People sometimes feel like if a story isn't on HN's front page, that we, or the community, feel like it's unimportant. That's not it at all. Rather, importance is not the quality that organizes HN. If it were, HN would not exist. An entirely different website, or no website, would exist in its place.
The organizing principle of HN is intellectual curiosity [1]. Everything we do here derives from that [2]. In the case of a thread like this one, the question I have as a moderator (not as a human being or a citizen) is whether this community, in its particular manifestation in this thread, is able to have a thoughtful conversation in which curiosity is present, or whether it is not. We sometimes turn off user flags if the answer is yes, but not if the answer is no.
That doesn't necessarily have to do with the story itself being on-topic or off-topic for HN. A story like this (or rather the cluster of stories around George Floyd, the protests, the riots, and related topics like police violence) is too big to be called on-topic or off-topic. It depends on the particular submission and the particular thread. HN has had several major threads related to this story and I'm sure it will have more.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...