Hacker News Reader

I'm not following these protests closely, but aren't you going to have a minority of violent people in any protest? That's just the nature of argry, large groups.

If that's your bar for "violent protest", then it's trivial for anyone to disrupt any protest by injecting interlopers to try to trigger an explosion. There's evidence that undercover police tried to instigate violence and looting in the BLM protests. Couldn't that be happening here too?

View on HN

I agree that in any large group there can and will be agitators, but given the dug-in nature of the Ottawa protest it is reasonable to consider the relationship between the lack of enforcement, the relatively small number of participants, and the intimidation that has occurred (as testified to by the OPS).

I think it is lost on most people not following closely that the day-to-day protest headcount is quite low, easily under 1,000 people, probably well under 500. Any normal crowd control policing unit could disperse such a small group, the police do not do so despite many instances of having done so and clear legal authority to do so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com