https://www.city-journal.org/toxic-narrative-about-police-is-wrong
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in police custody in Minneapolis—a death that appears, from all video evidence, to be a brutal and unjustified use of police force—rioters have set cities ablaze across the United States, looting businesses, destroying property, and attacking police. For many, this prolonged civil unrest is shocking. It shouldn’t be. Police have been the targets of a poisonous, decades-long campaign to paint law enforcement as a violent cog in the machine of a racially oppressive criminal-justice system. As more and more serious-minded people embraced this narrative and disregarded the astonishing progress made in racial tolerance, the question ceased to be whether America would see the large-scale riots of the kind that occurred in the mid- to late 1960s—when charges of widespread racism in policing had some merit—but only a question of when.
Many protest supporters have expressed frustration with the attention being given to a relative handful of agitators driving the violence and looting—behavior, they say, that distorts the image of what is largely a peaceful movement. Their frustration is understandable but also ironic: the narrative that has driven thousands into the streets is itself a distortion. Just as the violence that has alarmed the American public does not represent the peaceful protesters exercising their right to air their grievances, the police violence depicted in viral videos does not characterize the institution of law enforcement.
