Whether....would be...if...might...would...wouldn't. Armchair musings on the maybe causes of violence without any actual opinion on whether any of these things occurred. Any or all of them are possible, of course, as are many other things that point away from those things. Do you think they happened?
You seem to be so deadset on spurious readings of posts that it never occurs to you that you just didn't understand what was written. NH asked a hypothetical question, and I gave a hypothetical answer to it. He did not ask "why did they do it in this instance", he asked why they would do it. So I gave an answer about why they might do it. Maybe better to butt out if you can't follow?
Not great tactics though since protests turning violent tends to weaken messaging about the motivation for the protests. From a PR point of view, violence is usually to the benefit of the target of the protest. Which would be why cops are inciting violence.
I'm not sure to be honest. I suppose it depends on who your target audience is through such actions. I didn't make up that idea, btw, it's been a known theory for quite a while that the police (or others) plant agents provocateurs among protesters in order to push them far enough to justify the police cracking down on an otherwise legal protest. The argument goes that it's a fascist tactic to shut down free expression by justification of suppressing a riot. To the extent that the desire for police plants is to create legal pretext for use of force against the crowd and to make arrests, this could work.
But as we're discussing
left-wing agitators, if you're looking at PR among right-wing viewers, it probably also inflames them against the protesters, which might be desirable to extremist 'leftist' since a bolstered enemy means a bolstered set of allies. But I suspect that you're right that among left-wing viewers the riots may actually communicate "this issue is serious!" and increase both its visibility and righteousness against the target. So I suppose if we give full credit to the idea of planted agitators, it might well be the case that violent leftists could suppose that making it violent helps the cause rather than hurting it. It would still be co-opting a peaceful protest for their own violent ends, and result it it looking like "our side" is unified whereas in fact most were peaceful and a side faction wanted it violent. I could see that, but no idea if it happened here. I agree that it would seem to mostly be more logical to suppose that the opposing side would plant agitators if the idea was to give pretext for police violence.
I just heard, btw, that at a peaceful protest in Montreal yesterday (they are happening all over) the police did start tear gassing the
entirely peaceful crowd. It just goes to show how thin the line is between the police as enforcers of law and order, versus just enforcers of *order*. The 'law' part of it really doesn't matter as much to them, which I suspect is behind a lot of police aggression we see. Any disorder, even a guy standing on a street 'where he doesn't belong,' gets suppressed with immediate force. I think the populace would generally be happy if it was
law and order.