They (not Trump of course) had to walk it back when it turned out not to be true.
Is there some outside groups posing as others, possibly, but to blame a majority of problems on them is just BS.
Now, I don't think the bulk of the looters are bad people. But to change the narrative to be anything other than a REALLY TERRIBLE PR move by young people being opportunistic is absurd. For the truck driver who was beaten, the MSM were calling the violent protestors brave.
It comes down to this - are you helping the cause or hurting the cause? Only delusional, heavily-biased people / social justice warriors think looting is helping the cause and they're making every excuse under the sun. To think that humans, by and large, will look past it (for right or wrong) is out of touch with reality.
And if you criticize the means in any way, you get attacked even if you support the same change. In my opinion, to suggest that young black people are so pliable and incapable of thinking that some posts by a rogue group would turn them into robotic looters is racist in itself.
Young people semi organized and did some dumb stuff and justified it because of rightful injustice. Are they bad? No. Was it wise? Of course not. That's what happened.
Outside of that - I've been involved in a coroner's inquest before as my jury duty and it was very interesting. You basically are tasked with deciding whether a death was homicide, suicide or natural causes. I've heard about these civilian oversight boards as the answer but they have challenges with "local political manipulation" and require "steep budgets for investigators" [1]
So from my coroner's inquest experience, I was thinking - you already have civilians. It's efficient. If an officer is involved and the coroner's inquest participants rule it to be a homicide - boom, you could mandate an automatic trial!
This seems like it would be easier to roll out, more efficient, and provide pure accountability to any officer involved shooting. They'd know they would be legally required to go to trial if the coroner's inquest ruled a homicide.
Certainly, some evidence could still be tampered with by the powers that be, but that would elude the civilian oversight boards too in those cases. And with body cams, social media and business and civilian cameras, it's gotten much harder for them to hide evidence. So if you have an easy path to a trial originating from jury peers after coroner input, then you have a ton more accountability.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/is-civilian-overs...
The problem, which shows up in plenty of posts on social media, is that people's concern should, first and foremost, be the excessive use of force by US police officers, and the lack of accountability that officers face, in particular when black lives are lost as a result. Sure, destroying things this is bad, but black lives matter.
I grabbed this quote from your reply specifically because it seems to make the claim that people who belive in social justice are delusional, heavily-biased, and are entirely or at least largely in support of looting. I've never seen anyone make the argument that looting is helping the cause. What I have seen is arguments that acknowledge the 'badness' of the looting, and point out that the same arguments are not being applied to the police.
"Funny how one bad protester labels the whole movement, but a few bad cops are never supposed to represent all cops." -@aStatesman (Twitter)
In fact, there are plenty of videos people have posted of protesters stopping looters in various places. This tweet has one, but there are many in the responses to that tweet as well: https://twitter.com/gryking/status/1267101707596632066
I've also never seen anyone make the argument that excessive use of force by US police officers is helpful.
That gives us two extremes that we can eliminate from the discussions. There are no people who think illegal force used by the police is good, nor is there people who think looting is helping the cause of stopping the police from using illegal amount of force. Two strawmen done and dusted.
> "Funny how one bad protester labels the whole movement, but a few bad cops are never supposed to represent all cops."
101 in in-group and out-group human behavior research. The in-group is always made out of individuals and a few bad apples can never represent the group that a persons self belong to. The out-group however is in contrast a homogenic group. The purpose of having a clearly defined group to define as "them" is to avoid having to spend the energy to individualizing every member. It is a type of lazy thinking. Both the police and the protesters has bad people in them and good people, you only need to look at the individual level.
> The problem, which shows up in plenty of posts on social media, is that people's concern should, first and foremost
If we expect every post on social media to include boiler plate signaling then it kind of losses meaning. Everyone already agree that illegal use of force by the police is bad and should be prosecuted. We have democratic created laws that says so and no movement to remove them. The problem lies at the pseudo kinship relations that a band-of-brothers style police force has when it is tasked to enforce those laws against the in-group.
A crucial difference is that the police is an actual entity/organization, and one that is entirely responsible for its members. The whole problem is that this organization is not properly keeping their 'bad apples' in check, and even actively shielding them from consequence.
On top of that, this organization is immensely powerful, has ridiculous weaponry (and some degree of training), and is legally allowed to do a lot of violent things that most other 'groups' or individuals are not.
I think it's absolutely fair to consider the police as a group (while acknowledging that it has 'good' members), and make more individual distinction concerning the protesters.
I also think it's not a coincidence that Trump and various others are pitching the "it's Antifa destroying our cities" or for that matter even the whole idea that Antifa is a properly organized entity. So much easier to justify the use of force against the whole lot of protesters!