Do you support the violent protests: burning property down, looting, etc or no? Yes or No would suffice. I say no.
Im gonna interject on this one and try to explain things from how I see it.
Lets assume two things. 1) That the justice system will probably drop the ball on holding people accountable and establish reforms since in recent times they almost always do, and 2) That the community/a community has reached a level of anger to the point that such anger cannot be contained. The kind of level of anger where waiting for the justice system to take its course isnt enough, some action has to be taken now to relieve some of the anger being felt...... If the goal is to try to relieve the pressure and anger of the situation given these two conditions as best as possible, there are mainly three main options to be pursued.
The first option is public protest: Marches, blocking roads, protests, etc.... These unfortunately dont often achieve any sort of meaningful policy goal towards greater racial tolerance, outside of token gestures made by local governments that dont amount to much, and a fair number of times those protests are still met with unnecessary hostility from local riot police, while portions of the media actively try to undermine the protests and try to brush over what all is going on by dismissing the reason for protest outright..... Because peaceful protest doesnt usually lead to any sort of result and often times can result in an overly-aggressive counter response from police forces, its not really an option that pacifies those in the community who are livid/enraged, and can lead to further escalation in the future. Peaceful protest sounds good in practice or on paper, in reality it usually isnt effective at obtaining any policy objective or at relieving anger being felt in the community following a bad incident.
So option 1 is mostly ineffective at achieving policy changes, mostly ineffective at relieving anger felt in the community, and not very effective at de-escalating the situation going forward
Option 2 is looting and burning property..... Usually this is as far as it gets when a situation does escalate. Looting, the way I see it, is a release of built up frustration that has reached a critical boiling point where if it is internalized it will only lead to something worse. Looting, like a peaceful protest, is something that an entire community can exploit, so in terms of just being a release of anger in order to de-escalate things in the coming days, in a weird way it has its use.... Businesses are damaged, a fair number can retain any lost profits or damages through insurance or settlements with the state/city, and now with crowdfunding businesses can recoup damages they suffer in a matter of hours if neither of the previous options work. (Some black owned business in Minnesota was looted, the guy raised $200,000 in crowd funding to rebuild it almost overnight)..... Looting is definitely less effective at working towards any policy goal compared to peaceful protest, which is why its never the FIRST option that is pursued, but it does serve as a better release for community anger than peaceful protest does. When looting does take place, things usually calm down afterwards now that much of that anger felt in the community has been released, rather than have a 50/50 shot at escalating further when you just have peaceful protest. Just about every racial protest in US history began calming down after things escalated to the point where lootings happened, rather then only get worse and worse after lootings took place.
So option 2 is definitely not effective at achieving policy changes, but it is quite effective at relieving anger felt in the community, and usually de-escalates a situation going forward in the coming days
Option 3, the worst of all, is targeted killings of police officers and politicians..... I can only think of one time where this became an issue, and it was in 2014 when 2 NYC police officers were shot and killed in their own police car.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_killings_of_NYPD_officers This event followed both the death of Michael brown and death of Eric Garner, two racial incidents where one didnt even lead to a Grand Jury Indictment which is unheard of for an event of that caliber..... The killing of the two officers took place 2 weeks after protests already started, but because the justice system already looked like it failed before it could even begin, outrage and anger was higher than usual, with even less hope than usual of achieving any policy change.... The circumstances got to the point that one person, who was mentally unhinged to begin with, sought out police officers to kill them and did. Damages that businesses suffer from looting can largely be replaced or repaid, but dead police officers cannot. In addition to that, targeting police officers only relieves the anger felt by the person pulling the trigger, while the rest of the community still feels outrage.
So option 3 is also definitely not effective at achieving policy changes, but is the least effective at relieving anger felt by the community, and could re-escalate tension going forward.
Picking from these three options, which are the main available options to be pursued by a community that is up in arms over a police brutality incident, if you operate under the (correct) belief that the justice system will probably drop the ball on the whole matter, and that few meaningful reforms can be obtained from the community in response to an incident, then the option that allows the community to release the most anger and has the highest chance of de-escalating things in the days after that is in fact looting..... Peaceful protests achieve little and release little anger while not doing much to escalate/de-escalate in coming days, Looting achieves nothing but releases a lot of anger and usually things calm down going forward, while targeted killings of police officers + politicians achieves nothing and releases almost no anger while at the same time definitely risking a rise in tension after it happens.
Looting is not be the best resort when it comes to achieving positive reforms, but if you acknowledge that positive reforms probably wouldnt be made no matter what happened, and the priority becomes whatever option releases the anger of the situation and de-escalates things going forward after it happens, then in my opinion looting is something that can almost be forgiven/tolerated..... Historically speaking, Los Angeles used to be one of the worst cities in America in terms of cases of police brutality/abuse towards minority citizens. After the Rodney King Riots in 1992 that were the biggest lootings/riotings in national history, a lot of changes were made to the justice system/police trainings in the city, and there hasnt been a high profile incident involving the LAPD that got national attention in close to 30 years now.
For these reasons, while they definitely shouldnt be the first resort pursued, given how flawed and inept the justice system is at settling things, I can see lootings and riots as forgivable and tolerable
(Note this is just my personal belief and rationale, I dont represent the entire liberal population of the United States)
