It could be useful to protect people from relatiation under an authoritarian government, such as in Hong Kong. I dislike the idea of a government using mass automatic identification, that could be used again by authoritarians for terrible goals. I also dislike the idea of the opposite and using automatic anonymizing to protect criminals during riots. We're probably going to keep seeing an arms race in this, with good and bad actors on all sides.
Showing the face of a protestor smashing in a window will not lead to that protestor being brought to court and handed a sentence for community service, a fine, or some light jail time. It will lead to extrajudicial retaliation and possibly death.
Again, it would be nice if that weren’t the case and we could trust law enforcement to behave appropriately. But given that they and their supporters are known to hunt down and kill people who protest against them, we cannot in good conscience make it easier for them to do so.
If we are to trust the cops again, they need to show us they are worthy of trust. And they sure aren’t doing that right now.
What I've seen in the past 2 days is that the police are doubling down on being oppressors, not public servants. I expect it to get much worse before it (possibly) gets better. And it may not get better.
Protest turned to riots, literally burning down police stations. Police action wasn't until much later, and they were perfectly fine with the daytime, civil unrest. During the evening, the 'protestors' went home and the agitators came out to fight police, and that's that.
When people are looting every store on a street, the police have no choice but to physically move in. There are very few options for anyone at that point.
[1] https://twitter.com/imactuallynina/status/126691262719377408...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/nypd-officer-shoves-woman-ge...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/us/minneapolis-protests-p...
You're legitimising mass violence, and then condemning those trying to stop it, who in some instances might step too far.
A police Officer and others have been killed, the riots are spreading and it's obviously a problem.
There are riots in major cities - fairly aggressive violence and widespread property destruction.
This absolutely necessitates a physical response by police.
There is no way around that.
To expect absolutely perfectly defined behaviour in a perfect legal sense from some people in a situation, and then to completely ignore the violence by others, which is the cause of underlying problem, is some really difficult logic. Obviously the bar is higher one side, and accordingly behaviour is mostly better.
There are thousands of people looting and rioting and destroying things.
The police are responding fairly proportionately.
The 'daily protests' it seems are going fairly well, peacefully, but the evening situations are basically just riots.
As for your 'examples' ...
If police are slashing tires and tazing people arbitrarily there's no excuse for that, they should be punished.
But a woman was 'shoved'? Why does anyone think we have the right to physically or verbally assault government workers or anyone else, and for there not to be some kind of reaction, and in some cases overreaction, that is frankly, somewhere in the range of proportional, and not a big deal. We didn't see exactly what happened, but there is clearly a physical confrontation going on, while I wouldn't support at all an officer just arbitrarily shoving someone, there's a lot on that table to discuss.
The 'press officer arrested'. This again, I don't think is a story. In a riot, if police are asking people to move somewhere, and they don't, it's very reasonable for people to get detained for a few minutes as they are moved out of the way. In fact, that's a pretty 'civil' example of unrest and the management of it. I don't know all the details actually, but as police are clearing a riot scene of mass violence, having to temporarily detain some people seems reasonable.
There's also the issue of a 'freelance journalist' hit with pellets or something along those lines. A lot of people were hit with pellets - just because someone is carrying a camera, does not give them some kind of legal immunity. Again, we're missing details - if she was standing out of the way, where she was clearly not participating and the cops just 'shot her way' for no reason, well, that's bad. On the other hand, if she's thick into the riot and pellets came her way, well then I think it seems rational, if tragic, that this would be the outcome.
If those thing were happening without any riots or legitimate need to be respond, then it would be really bad, but in the context of literally trying to suppress riots, that's not a 'police state' - that's literally just police dispersing a riot and getting people to go home or indoors.
Already a Police Officer has been killed, one protestor has been killed purposefully, and another killed while accidentally dragged behind a vehicle? And there's probably a billion or so in property damage and lives ruined? This is serious stuff, far beyond the legit protests we're seeing mostly during the daytime that nobody has a problem with.
All of the videos and incidents I linked showed 100% from multiple angles that the police were the ones instigating the issue. They shoved a woman out of the way because she was just standing there and sent her to the ER. Journalists were blinded because they were simply doing their job and the police decided to take potshots. You're arguing about 'legal immunity' when we're talking about cops blatantly breaking the law and abusing their privilege as police officers to get away with it. And the reason why this entire incident occurred was because of police murdering someone so obviously that people couldn't look the other way. Maybe you should start by blaming them for instigating this whole mess.