Organizing street protests is fraught with problems.
One of the most frequent of those problems has always been people who show up on the day of the action and who have neither any idea of how it is organized, what its goals are nor any intention of participating in the spirit of the action. They aren't part of the planning, but become the ugly public face that is remembered after many protests.
Those are the people who screw up many protest actions and turn them into disasters. They are the people who shout, "fuck the pigs" when the protest is trying to stand in solidarity in front of a police line without provoking police violence. They are the people who show up and then throw rocks from the sidelines without putting themselves in harm's way. That leaves the dedicated non-violent protesters to deal with the resulting violence.
I finally stopped being involved in organized protest actions due to such people. No matter how much planning and care went into an action, people always showed up with a completely different agenda and often destroyed any effectiveness the planned action might have had. I decided to approach the whole thing in a different way.
Such people are still, and may always be, screwing up protest actions with their unplanned and unthoughtful actions. They're the people up on the freeway overpass in Minnesota, throwing bricks and other objects at the police, putting the people who are there to make their point in danger. They tend to ruin everything they participate in with their random, unplanned violent actions. They make street activism less effective and far more dangerous for protesters and others.
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