The thing to understand is that the police view protests as street battles and organize themselves based on ancient warfare techniques. Do not think of them as your friends, think of them as Hannibal Barca trying to kettle, contain, and eliminate you. Because that’s how they think of themselves. If you want to avoid violence at a protest the first step is to don’t be violent, and then to avoid allowing your columns to become too deep or too wide for easy exploitation by the police. The police will ABSOLUTELY take the first act of violence if they simply feel like it. They will shoot you with rubber bullets or beanbags and claim they did so after the crowd started rioting to try to get them to disperse, even as they have you completely surrounded and there’s nowhere to disperse to. They will handcuff you and spray you with pepper spray.

So again. Avoiding violence at protests is less about being nonviolent, and more about keeping your head on a swivel and planning multiple moves ahead. What this OP is asking us to do is to martyr ourselves for the movement. Martyrdom doesn’t work en masse like this. All these mass arrests would do is weaken us for the next protest because we’ll have fewer people out on the streets and more people in political imprisonment. PLEASE when you make plans for what to do about police violence start by understanding that the police are violent. They love doing violence. They are on the side of what we are protesting. They are part of what we are protesting. You cannot trust them to be kind to you simply because you didn’t throw a brick but instead sat your ass down