> after all these years and with all development in surveillance tech distinguish between peaceful demonstrators and rioters. One could almost believe that they have no interest in making that distinction.
The thing is that they can. That's a very deliberate tactic, down to planting of provocators.
If you been watching what's going on around the world, the allegations of that, including provocator planting, followed pretty much every major demonstration event.
It's naive, if not silly, to use that "hey, he started it first!" argument at the time when the fact of confrontation happening is already obvious.
The talk now should not be who started the violence, but how to end it, a peace treaty to say.
There exists an asymmetry in the dynamics of protesters vs police during a protest. Very simple:
Anyone can be 'planted' in a group of protesters to start stirring up trouble (agent-provocateur). Then the police have 'justification' to use whatever amount of force they think is required.
On the other hand, it's practically impossible for a regular citizen to be embedded into a riot police response unit.
Add to that the police have practically no real oversight and investigate themselves (assuming internal affairs counts as police).
One side can't fail (except morally), while the other side always will end up with the shorter end of the stick.