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Comment by nyc_data_geek1 | Hacker News Reader

The job of police is not to monitor and suppress constitutionally protected rights, such as those to free public expression, gathering and protest.

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While I wholeheartedly agree, this is a very modern and localized viewpoint. In most places and times, the job of the police was exactly to protect the ruling classes from uprising by the underclasses. For historical reasons if nothing else, protests make them very nervous.

If you doubt this... then just read some history of labor rights in the world. Absolutely horrifying things were done by the law in the name of suppressing unionization all around the US and abroad.

Plus, some protests turn ugly. We saw this in Seattle and elsewhere during the BLM protests. Some protestors engage in property crimes and violence, granting an air of legitimacy to a strong police response.

Which is great fun when we also know that police don plain clothes, pretend to be part of these protests, and incite violence and rioting.

Yes, but I am referring to the content of TFA, and the GP. San Francisco PD is supposed to abide by these strictures, and if they do not, we have a reckoning due aa a society.

The police are agents of the government. Police pretty obviously are there to protect the government from the citizens. Not the other way around.

Then what the fuck do you think some “oversight board” is going to do?

Also protect citizens from other citizens. I don't for a second believe that all weak and strong citizens live happily together if there were no police.

In the US this is blindingly false. The police have absolutely zero obligation to protect you or your property. This is affirmed by multiple supreme court cases, including cases where the police actively destroyed people's property and at least one case their home.

I think you're going about that on the wrong angle; not that unnecessary willful destruction of property is good. But if police are present they have no requirement to stop a crime [1].

[1]: https://gothamist.com/news/city-argues-nypd-had-no-special-d...

I agree with you, but this is a weak argument, because the police aren't suppressing any right of expression by monitoring protests. They may be having a chilling effect by effectively discouraging protesters to attend, but they are not actively suppressing any identifiable freedoms.

SCOTUS has repeatedly considered the "chilling effect" of government policies to be sufficient to strike down government policies. Here's a long article from MTSU about the history of the "chilling effect" on First Amendment jurisprudence: https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/897/chilling-effect

tl;dr: having a "chilling effect" is, according to SCOTUS, often (but not always) the same thing as "actively suppressing" freedom of speech.

The Supreme Court has held that anonymous speech is a huge part of the First Amendment as non-anonymous speech has a pretty chilling effect. With a surveillance state you are taking away the 'anonymizing' effect people felt of being in a crowd, that they could speak without being singled out.

It is their job to (1) protect the protestors from physical harm, and (2) to prevent the protests from getting out of hand like what happened in June 2020.

It's weird how 'Fix the problems that are being protested' is not an option on the table.

The answer to 'The police are indiscriminate and unaccountable in their use of violence against the public' always seems to be 'Employ even more indiscriminate and unaccountable violence against the public.' It's almost like that's the only response these institutions are capable of.

This is not, in practice, what they do. In reality, they tend to use overwhelming force with dubious justification (if any), escalate situations via techniques such as kettling of protestors, and arrest/brutalize people expressing their disapproval of the above. There are many instances where police use violence on nonviolent protestors, so how does that protect them from physical harm?

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