Re-Emerging Anti Police Riots

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The same can almost be said for recent Occupy movements. In his article, “Square and Circle: The Logic of Occupy”, Jasper Bernes shared the the defining phrase of the Occupy movement which is “we are the 99%”. This phrase implies that the movement is very much inclusive of the majority of ordinary citizens. The phrase also serves to name a condition of dispossession rather than exploitation. In other words, occupy movements are more attracting to people who have either lost their homes or are in the process of losing them, college graduates burdened with student loan debt, people who can’t find the decent-paying work they expect, etc. The 99% in their phrase is a class based on frustrated expectations – a class that feels dispossessed of certain rights and comforts. In another article by Phil A. Neel, he shares that the root of all these Occupy movements is this struggle over power and fighting so that power itself is not concentrated in the hands of a minority of the population. The autonomy of these movements can be characterized best by the demandlessness feature. Almost every one of the mass movements that began in 2011, starting with the Arab Spring, had no coherent or agreed-upon demands. What brought many of the occupy participants together was merely a general rejection of those in power. These riots thus began to overturn the pretense that power does not only benefit those who hold it by exerting the power of the protestors against theirs. This method both scared the rich and attracted people to the movements.

What one can see throughout the majority of recent riots and occupy movements, is that they are mainly composed of the millennial generation. This supports the idea that the exploitation, injustices, and concentration of power into a small population is being felt more by those trying to secure a place in society now. While the triggers of this re-emergence were a series of police killings of young black men: Eric Garner, Mike Brown, Freddie Gray, the riots were a revolt not only against the police, but also against a society which has nothing but police to offer. In much of the United States, police terror was the government’s only means of managing a rapidly deteriorating set of conditions in poor black neighborhoods. The riots following these killings were thus an expression of anger due to the combination of all the factors shared across these articles.