As police violence becomes more widespread, I increasingly see police apologists justifying their abuse by pointing to past destructive actions by protesters. I want to talk about this fallacy and why we shouldn't treat protesters as a monolith in the same way we treat police.

The mainstream view of these conflicts often boils down to Protesters vs Police, which is a convenient shorthand but ultimately misrepresents the dynamics. These two groups of people are fundamentally different, and I think it's worthwhile to highlight those differences...

First, like I said, protesters are not a monolith. Each person is out here for their own reason. Sometimes our reasons overlap, and that's when you get big crowds who appear to be moving together. This is why *organizing* is so important, to build power where we overlap.

Juxtapose that with the fact that police are, by design, a monolith. Every officer is a cog in the machine, the cogs are even numbered. They receive the same training, wear the same uniform, carry the same badge, drive the same car, and are beholden to the same chain of command.

That's why I get frustrated when I see the protest signs like, "if you judge us by the worst protestor, why don't you judge them by the worst cops?" It's an effective gotcha-moment, but it's a false equivalency (there also isn't a "worse" way to protest, but I digress).

It absolutely makes sense to judge police by looking at the worst cops. The same way you'd judge any system or machine...by looking at its weakest parts, its points of failure, the parts that keep it from being successful, how much malfunction the system is willing to tolerate.

But that's not the case for protesters. Protesters aren't a self-regulating system. Protesters can't be fired, can't be reassigned, there is no outside force that decides whether someone is a protester. It makes no sense to judge a group based on something they can't control.

And that's ultimately what it boils down to: control. Police have a responsibility to weed out their dysfunctional colleagues (a responsibility they rarely live up to). They have the tools and the control necessary to rid their ranks of abuse.

When you have the necessary tools, and you've *asked for* the explicit responsibility of holding others accountable for their violence, but you abdicate that duty, then you should expect to be held accountable for your complicity in that violence.

Again, not the case for protesters. A protester isn't responsible for the actions of another protester, any more than you are responsible for the actions of your neighbor. Not only do they not have a responsibility to control others, they don't have the authority.

(None of this is to say that we shouldn't hold people in our community accountable, it just means that "community" isn't necessarily defined as "all fellow protesters")

This is why we cannot accept when Seattle Police do things like pointing to an arson committed on a Monday, in an attempt to justify police violently attacking a candlelight vigil the following Wednesday. There's nothing that necessarily links those two events.

This is all a longwinded way of saying that we do ourselves a disservice when we allow media to portray this struggle as a conflict between two equal sides, both deserving of the same sort of scrutiny and both capable of losing collective legitimacy because of individual actions.

Don't allow critics in the media to delegitimize the movement simply because there are individuals within the movement whose actions they (or even you) don't agree with. Don't allow the police to justify their widespread violence as a response to past actions of individuals.