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They've at least got to be better than the LAPD, right?
He said anyone sympathetic. That's a journalist.
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If that was an American reporter and the National Guard, it'd be front page banners on every news site in the US (including Fox except the headline might suggest she had it coming). Since it's an Australian reporter, the LAPD, and a rubber bullet (that was in fact non-lethal), it'll just be an amusing footnote.
The summary here -- "US Correspondent Lauren Tomasi has been caught in the crossfire as the LAPD fired rubber bullets at protesters in the heart of Los Angeles." seems wrong. There's no crossfire, in fact no other shots, as far as I can tell, and it doesn't even look like a miss (unless there was someone just out of frame who was up to something), it looks like the cop shot her on purpose, though I can't imagine why.
I'd bet that, ironically, the root cause is the same as the root cause of the protests becoming riots in the first place: because we're violent apes, and we evolved to rely on our own little groups' capacity for violence to protect us from all the other little violent groups, we therefore excuse even unprincipled violence by guys on "our side" rather than cracking down on it and risking intra-group conflict undermining our inter-group conflict. This gives sociopaths opportunities just as soon as they join whichever group gives them the most opportunities for their particular flavor of sociopathy.
When he saw someone who annoyed him, he got to make her suffer with no immediate consequences. It probably felt pretty sweet! The cops surrounding him didn't even turn to look and see what the hubbub was about, and he didn't even glance around to double check on that. He had about as much expectation of being punished by the other cops as the car-torchers had of being punished by other protesters. This asshole is doing more to undermine the support for aggressive law enforcement than the protesters are, and the jackasses waving Mexican flags in front of their barbarian pyres are doing more to undermine the opposition to mass deportations than the ICE and cops are, but because they're all superficially signaling commitment to their groups' cause, they don't get called on it by their other group members.
In general I'd guess police sociopaths are much smarter than rioter/arsonist sociopaths, because they found a group that will pay them overtime while they get to fuck around. Perhaps shooting a woman while a camera was pointed at her may have been going too far, but it is the LAPD, so even if some minor discipline eventually occurs we'll probably never know the details.
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I mean, it's the LAPD. You've got a choice between evil or incompetent, and it's probably better to select the healing power of "and".
LASD is a totally different organization to LAPD and the worse of the two, IIRC.
Fair. My impression is that LASD has a lot of the same issues, but I'll admit I've got less current evidence on that.
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