Can you change my belief that the protesters are at risk of losing their limbs, eyesight, liberty, or lives?
These are not a question of “are all cops bad?”, it is a question of “is this even a remotely equal situation?”
Police here need those tools because there are cartels like MS-13 and other dangerous criminals they have to face on a daily basis.
Bad cops with lots of complaints are protected by police unions, that's the main problem. Get rid of those and you'll be able to fire the bad apples.
Protesters may get hurt, many of them bring it on themselves by not dispersing after a few bad apples stir things up by throwing rocks/bottles of cement/etc.
We need to call out the people disrupting the protests, not the cops trying to protect the protesters from the rioters.
However...
> Protesters may get hurt, many of them bring it on themselves by not dispersing after a few bad apples stir things up by throwing rocks/bottles of cement/etc.
I recommend you avoid this type of reasoning. After all, I’m explicitly not saying “Police may get hurt, many of them bring it on themselves by not disciplining a few bad apples who stir things up by sitting on someone’s neck until they die“, which would be an equivalent statement.
I think you and I would agree about the current police unions, although I do think there are at least two other possible solutions than getting rid of police unions entirely.
I definitely don’t agree that police need to be armed, because although I’m no longer living in the UK, I grew up there — UK cops are not only not routinely armed, their unions are mostly opposed to becoming armed.
> I do think there are at least two other possible solutions than getting rid of police unions entirely
There is no other solution, it's the corrupt union leaders protecting these cops.
The cop that killed Floyd had 17 complaints, his union protected him from being fired. The unions essentially killed Floyd.
There aren't cartel wars going on in the UK, but there is terrorism so I'm not sure whether or not UK should or does have swat/armed police.
It's not feasible to take guns away from cops here, there are too many criminals with guns, all major cartels are in Houston for example. MS-13 operates in at least 30 states.
I understand everyone wants to feel like they need to argue about this, but no one is saying these specific cops that do harm shouldn't be punished.
No group, including the police, are the problem, individual humans (including union leaders and specific politicians) are the problem.
tldr: get rid of the police unions and replace the local Democratic leadership in the cities that these events happen in to solve the issue.