Some extremely common lies used to turn the public against a protest

scrapbones:

bioethicists:

queeranarchism:

“Most of those who were arrested at the protest about this local issue were not from the neighbourhood”
Very often untrue. Outsiders posing as ‘concerned local citizens’ does happen but this is almost entirely a strategy of white supremacists. Anarchists and other left wing radicals don’t use this stategy as it runs counter to their goal of winning over the people.
Some ways the police manipulate statistics:
– defining ‘the neighbourhood’ in extremely narrow terms
– assuming all those arrested who did not give their address are outsiders
– just plain making up statistics.

“The road block prevented emergency services from doing their job”
Almost always untrue. Road blocks pretty much without exception allow ambulances to pass. When police report this some likely explanations are:
– ‘emergency services couldn’t pass’ just means ‘the police couldn’t pass’
– the police organized a blatant trap, driving an ambulance to the blockade followed closely by lots and lots of riot cops, and the blockade didn’t fall for the obvious trick.
– it’s pure fiction

“A mindless mob destroyed it’s own neighbourhood.”
Just not what protestors, rioters or mobs do. Some reasons you may hear it:
– protestors entered local stores to get essential supplies to defend themselves against police violence
– protestors destroyed windows close to protest lines because that is much safer than waiting for a rubber bullet to smash that window and send glass flying everywhere
– locals damaged businesses known to collaborate with the police
– locals destroyed surveillance equipment
– locals accepted an amount of physical damage to their neighbourhood in the struggle and their efforts to clean up and repair the next day were not covered by the media
– the police send people into the protest whose only intention was to cause mayhem and reck the neighbourhood.
– More fiction

There are way more like these and different police forces and governments have a different set if them that they use often. Know some? Reblog and add!

“the police support peaceful protests- just not violent ones!”

this is patently untrue and you can tell from the way the media reports “peaceful protests” like roadblocks, sitins, boycotts, strikes, etc- when they say peaceful protest, what they mean is “10-30 liberals quietly holding signs that don’t call for meaningful change” and anything else is considered troublesome

not to mention that “violent” protests often amount to controlled destruction of property and the police make every protest a “violent” protest by showing up and attacking protestors. and even at the tamest of protests, if someone sets a SINGLE trash can fire or dents a cop car, it’s gonna be the front page of every news paper and some old white guy from fifteen blocks down is going to be on the news talking about how he feared for his life

“number of police injured in recent ‘peaceful protest’”

-media reports presented like this are usually sympathetic only to police & neglect to mention how many protestors were injured (probably many more than the number of police injured)

-or that the police were injured by their own weapons/equipment

-or that it was indeed a peaceful protest, but the police began to attack with tear gas and other weapons, which then caused police injuries or caused protestors to react not out of violence but out of neutral self-defense (throwing tear gas canisters/dispersal grenades/etc back toward police or toward empty areas to avoid them injuring protestors)

-or that most if not all direct physical altercations between police and civilians were initiated by the police