that statistic isn’t collected.

I mean, you could just google it. Good copy/paste though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_the_United_States

Edit: And yes, I know this isn’t official and the data isn’t complete but, then again, it’s probably still more accurate than, say, the BLS.

STL, it’s voluntary reporting with only a portion of precincts reporting, again, voluntarily. That is not a statistic, it’s a guestimate and it would be a very simple thing to at least have mandatory reporting of officer deaths and deaths at the hands of police with qualifying details included.

Would it be perfect? No, but few statistics are. But it would at the very least be a simple benchmark that would allow simple insight. Voluntary reporting is about as apathetic as it gets.

So TL;DR, the statistic does not in fact exist.

If they organized a large peaceful demonstration, Yes we would be.

Violence by a smaller crowd generates more media buzz, that’s the unfortunate nature of media.

and you wouldn’t be so nonchalant if it was your car, house, store that got destroyed.

You wouldn’t be so nonchalant if it was your family that had been destroyed.

After 50 years of this shit, maybe the time for peacefully gathering has passed. Objects are objects and I have insurance for a reason.

We don’t need to apologize for looters. It’s not society’s fault that they are causing public damage without a purpose. Countless Americans have uplifted themselves without resorting to destructive behavior.