Recently a massive "pro-Palestine" riot happened in the city of Bern, Switzerland, with over five thousand rioters engaging in violence, assault, destruction of property and arson. They attacked police officers, injuring 18 of them. What's worse, they deliberately set fire to a local restaurant, with ten employees inside, who were unable to escape the building. It was almost miraculous that they were saved by the fact that, unlike American law enforcement, the Swiss police forces use water cannons to deal with riots, and in this case the water cannon was used to put out the fire which was getting completely out of hand, saving the people inside the restaurant. Without this it's extremely likely that those people would have died. Officials reported that it was probably a question of mere minutes before the fire would have gone completely out of control and become unstoppable.
The Swiss police forces mostly stopped the rioters from advancing and eg.occupying and blocking train tracks, which was one of their plans, and they engaged the rioters even though they were outnumbered.
If this had been the United States, the cops would have just stood by the sidelines, watching it all happen, without doing anything to stop it, and perhaps arresting five people out of the five thousand. The amount of property damage would have probably been a hundred times higher, and the rioters would have been allowed to vandalize and disrupt public services like the train traffic. This is not just badmouthing because there are literally hundreds and hundreds of videos of that many violent riots where the American cops do exactly that. Or, more precisely, do nothing.
In contrast, the Swiss police was able to mostly stop the riot, and they arrested 536 rioters were arrested.
That's about a hundred times better than what the American cops would have done. And that's no exaggeration.
Yet...
Why 536 arrests, and not five thousand? All of the rioters were committing blatant crimes. The riot itself was illegal, against the laws of the country, and definitely a lot more than 536 people engaged in all kinds of other crimes, including property damage, disrupting traffic, assault, and so on.
While 536 is definitely much better than what the Americans would have done, it's still way too few. Only about 10% of the people committing crimes were arrested.
And that's a problem that's happening in a huge amount of western countries: People are being allowed to commit severe crimes when they are in riot mobs, crimes that they could never, ever get away with if they were alone.
In the United States there's literally less than 1% chance that you'll get arrested if you participate in an illegal riot. Apparently in Switzerland there's about a 10% chance.
And that's the problem: Those abysmally low numbers just encourage the indoctrinated violent activists. The chances of ever experiencing any sort of repercussions is extremely low.
That's a big problem that desperately needs fixing, in most western countries (and many others as well).
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