This "if I back off, I will show weakness" mentality is precisely what leads so many police officers to use excessive force despite being surrounded by bystanders pleading for mercy on behalf of their fellow citizens.
When the people have to resort to violence to get public servants to do their jobs and relieve the wounds of injustice, the only appropriate response is to give them justice.
Lastly, I remind you that the public did not initiate the use of force in this riotous controversy. A police officer did.
You will show weakness and that weakness will be exploited again. How is that debatable is beyond me.
Police are allowed to use violence, that's their reason for existing, if that violence was misused it can be handled in non-violent way, that's what society is built around. It might not be instant or easy, but that's the difference between civil discourse and terrorism.
It's not OK for the police to terrorize people. If they do so repeatedly, their authority can be revoked. I might remind you that people tried protesting this peacefully a couple of days with the conventional things like signs and chanting and got tear-gassed for their efforts.
This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
It just seems like you're failing to acknowledge the logical consequences of the idea. If the looters in Minneapolis are conducting a civil war, military force against them is justified and appropriate.
A great many people in this country feel they're already having military force deployed against them and that police are little different from an occupying army, so officially militarizing he conflict would just mean different colors of uniform and cleaner rules of engagement.
As a practical matter, a resort to military force in a domestic theater signals a failure of governance. And to the extent that it is attempted, it will further erode the support of the military for the civilian command; many veterans and active-duty personnel have no faith in the commander-in-chief, and history suggests that in such cases many troops choose to remain in their barracks.
To be sure, insurrection could have dangerous and bloody consequences, but that's why people are rebelling against it. Different people are rebelling for different reasons across the political spectrum; folk on the left are angry about the deaths of people like George Floyd or Breonna Taylor, folk on the right are angry about the death of people like Duncan Lemp or Randy Weaver. There are big differences between different groups because of differing notions about race, property, the social order, history, and so forth, but there's a wide consensus that the status quo is oppressive both at home and abroad and that regular folk feel trampled upon.
Was it not just weeks ago that the President, in response to heavily armed demonstrations in statehouses, was tweeting out 'Liberate Michigan! Liberate Wisconsin! Liberate Virgina - your 2nd amendment rights are under attack!' Now he threatens military force when a different group of people rise up against a different perception of tyranny. There's plainly a big disagreement in this country about what constitutes liberty, where life ends and property begins, and so forth - ideological questions that can be reasoned out to some degree, but highlight quite different basic premises held by people of different birth and experience. History is in many ways the tale of such fundamental disagreements.
Notions of justification and appropriateness are ultimately appeals to a higher authority - civic, judicial, parental, political, or religious. Once the nature and legitimacy of authority itself comes into dispute, differences are resolved by other means. In this historical moment people are choosing to seize authorship of their own lives rather than dully play the roles that were written out for them. Make of that what you wish.
You know, I recall a group of old white guys looting circa 1776. They attacked a boat in Boston Harbor, spilled a bunch of tea. IIRC, that turned out pretty good for a lot of us, not so much for King George.
Would you have preferred that never happened? Sometimes violence and revolution are justified. JFK said "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
The DA could've made this peaceful by simply filing charges. I mean it's a pretty open/shut case here. All 4 police officers need to be thrown behind bars for life. He should be held accountable for the looting/violence because his actions of trying to cover this up and let it just 'go away', led to the escalations.
The people in 1776 didn't loot random places, they only attacked the people abusing them. Also they didn't loot, they just poured it all in the sea to ensure the company suffered losses, they didn't do it to enrich themselves. That is very different from what is happening today, if these people only attacked the police station and left the other places untouched I would have more sympathy for them.
As another modern example, the protests in Hong Kong didn't involve looting. Instead the protesters were very well behaved except against what they protested against, and thus got a lot of support. Looting and destroying random property will just ensure that people will cheer when you get smashed by the police or military.
>if that violence was misused it can be handled in non-violent way
This is demonstrably false for the genre of police crime in question. When the people being murdered react with violence, it is unrealistic to brush that away as evil because those people aren't exclusively using the proper legal channels instead.
When the people have to resort to violence to get public servants to do their jobs and relieve the wounds of injustice, the only appropriate response is to give them justice.
Lastly, I remind you that the public did not initiate the use of force in this riotous controversy. A police officer did.