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[SalmonGod]

I've lived most of my life in Indiana.  I've only ever heard of 2 protests here in my entire life.  We had one of the country's smallest Occupy camps relative to the size of our city.  And there was an incident several years ago where an officer driving drunk while on duty plowed through a large group of motorcyclists stopped at a stop light, which prompted a protest ride.  Both were uneventful.  No confrontation with police.  Both small.

This past weekend, there were thousands protesting in Indianapolis, and we had rioting for consecutive nights until they implemented curfew.  Nothing like it has ever happened here in my life.

Even Naptown (one local pet name for the city) has woken up.  Anything can happen at this point.

Honestly if grievances are not addressed, we could truly be edging super close to full blown civil conflict.

[Iduno]

Just gonna share a fat Twitter thread that collects police incitement incidents:

https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1266957030285127687

Here are a bunch showing cops vandalizing buildings and a cop car to blame on the protestors.

[Dunamisdeos]

Just gonna share a fat Twitter thread that collects police incitement incidents:

https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1266957030285127687

Here are a bunch showing cops vandalizing buildings and a cop car to blame on the protestors.

A couple replies down in that one debunks that one particular video with the cop car :<

https://twitter.com/Nelsonbarros_12/status/1267317955429371904

Regardless thank you for making us aware of that collected thread, I'll be sharing info from there.

[Imic]

To the Americans in this thread, I know you’re out there somewhere, may I ask, how do you think this will play out? Do you think it will keep going or slow down?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Historically, hot summers sustain this kind of movement, and we are entering a hot summer. How this crashes into the impending reopen clusterfuck remains to be seen.

My expectation is that you will continue to see the initial momentum picked apart and disrupted through the "white anarchist rioters" message and agent provocateur counter-insurgency tactics. White liberals will largely endorse this message and gradually rehabilitate themselves to be pro-cop and refocus on Biden's presidential campaign, as is tradition. Extended national guard crackdown followed by police murdering any distinguished protest leaders over the next few years, as occurred in Ferguson. I still don't think anything out of the ordinary will happen to the election, which is to say the Republicans will openly cheat but only in swing states.

However, it is also true that the US is fraying at the edges of economic and social devastation, so events may escalate in unexpected ways. Also, the cop (only the one) will be convicted on one of the two charges but given around 20% of the maximum sentence and released for good behavior later this decade. By then the country could be on fire, though.

[TamerVirus]

The 'nothing ever happens' in me says that the protests will fizzle out as people get tired or lose interest after a number of days. Just like it has with all other recent police brutality protests of the past.

BUT

The US is at over 40 million unemployed and people are stir-crazy after being cooped up for weeks in quarantine. The usual 'bread and circuses' have been put on hold. 2020 is crazy enough as it is so unrest continuing wouldn't surprise me either

[Egan_BW]

"Nothing ever happens" ended with the plague. It's the 20s now, baby.

[A Thing]

Yeah it's a bit hard to say right now. I don't think they're slowing down right now though, at the very least here in Alabama they've pretty much just started. As far as I can tell, police tactics so far have just increased the unrest and aren't changing. Hard for people to just walk away from the protests when people are getting eyes taken out by rubber bullets, and in some cases just plain shot (which happened in Lexington, Kentucky last night.) by cops/national guard.

[Iduno]

Just gonna share a fat Twitter thread that collects police incitement incidents:

https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1266957030285127687

Here are a bunch showing cops vandalizing buildings and a cop car to blame on the protestors.

A couple replies down in that one debunks that one particular video with the cop car :<

https://twitter.com/Nelsonbarros_12/status/1267317955429371904

Regardless thank you for making us aware of that collected thread, I'll be sharing info from there.

Yeah, but as someone else said, why would you clean the broken glass into the vehicle. You would remove it if that was what you were doing. But who knows.

To the Americans in this thread, I know you’re out there somewhere, may I ask, how do you think this will play out? Do you think it will keep going or slow down?

The only long-term changes will be a law allowing more crackdowns on protestors, and the people who saw the violence firsthand will have learned who police really are. The journalists who were shot or beaten, the nurses who were attacked for giving medical care, peaceful protestors who were corralled and tear gassed. They'll come out changed.

[SalmonGod]

What MSH describes would be the normal routine.  But I don't know at this point.  This is so much larger than anything I've ever seen - even Occupy.  Occupy may have technically brought out larger numbers.  I'm not sure.  But not even half this level of conflict.  And yeah - it does look like a bunch of the higher profile Ferguson protesters got murdered in the following years.  But that was a very localized event.  I don't know if they could pull off that same kind of thing in response to a nationwide event of this scale.

The thing I'm paying attention to is just how much fiercer protesters are fighting than I have ever seen them fight before, and I've been watching protest activity for 20 years.  Every instance of police violence seems to be responded to with increased energy.

There's many ways I can see this going and many variables.  But here's the two I'm most concerned with.

1.  If a handful of cops lose their shit and shoot some real bullets, this could instantly explode into 4x as fierce an event as it already is.
2.  If that doesn't happen first, I don't think the police have the capability to quell this.  They're going to keep responding with violence and the protests are going to keep intensifying in response.  I think that's the nature of it this time around.  Question is what might the National Guard do, or any other military apparatus that gets brought in.  They could succeed in de-escalation the way they did in Ferguson (at least for long enough that most people stop paying attention and any reboot of rioting can be rebranded more effectively).  Or they could apply an overwhelming show of force that cows the whole movement.  Anything in-between while, I think, just continue to fuel it.

[Superdorf]

The way I figure it, we're either headed for actual positive change... or bloody regime. Not sure which.
There's a tremendous amount of anger going about right now. Something's gonna give.

...

...anyway, thought I'd share this press conference for y'all.

[JoshuaFH]

It feels like a lot of my pessimistic premonitions I've had throughout life are finally becoming reality. Premonitions that I feel are only going to become worse and more desperate as time goes on. I don't think this is a purely domestic issue, the result of the domestic issue has international consequences. I can only hope that the rest of the developed world will realize that the US can't wipe it's own ass, and is in fact sure to destroy itself if left unchecked... and bring everyone else down with it.

[Dunamisdeos]

I'm with Salmon there.
 
I don't see this one being cowed by force. Maybe they'll manage to stop the momentum some other way, but if a cop puts a bullet into some protesters people I feel like folks will just start gunning down cops. In America it's not that the protesters CANT fight the PD with lethal force, it's that they aren't. Yet.

Then they'll call in the guard, and we'll either have civil war or massive lethal crackdowns.

[Dostoevsky]

I've been talking with a few folks from older generations, and they point to the protests of the 60s-70s as an example. Their narrative, at least, is: 1) protests ramp up (i.e. 'you are here'); 2) Nixon wins election (and reelection!) (i.e. what MSH suspects may happen); 3) things get bad all over the place, up until Watergate (more or less).

Given how certain institutions have changed since then I don't think another Watergate-like event like that would break through. (Heck, perhaps one should use the past tense and say it didn't break through considering what this administration has done in the first term.)

As has already been pointed out by others, high unemployment combined with other factors means that this will likely get worse before it gets better. It is probably just a matter of time before another Kent State shooting or the like.

[sluissa]

I'm with the "nothing's going to happen" group as well. I think there's more energy than usual right now because of the covid lockdown. I think that might be enough to change things. But I also think that people get bored easily. People get tired. People see little change and they see the ineffectiveness of their actions, and they go home, or they see a symbolic, but practically meaningless change and they declare victory and go home.

On the other hand, 2020. We've still got 6 more months of this shitty year. We can only predict based on what we've seen in the past. But thus far 2020 has managed to surprise us with unpredictable or unlikely scenarios.

I've just seen too many of these sorts of protests and demonstrations and outbreaks of violence simply fizzle out.