I have been to a few rallies/vigils/marches lately and all incidences of violence that I have witnessed either in person or through media has been instigated by the police. As far as I know,every documented case where a formerly peaceful crowd turns into chaos has been started with police shooting pepperspray, teargas, or whatever into the crowd.
I find it really hard to not come to the conclusion that the police is desperately trying to set a narrative to justify a history of violence by escalating more violence, but please, someone, restore my faith.
This has been a long time coming, too. In the last few years, many police departments around the country have thrown their hands up and publicly stated they won't be bothering with most property crimes. The way they see it, the only crimes worth their time involve people not committing real crimes at all or crimes involving guns or knives. Anyone who doesn't get why people don't trust the police has been living under a rock. This goes beyond just racism.
They want the story to be about rioters so they're letting them riot. It's a way to shift the public opinion (same way some cops have been seen breaking car and store windows).
Not showing up can be a tactical decision: you don't have to generate more bad press and more cries about police brutality and you also don't need to quasi-officially hand over the area to the looters.
The state's power isn't real as in "we can crush you", it rests only in everybody's fear of the state being able to crush them. If there's a chance that the state has to back down, not seeking the confrontation sounds like a smart choice to me, even if it comes at the price of a day or two of looting.
Failing to respond to looting damages the state's legitimacy. Responding to looting and failing to stop it damages the state's legitimacy. Even responding to looting and successfully stopping it damages the state's legitimacy, because mass looting signals that looting has become more acceptable.
Germany has an issue with criminal clans from the Middle East, our law enforcement system isn't equipped to deal with them and our laws in general aren't either. The approach is pretty much "try not to engage", because while it's damaging to have "extended families" with hundreds of members where basically everyone of them has a criminal record, the other option is either locking up everybody (terrible idea in Germany) or trying to reason with them and failing (showing the state tried to handle it but failed). Not engaging is just the cheapest option and does the least amount of damage (I'm not suggesting that's necessarily true for the situation in the US, I don't know it well enough).
If the Leviathan shows its teeth and the problem doesn't go away, it has to bite. If it doesn't, everybody will see that the teeth aren't that sharp any more, and that will encourage more challengers.
> The state's power is not just fear alone, it's legitimacy.
For the people that don't require laws and punishment to behave morally, yes. For those that do, they obviously don't care about legitimacy or that looting (or any crime) is wrong, otherwise they wouldn't commit it. It's only those people that any society needs to worry about, and it's only those people that the state needs to convince that it is stronger than them.
But that's effectively what doing nothing does. The state has teeth (the police) and it doesn't bite.
That's a completely unambiguous signal to both criminals and law-abiding citizens. And the results of this policy anywhere in the world is the problems have just grown in size and gotten worse.
> because while it's damaging to have "extended families" with hundreds of members where basically everyone of them has a criminal record
Remember when these "extended families" were an order of magnitude smaller and we applied the same policy of non-intervention? And look what that got us!
When are we finally going to apply the only acceptable course of action?
Kind of, but not really. If you send the police to confront the looters, you are showing your teeth, you're saying "this will stop right here and right now, or else". You have to have a plan for the "or else" part.
If you don't send the police, you're not saying anything. Everybody is aware that the police exists, but unless you assert your power, there is no challenge.
This is obviously not a possible long-term strategy, because not having any power and never asserting the power you have are functionally the same. I don't think that anybody assumes the rioting will be a long-term problem though, so that may not be an issue.
> When are we finally going to apply the only acceptable course of action?
We won't. We're doing harm-reduction, both on a society level and, for politicians, on an individual level (and for management in large companies). Kick the can down the road. Attacking the big problems before they become unavoidable isn't something our systems are set up to do, not causing disturbances is incentivized, be that in law enforcement, dealing with dead industries surviving only on subsidies, education, pollution and emissions, health care, public infrastructure etc pp. "Spending $5m on that bridge now will save us lots of money in the future" isn't what the public sees - it's "they want to waste $5m on a perfectly fine bridge".