If we let these events continue until they die down, wouldn't that create more of a risk that a death happens than the police intervening to try to stop it?
It's a tough decision to make, police getting involved to break up crowds often escalates the violence from that crowd, look at all the protests here in the US that were mostly peaceful and get escalated by police response. Now there's a new thing to be mad about and it's unlikely to go away because the police are hard to disengage once they decide they should.