You Can't Overpower the Police

So, in one of my recent posts, writing about the problems with the power disparity between police and the rest of us, I wrote that if the police are slowly strangling someone in front of you, you have no option except to just beg them to stop.  As the video of George Floyd's death illustrated perfectly.

At the time I took it for granted that everyone understood that you couldn't just rush in and physically stop the police.
However, since then, I've been seeing a lot of people on the Internet who don't understand why the bystanders didn't intervene and stop the police.
Well, lesson learned.  You can't take anything for granted on the Internet.  On any given issue, what seems common sense to you is not understood by some percentage of the population, and since everyone has a social media presence these days, that percentage is going to make its voice heard.  And to be fair, there was a time in my life when I didn't fully understand all of this stuff either.  (Much of this was explained to me when I started attending civil disobedience workshop training in my early 20s.  Before that, I didn't completely understand how the system worked either.)

So, for the benefit of anyone who doesn't fully understand this yet:
You are not allowed to touch a cop.  If you touch them, at all, you get charged with assaulting a police officer.  If you gently put your hand on their shoulder, and say, "Hey now, stop it!", then that's assault.  And then you'll spend the next year tied up in court cases, jail time, criminal record, and all the fun stuff that goes with being charged for assaulting a police officer.

Okay, but suppose you say, "I don't care about my own future.  A man's life is at stake! I'm doing it!"

But, you cannot overpower a police officer.  They are trained to take you down.  And all 4 of them on the scene will rush you together.
They are also trained to always make sure they are one step more powerful than you in any confrontation.  If it's hand to hand, then they take out their club.  If you have any weapon on you at all, then they drop their club and take out their gun.
And do you think they won't shoot you?  Because they will totally shoot you.  And they won't aim for the knees either.

And that is why when you see the cops slowly suffocating someone on the street in broad daylight, the bystanders have no options left except to just plead with the cops to stop.