How spontaneous are the demonstrations in Baltimore, New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C? I don’t know, but having seen help wanted advertisements in the past advertising for paid protestors, I am wondering. I am sure many of the people protesting are protesting because they think injustice has been done. I am also sure many of the people are protesting because it is an excuse to behave badly.
Yesterday the U.K. Daily Mail posted an article about the protests in Baltimore, New York, and other cities. The article includes a lot of pictures of the protests. Please follow the link above to read the article. Often the British press does a better job of reporting on America than the American press does.
The article sums up events in Baltimore:
Enforced by 3,000 extra police and National Guardsmen, the streets that had been rocked by massive unrest were quiet following the ending of the curfew at 5am with no reports of disturbances in the early hours.
Indeed, going on the numbers alone, the curfew was a resounding success.
On Monday, 235 people – including 34 juveniles were arrested, 19 buildings set ablaze, 20 police injured and 144 vehicles torched.
On Tuesday, 10 people were arrested and one police officer was injured.
But life is unlikely to get completely back to normal anytime soon.
Attempting to keep expectations low, Governor Larry Hogan said that along with Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake they can’t promise that respect for the rule of law has returned to the city.
‘You can’t ensure that there’s not going to be any unrest. I’m not a magician,’ Hogan said to the Baltimore Sun . ‘What I can assure you is that we will put all the resources that we have at our disposal to make sure that disturbances don’t get out of hand.’
Let’s back up and look at this for a moment. It is unfortunate that a black man died while in police custody, but obviously that is not the whole story. When the facts eventually came out in Ferguson, it became obvious that the person killed was guilty of a number of things, including attempting to take the policeman’s gun and shoot him. Again, what happened was unfortunate, but the actions taken by the policeman involved were not totally unjustified. I wish there were more gentle ways to handle criminals who don’t listen to the police, but I also wish there were not criminals who don’t listen to the police. Both wishes are unlikely to come true.
This is one picture from the U.K. Mail article: