I was involved in the BLM protests of 2021. The cops were legitimately pulling people off the street into unmarked, black vans. Some of the people that were grabbed were not even involved in the protests, they were just outside past the citywide curfew.
I had heard about this happening in Oregon and Washington through the ever reliable internet, but I didn’t actually believe it until I saw it happen in my moderately sized Midwestern city.
It happened in Pittsburgh too. Undercovers in unmarked vans were just snatching people up off the street. Cops were shooting at people who were on their knees with their hands in the air. Someone plowed their car through a crowd of protesters on video, with the license plate and cops said there was nothing they could do.
I remember the livestreams. Did anyone ever find out what happened to those poor people?
Probably mostly just shaken up and released. I think it was the National Guard, but I wasn’t about to get close enough to ask.
They fucking shot people on their own porches. They fucking arrested a journalist just standing doing nothing live on the air.
They went into people’s houses to arrest them for being out after curfew.
They fired tear gas into people’s houses because they were suspected of giving water to protestors.
In Minneapolis a group of cops went around off duty, out of uniform in an unmarked van and fired irritant paintballs at everyone they saw. When someone shot back they arrested him for assauting an officer, assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder, etc. He was eventually acquitted because he stopped shooting as soon as they ID’d themselves.
The police are fucking animals roaming the streets and inflicting violence anywhere they can get away with it.
And yet they let a bunch of reactionary fascists storm the capitol with minimal resistance.
Yeah, about that… let’s talk about a conspiracy theory. I remember reading, I think on Twitter, either just before, or maybe it was a retweet after the fact, someone local to DC saying that the security that had been established around town (or maybe around the capitol specifically) that day in preparation for the demonstrations was weaker than they had ever seen for any run of the mill event there. This would seem very strange because word was very much out that something was going to go down that day, so one would have expected a much higher level of security to have been established. Although I didn’t look very closely into what happened that day and the days surrounding it, it still seems strange that I’ve never heard this discussed since I read it.
Conspiracy fact. I watched on video as cops moved barricades to let rioters in, took selfies with rioters, then literally held the hands of rioters as they walked down the capitol stairs.
At the BLM protests in Buffalo a cop dropped his helmet. When a bystander tried to give it back to them, the cops gave him brain damage.
