Comment by lokar

10 days ago

Waving signs, yelling and filming is not obstruction

[flagged]

  • Slamming people into the ground, firing tear gas canisters into their faces, or killing them are not valid remedies for the state to take even if obstruction is happening. (even if they're being like really annoying with whistles and stuff!)

    edit: even if they referred to the ICE agent as "fatty fat fat fat" meanly

    • As a matter of fact, arrest is the proper remedy for obstruction, which is at least a misdemeanor and sometimes a felony, and it may include those first two things, or even the third if they violently resist. And despite widely spread misinformation online, ICE has the legal authority to arrest anyone, even citizens, if they see them doing this.

      There’s really no other way law enforcement could work, I don’t know what people are imagining. You don’t get to surround or block LEO from conducting business and just say “neener neener” and there’s nothing they can do. If you escalate to physical violence then you’re simply gambling with your life and there’s no other way it could be in the world we life in, except in maybe a very low crime society.

      It’s one thing if you accept all this and do it anyway, but people keep acting shocked by what happens. “why did you have real bullets?”.

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  • "Blocking traffic" is at this point a tired trope. Any sort of disruptive action is described as "blocking traffic", which is somehow framed as a form of violence. (My favorite version is when people argue that it is a form of unlawful detention akin to kidnapping.)

    This would be more accurately framed as "parking illegally", which is the sort of thing for which you occasionally get a ticket placed under your windshield wiper, not the sort of thing for which armed, masked agents violently arrest you.

    • Purposely moving your car in front of law enforcement officers' cars to prevent them from arresting a suspect is in fact obstruction. This is not "violence", but you will be arrested if you do this. If you resist arrest, you will be forcefully arrested/apprehended. If you then attempt potentially life-threatening physical harm to the officer you will likely be met with deadly force.

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  • Please think more deeply about the consequences here. Besides even the first amendment’s right to assembly, these videos show just people driving by.

  • Do these [1] look like blocking traffic?

    [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46598192

    • They will claim that if the person was in front of the car when ICE rammed into them, it means they were blocking the car

    • Most of those are shorts clips that do not show the context of the situation. These sorts of clips are what is causing people to believe the actions of federal agents are not justified when they actually are. When the initial clip of Renee Good came out people thought that the she did not drive into the agent but now that other angles have come out it is clear that she did hit the federal agent. It is always important to find the whole clip and not just propaganda clips

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