I respectfully disagree. I think the looters/insurgents are causing the chaos.
There are looters/rioters. But there are countless videos showing police attacking peaceful protesters. These are people protesting police violence and the police are responding with violence. Do you think that will lead to more or less chaos?
Sometimes the violence bubbles up from the bottom, like in this case (but notice the signs of systemic problems: (1) cops stop and correct the behavior of the one cop whose first impulse is compassion, (2) The police release an official statement to exonerate the cops involved which the video prove is a lie. The problem in Buffalo isn't limited to one or two cops.)
Sometimes the violence comes from the top down, like in DC when cops were apparently ordered to violently clear peaceful protestors and bystanders from a public park and church yard (including the pastor of the church!), apparently for a brief, cringy photo-op.
Top to bottom, the problem is that cops believe they are above the law, morality, or even just basic decency.
I wish we could say "cops are on the side of order." That's their job, and the whole reason police exist. The huge problem here is that they so often are not.
There has been looting, but to imply that protestors are "causing chaos" is a dishonest comparison given all evidence publicly available.
Please, you need to look beyond NYC.
The riots/looting has been happening across the US. I agree that there have been peaceful protesting, but you cannot deny that there have been riots and looting across the US.
Some black businesses have also been affected by this.
There is no justification for it.
I have White friends who were mostly silent before but are now actively publicly supporting racial justice causes. I’m not saying they were anti Black justice causes before they just weren’t aware of how bad it was. It didn’t hit them viscerally, their only Black friends were the few high income households that lived in their neighborhoods and in their social circles.
Just like I was never as an adult against LGBTQ rights. I just didn’t care either way. It just wasn’t on my radar until a few years ago.
Of course we can't really say either of us is right or wrong, because their statement inherently relied on bystanders inferring most of the meaning from context.
edit: footnipple replied in additional contexts that they've seen "a lot of destruction at the hands of some very bad people" when asked if they'd been in the protests, so I feel a little more confident that my read of the context was correct.
Maybe some fringe elements of the Iraq war protests are an exception.