The public notion of good policing and the actual practices police departments follow have been diverging for several decades (if they ever converged). What we're seeing right now is not some inexplicable increase in bad behavior or cops deliberately targeting journalists. For modern American police this is just business as usual, except the volume of deployment is significantly higher than in the past few decades and the visibility is much higher as well.
Edit:
There is a flip side to this coin. When you have a systemic problem of this scale, you should be cautious about making simplistic (especially moral) judgements about individuals in the system. When someone's training, incentives, position in the community and even equipment nudge them towards bad actions, even decent people will routinely do bad things.
Lobster brain claims another. I have to say that one of the most overlooked forms of anti-intellectualism in modern life is the immediate discount of anything that uses even remotely complex terminology or looks in the general direction of critical theory.
"Critical theory" isn't even a thing and barely even intersects with post-modernism, although I suppose it shares some philosophical leanings. It's just a repackaging of Marxist ideals applied to other demographic groupings besides class, and it's just as easily disproven.
Edit: Thanks to whoever downvoted me, because they had nothing worthwhile to say in response. Rejection of objective truth is a core principle of post-modernism, you can ask the post-modernists yourself if you like, they'll agree. Meanwhile speaking the truth earns you hate since the rise of post-modernism.
Weird. I wonder why there's a Wikipedia article for something that's "not even a thing"[0].
> It's just a repackaging of Marxist ideals applied to other demographic groupings besides class, and it's just as easily disproven.
Can you cite a single critical theorist who simply transposes class analysis to "other demographic groupings"? The theorists I've read actually stray pretty far from the concept of class conflict, and they do not construct, for example, "gender conflict" or "race conflict" out of the "ideals" such as class conflict. Is there any evidence for your claim at all? Or are you claiming that any analysis of conflict between demographics is simply a repackaging of class conflict?
You fail to recognize the specificity of the idea of class conflict, and why it can't be "repackaged" as an abstraction. As an abstraction, all you're left with is "societal conflict", but nobody would deny that there is some conflict in society of some kind. The concepts of economic exploitation, alienation, historical and current primitive accumulation, base and superstructure, etc. are all core to class conflict analysis, but from what I've read, few if any of these are present in the literature on race and gender.
And while we're on the topic, can you point to which "easy disproofs" you're talking about as they relate to class conflict or "other demographic" conflicts? Ironically, the same critical theorists you claim "aren't a thing" were the same ones to argue against the traditional conception of class conflict (e.g. Marcuse).