Here's a little anecdotal data: Yesterday law enforcement in Flint, Michigan and Somewhere, New Jersey approached the protests in their jurisdictions un-helmeted, un-armored, and without shields, acoustic grenades, tear gas launchers, armored vehicles, or batons drawn.

They approached the protesters as individual human beings rather than a "crowd" to be "controlled" and lo and be-fucking-hold Flint, MI and Wherever, NJ are not a smoldering wreck today. This is a screaming example of cause and effect.

Any possibility of "peaceful protest" elsewhere was obliterated before it had a chance to happen by the arrival of uniformed police officers equipped for combat.

They were deployed by the civil authorities in anticipation of the unrest they counter-intuitively claimed to be trying to prevent, and in doing so guaranteed that it would happen.

The tactics they decided to execute rely on creating fear, confusion, and physical pain in order to coerce and control unarmed people's movement.

Remove these actions from the situation and you could properly gauge how "violent" or "non-violent" the protesters and their protest inherently is. But that isn't done and it isn't done for a reason.

Even the most remote chance of disorder (read: obstruction of business, referred to circumlocutively by the governor of Minnesota as the state providing its people "decent lives") impels the leadership to take advantage of the possibility of a worst-case scenario,

An excuse to expend the full measure of the resources they have purchased with their budgets.

And the officers dutifully accept these orders and this equipment, don their helmets and pick up their sticks and shields without questioning why.

I keep seeing friends and colleagues hedging their comments in deference to the police forces in their communities and the officers they happen to know. I get the impulse, especially after having spent a lot of time working with law enforcement around the country.

Nobody owes an explanation of their feelings to the police. Every police officer owes us an explanation for their participation in and support for an institution that has thoroughly bankrupted the trust of the people who pay for them.

Who pay for their equipment and for their buildings and for their salaries and do so in expectation of safety and the preservation of their human rights.

Come back out tonight. Stay out. Exhaust their resources and their physical strength. Push them to question why they are there and what they are doing.