Police riot
[7] During the Vietnam War, anti-war demonstrators frequently clashed with police, who were equipped with billy clubs and tear gas.
Many patrons were beaten by police in riot gear, some two dozen arrests were made, and a number of people later sued the SFPD for their actions.
Bystanders, artists, residents, homeless people, reporters, and political activists were caught up in the police action that took place during the night of August 6–7.
The event was the first large-scale confrontation between the city's LGBT community and the police since the White Night riots a decade earlier and resulted in 53 arrests and 14 people injured.
Long Range Acoustic Devices and armored vehicles were heavily utilized to subdue protesters, and police threatened journalists and human rights workers on the scene.
[13][14][15][16] Police were accused in multiple cities of instigating unprovoked violence with persons who protested the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
[17][18][19] Videos from multiple cities showed police using tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets on protesters.
[29] A 2016 working paper in the National Bureau of Economic Research by economist Roland G. Fryer, Jr. found that while overall "blacks are 21 percent more likely than whites to be involved in an interaction with police in which at least a weapon is drawn" and that in the raw data from New York City's Stop and Frisk program "blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to have an interaction with police which involves any use of force" after "[p]artitioning the data in myriad ways, we find no evidence of racial discrimination in officer-involved shootings.
[32] Nobel-laureate James Heckman and Steven Durlauf, both University of Chicago economists, published a response to the Fryer study, writing that the paper "does not establish credible evidence on the presence or absence of discrimination against African Americans in police shootings" due to issues with selection bias.
"[34] During an attempt to enforce an exclusion zone around Stonehenge, Wiltshire, in 1985, the police entered the field where a group of travelers known as the Peace Convoy were being detained and began damaging their vehicles and beating the occupants.
