Are the police legally allowed to assault protesters "with a deadly weapon"? Otherwise, it seems like a countersuit would be in order. "Police claim they were assaulted, therefore they admit to assaulting us."
The only reason they get away with it is that they are unwilling to enforce the law against themselves.
The problem is that QI rulings are insanely narrow, to the point where minor differences get cops off scot free. The differences can be as minor as the difference between setting dogs on a surrendering suspect in a “wooded creek” vs. in a “shrubby ditch”. And every single time this happens, a specific precedent is denied for future incidents.
You may not like their enforcement, and in some cases they are clearly going too far, but there is no real argument on the legality of the tools they are using in the situation. We gave them the right to act as the state's expression of force.
If this is your takeaway from the last two weeks, we won't be able to agree. My position is that the police are shooting rubber bullets at random citizens, and that protestors "pushing the line between peaceful and rioting" is a mostly–manufactured narrative to give them post–hoc justification for doing so.