The Minnesota RNC protests

Megan McArdle considers the situation in St. Paul over the arrests of protestors outside the Republican convention:

Police are arresting journalists, which is generally an indication that they're in full-on flip-out mode. And in my own experience as a protest kid, the police are generally way too willing to use force on protesters, particularly ones they find politically distasteful. This is a small minority, but once they start something, the other officers generally have to follow them in or stand silent witness to a riot. So my natural assumption with these kinds of arrests is that the police were somehow at fault.

I've never been a political protestor, so I can't speak from personal experience, but otherwise I fully agree with Megan here. The police are probably at fault at least half the time when a protest march is disrupted (not to say that they're not necessary: every protest march gathers up temporary idiots, clueless folks, and genuine agitators or would-be Weathermen to march alongside the actual protestors. It's how the police handle things when the clueless or idiotic get a bit rowdy that dictates whether the genuine troublemakers can "get their hate on" and start the violent phase.

Some police officers should never be assigned to this kind of duty; most can. A good police administration should be able to manage that sort of aptitude-based tasking.

On the other hand, Minneapolis is not a very Republican kind of town. And the offenses cited by the Strib are the kinds of things people should be arrested for. You don't protest Republican policies by smashing windows and blocking roads. If you want the road to yourself, get a parade permit just like the VFW. Also in my experience as a protest kid, there's an obnoxious element that's looking for a fight and thinks they're entitled to smash things to show they're VEEEEWWWWWY MAAAAAAD!!!!! This number is also always numerically very small, but a few people can do a lot of damage. They can also get the police adrenaline running, at which point the pepper spray and the night sticks start flying.

So as best I can tell, there were some adolescent, violent protesters who ruined things for everyone, and fault should be apportioned about equally between them, and the hotheaded police who reacted to their nonsense by spraying tear gas at everyone.

Update: If you read the comments on Megan's post, you'll find that many of her readers feel that she's ducked the issue by discussing only the arrests at the protests, not the pre-emptive arrests I mentioned here.