A group that had previously expressed their "solidarity" with protest movements, according to The Washington Post, has now released a report that makes the claim that 93 percent of protests have been "peaceful."
The Hill reported:
The report, produced by the nonprofit Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project [ACLED], identified 7,750 protests between May 26 and Aug. 22 in 2,400 locations, according to The Washington Post.
The report found that about 220 became "violent" — a term defined as demonstrators fighting with police or with counterprotesters. The term also applies to demonstrations that resulted in property damage. In 93 percent of cases analyzed, there was no violence.
In the violent cases, the report said, violence was “largely confined to specific blocks, rather than dispersed throughout the city.”
ACLED partnered with the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton University to collect the data used in the report. In the summary for the report, ACLED used only leftist publications, such as the BBC, Al Jazeera, FiveThirtyEight and the New York Times.
It's not clear whether the 220 number that the report touts as having been "violent" includes every day over the past three-plus months of unrest in Portland, Oregon. The daily violence in Portland alone would constitute almost half of the 220 violent "protests" reported.
Plus, these are just the protests that the group "identified." Is a night of violence in Portland counted as a protest that turned violent, or is it discounted because a protest didn't precede said violence? Sometimes protests don't need to happen in order for political violence to be carried out, just ask Aaron Danielson.
Here's the thing. Even if 93 percent of protest could be considered some form of "peaceful," that leaves almost one out of every 10 protests being of the violent variety. That is unacceptable. Protests that become violent can no longer be considered protests. They are crime scenes.
Let's put it this way. You have a better chance of a protest becoming violent than you have of dying from, or even contracting, COVID.