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However, you need to have a relatively clear deliniation between the person who is supposedly "inciting" or "encouraging" said violence and those actually committing it.
There is a difference between an individual speaking directly to a knowingly enflamed group and advocating a specific type of criminal activity, that a person in said group ends up going out and doing....and simply advocating in a broad venue that something was wrong, with no direct adovcation for any specific or even broad type of illegal activitiy.
Indeed, one of the explicite requirements of incitement I believe is that it must be specifically be encouraging, instigating, encouraging, etc, in order to cause someone to commit a criminal act.
If I go out and say "YEAH! THE COWBOYS SUCK ASS!" to a crowd of people...and then someone stabs a Cowboys player...I'm not likely to be found guilty of "inciting". Even if my words did somehow motivate that person to do that...which in this case we have zero evidence that anything the mayor said motivated the murderer...it still doesn't necessarily mean my comments were made for the purpose of convincing him to commit such a criminal act.
The incident you're quoting is an instance of a specific person urging people to commit a specific crime. That's an entirely different situation to what we have here with regards to the mayor
I can agree with that - it's just a very thin line between the rhetoric of anti-cop speech we've experienced in America this past couple of months and a direct call to violence. You can see it in those who come out to protest and get caught up in the emotion of the day and spew even more violent hate such as the "what do we want, dead cops..." chants. You can also see it in the assassin who came from Baltimore to kill NYC cops - there is no plausible explanation why he chose not to kill Baltimore cops but drove to NYC to target that city's cops other than the anti-cop hate speech that has been spewing from various mouths following the GJ non-indictment in the Garner case.
There has to be some level of responsibility accepted by those who know full well there are people with fragile and dangerous mental capacity deficiencies who will readily take such language as their call to arms and who will see murdering a police officer as a righteous thing to do.
It's why I think De Blasio's use of his son as a political tool in this situation was dangerous.