There’s kind of an issue in that a lot of police decide a person is inherently threatening rather than actually presenting threatening behaviour and assume that if they are physically capable of so much as craning their neck they will use that movement to launch an assault at any moment, (sometimes even that much freedom of movement is not required and they can be on the ground, asleep, or in the middle of a debilitating stroke and still be treated as an active threat that must be put down before anything else,) escalate a situation beyond all sense engaging in dangerous physical confrontation with no provocation whatsoever, and then in the aftermath work backwards to justify that escalation. And then people take the involvement of the police as all the evidence needed that whatever they did was justified by default.
But this escalation - and the reaction to that escalation - is often subject to a perception bias that defies all reason. The difference between how people reacted to Cliven Bundy’s armed standoff with police and their excusing his decade of breaking the law with illegal grazing, arson, trespassing, assault, etc. insisting that he had rights that needed defending regardless and that police were being unreasonable by being there at all and the shooting deaths of more young black men than I can bear to think about is stark indeed. When the justifications for the latter start by seriously questioning what those men were doing in places open to the public as though this in itself was criminal any reasonable person would have to call bullshit but somehow not only does this fly but so much as a noise violation becomes grounds for entirely revoking someone’s rights on the spot and retroactive justifications become routine.
And then you get into the contradictory “should haves” that are inevitable. For example some people (and Sean Hannity) say if you’re carrying a gun you should tell the police and even show them the gun because just catching sight of a holster has been enough justification for police to start shooting and not telling them is actively “hiding” your gun and "suggests” violent intent. But Philando Castile got as far as telling the officer he had a gun before being shot repeatedly. And actually flashing a gun at officers? Just adjusting your shirt can get you shot because you “might” have a gun. Some people only get as far as opening their mouths before having violence visited upon them for talking out of turn, which is also then somehow justified as was the case for a man trying to show his autistic charge how to comply with police. The same thing that is taken as “compliance” is also “resisting” at the same time depending how something needs to be justified. There’s literally no winning. Action and inaction are taken as justifications.
Speaking of the man shot for trying to save the life of his autistic charge who was playing with a toy truck in the middle of the road while police were evidently training guns on him about to shoot the treatment of people with mental illnesses or handicaps who might not even be able to understand the situation is equally grim and excused just as fast.
And then on the other end of the scale there’s the even more infuriating differences in treatment when you get to the rich and famous. A poor man could be told to shut up for complaining that police blew the front doors off his house to execute a search warrant, parked a tank on his lawn, tossed flashbangs, menaced their family with assault rifles and generally treated it less like a police search and more like an assault on a terrorist stronghold… But if you’re rich you can demand an apology for police not calling ahead of time and asking when it’s convenient to stop in and look for anything incriminating.
And if all that was too long to bother reading just ponder basic fact that when you give people power without holding them accountable to their actions they will abuse it, and when their abuses are not merely tolerated but defended it will become so habitual that they genuinely forget what their original job was possibly degenerating to the point where they’re indistinguishable from organized crime running protection rackets and roughing up anyone who doesn’t bow and scrape to preserve their street cred and that just undermines the public trust and makes everyone generally less safe. Also it’s pretty stupid to pay what then becomes criminals to do crimes to you.