John Pike ("Pepper Spray Cop," "Pepper Spraying Cop" or "Casually Pepper Spraying Everything Cop") was a lieutenant in the UC Davis Police Department. He gained notoriety for pepper spraying peaceful, sitting protesters during the UC Davis protest on Friday November 18.
Local protests began in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area of Minnesota before quickly spreading nationwide and in over 2,000 cities and towns in over 60 countries in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Protests continued throughout June, July, and August, with polls at the time estimating that between 15 million and 26 million people had participated at some point in the demonstrations in the United States, making the protests the largest in United States history.
Vicky Osterweil is the author of an essay I liked in the New Inquiry called "In Defense of Looting," which she has expanded into a book that was recently published.
"[Looting] also attacks the very way in which food and things are distributed. It attacks the idea of property, and it attacks the idea that in order for someone to have a roof over their head or have a meal ticket, they have to work for a boss, in order to buy things that people just like them somewhere else in the world had to make under the same conditions. It points to the way in which that's unjust."
Riot is the recourse of surplus populations: both Marx's "industrial reserve army" and the lumpen, the excluded — those who are "chronically outside the formal wage, or 'structurally unemployed.' "
"In order to understand the nature of the Syrian conflict, it is essential that we remember the first years of the uprising, and, through remembering what took place between 2011 and 2014, dispel the myth that Syria has always been a proxy war or has always been a struggle between a secular government and jihadis. To ignore the years which lead Syria from a democratic uprising to a bloody proxy war is to read history backwards."