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the Republican National Convention Welcoming Committee was not advocating violence, but rather, blocking traffic and other forms of civil disobedience. How does that justify sending paramilitary units to aim semi-automatic weapons at them and arrest them before they have actually blocked any traffic?
Most protesters, left and right, go limp during episodes of civil disobedience and the cops simply carry them away when the disobedience actually occurs. In the U.S., we don't preemptively send militarized police to detain them, remove their personal belongings such as computers and diaries, and harass them beforehand. Until now.
BTW, the fact that so many municipal police departments and county sheriffs depts are armed to the gills and have para-military SWAT units, is a direct result of the so-called War on Drugs. That's why these deployments were possible. (Until the WoD, SWAT teams were far fewer and used for rare instances such as violent criminals taking hostages.)
