That's the problem there exactly. If it wasn't for a bunch of lousy cops and in one case a lousy wanna be cop who defied orders of the actual cops, there wouldn't be this high level of distrust and chaos. Mistrust isn't going to blow over, even when the cops are within their rights to do so. And even in the cases where they have been reason to, the cops seem to have found ways to bungle it up and make them look like the bad guys through dishonesty.
Like the case of the guy who hijacked a car and crashed into police officers. They had every right to take the guy down because he was actually endangering the cops. Yet the officers all fired randomly to make it sound like there was gun fire from the criminal who was otherwise unarmed. My question is why? I'm sure no one would have questioned the police shooting a guy trying to ram them with a car. But no, they had to make an already bad guy look worse through dishonest means, thus making the bad guy look sympathetic when there was no reason to.
Then the case of the body cam mysteriously cutting out when it didn't need to because that guy was also a bad egg. Unless I'm getting this mixed with another story since these are just starting to blend in at this point. There's no good guy or bad guy when everyone acts terrible.
As for the protests...well, are we more familiar with the uneventful peaceful ones in respectable communities where some of the protesters are cops themselves, or the loud, violent, ratings grabbing ones the extremely bias on both sides media loves to use to polarize everyone? To me the problem is simple. Dirty cops, the small amount of them that do things crappy enough to land on the 24/hr noise and outrage cycle, haven't been punished for their gross incompetence and/or institutional small townie racism because of a lack of transparency. No one wants to actually talk about it or do anything about it, leaving citizens to feel powerless, frustrated, and growing angrier and bitter by the incident, making them violent and furious. Which of course leads to a couple driven by madness shooters to attack the wrong people, which leads to some overpaid piece of crap talking head to say "the entire movement is terrible," making the protesters even angrier than they were, leading to crap like this happening. The lines get blurred, both extreme sides look awful, and the people in the middle trying to say in a civil manner "HEY! Something's majorly screwed up here. Let's stop and think and try and fix the problem" get booted to the side because they're not ratings friendly enough.
Sometimes I think... why do we wonder why a certain person running for president didn't just burn out a year ago? We have a media system where no one shuts the heck up, they hire "experts" to give us an opinion, we have 24 hours nonstop of sensationalism, and repeated viewings tend to emotionally ware on a person, turning them into some sort of rage monster.
All I'm saying is if these small amount of crooked cops at the very least got fired off the force instead of paid suspension, and various problems would be fixed by rational reasonable adults, I'm not saying everything would be much much better, but I feel we'd be more forgiving. Not happy, but forgiving. But it doesn't sell books, it doesn't increase ratings, it doesn't give horrible people a pulpit. It's probably going to cost money, time and effort, so better to keep a vicious cycle of people being angry at the wrong people and acting out.
That said...how come you rarely see dedicated, justice fueled cops that became cops for the right reasons come out and say "We agree there are terrible things happening and we're just as mad as you, if not more since it makes us look bad." Nope it's all absolute one side or the other with no shades of nuance and understanding in between.
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