Photo by Ethan Duran
We have all seen the tragic video from Minneapolis, a city with a proud progressive reputation, showing what is hard to describe as other than a murder in action by a police officer with three other officers calmly watching while the folks in the community are begging the officer to take his knee off the neck of the man who was handcuffed and on the ground. Your first thought is what kind of human being could calmly and slowly take another human being’s life while the victim is crying out that he can’t breathe? Your second thought is how could this person be a police officer?
Unfortunately, the story of a police officer killing an African American who was no threat to the officer is too common in America. Also, over the last three years, the racists and white nationalists have been emboldened by the tweets from the highest office in our land. The video of this murder was a little too much for Americans who are under a great deal of stress from the COVID-19 and seeing over 100,000 Americans dead with no end in sight. On top of that we have had record unemployment and have great uncertainty of whether the businesses that employed many of these millions of unemployed Americans will still be in business months from now.
It’s Time to Demand Change
We are seeing people, primarily our young people, out on the streets protesting another police murder of an unarmed person of color. In our democracy it is our right and obligation to stand up and peacefully demonstrate when we see injustices. That’s how you keep democracy strong.
These demonstrations are taking place in most major cities throughout our country including our city of Milwaukee. Unfortunately, these demonstrations often turn violent. I strongly believe that well over 95% of the people demonstrating are seriously committed to positive social change and have no desire to mix it up in a violent manner. Most of the violent members are either individuals who feel so frustrated and so angry by what they see that they are willing to go for broke or individuals who are just kind of jerks looking for the excitement of the fight and looting. Then there are the provocateurs like the FBI had under J. Edgar Hoover who wanted to undermine the cause which the demonstrators support.
When you talk to the demonstrators who are engaged in the violence or who are watching the violence with mixed feelings, they will often tell you that if we just do a peaceful march along with passionate speeches, we don’t get recognized unless things get disruptive and violent. They correctly argue that if things get violent, the media covers it and the officials take notice. Unfortunately, there is some truth to that, but there are also some very serious downsides when things get violent if you are genuinely looking for serious social change.
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First of all, there are the obvious consequences from the violence including injuries and deaths, arrests, destruction of property including many locally owned small neighborhood businesses. The violence gives those who want to crush you and thwart the changes you desire an excuse to violently crack down. And when it comes to a physical fight, the establishment has all the power. But more importantly, you lose some of the support of the community who are sympathetic to your cause. Getting violent is rarely a winning strategy but getting disruptive in a non-violent manner has a history of proven results.
Nonviolent Disruption and Creative Nonviolent Resistance
Yes, the demonstrators need to get their message out and to get the media’s and the public’s attention, but there is a difference between disruption and violence. Violence is just one method of disruption and I argue it is often counterproductive and hurtful to innocent people. It may be satisfying to some to throw a punch or go break some windows, but you are hurting the cause you are fighting for. There are at least two proven ways that history has shown for peaceful disruptions to get positive attention and to generate social change.
One is sheer numbers. If your cause becomes popular enough as the anti-war demonstrations did by the early 1970s and you can turn out hundreds of thousands or millions of people, you will be heard. It will generate dialog at the highest levels. Looking back at the 1960s it took many years to get the public’s attention to take a serious look at what we were actually doing in Vietnam and all of Southeast Asia. To get that early attention, you often have to disrupt, peacefully disrupt if you believe your cause is just and you feel you are not being heard. Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King employed very effective non-violent disruptions. With a well thought through plan and carefully orchestrated tactics like boycotts and various non-violent resistance, both Gandhi and King were able to achieve major social change.
Our Struggle for Justice
We need change with respect to an end of police killing non-threatening people of color. Ending these killings is a very just cause. We need to continue to peacefully demonstrate and non-violently disrupt when necessary. We need to continue to speak out against injustice, but we also need to win. To win, we need a plan with clear and concrete goals. We need a strategy and clear tactics to channel our energies more creatively with more non-violent actions and to not let our demonstrations be led into violence by a small group of individuals.
Cities throughout America have various plans to reform police departments that work. We need to educate the public about how these plans work and their successes and why they are necessary to keep America strong.
To be clear, this is not anti-police; much the opposite. In the past, I have done numerous ride-alongs on hot summer evenings in the highest crime rate precincts in our city and being a big city police officer is not an easy job. The majority are doing those jobs for the right reasons. The credibility of good cops is hurt by the actions of the bad actors. We need good hiring practices and good training for our police to support and train the women and men who want to be good community police and to weed out the bad actors. As they say, “we are all in this together.”
For more of our coverage of the protests occurring across Milwaukee, click here.
