There have been plenty of full-on police riots during the past couple of months.

By Matt Baume

Portland Mercury

You will be shocked, simply SHOCKED, to learn that after decades of researching effective methods for police response to large crowd actions, researchers have found — and you’re never going to believe this — that when cops show up in military gear and get aggressive, they actually make protest violence worse!

That’s one of the findings in “New Directions in Protest Policing,” a 2015 paper that reviews decades upon decades of police history and the conclusions of multiple separate commissions. Police that dress like they’re going to war, who try to control First Amendment expression rather than facilitate it, and who act in arbitrary ways can inflame violence and jeopardize their own safety and that of the public.

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