Political reform? How many people protesting actually voted in their municipal and state elections?
Even if that were the case, it would be a pretty solid argument to focus on more tractable problems rather than whatever the past few months have been.
Saying "Other options have been tried and failed." Is BS post-hoc justification. This round of BLM started because of 1 egregious viral video in a country of 300,000,000 when a whole bunch of young people had nothing better to do. When your dealing with complex systems like police-community interactions, you will never be able to completely eliminate egregious incidents, even if you can reduce the incident rate by 90%. Any kind of legitimate attempt to improve the situation will necessarily involve something resembling multiple A/B tests carried out over multiple areas and multiple years to understand the relationship between policy, environment, culture, and policing outcomes. This will necessarily take time, it will be extremely expensive, and the gains will be marginal. That's just how things work when your dealing with massive complex systems and rare events.
It wasn't just one video, it wasn't one just one incident, It's not a small amount of people who are upset, and it's not okay.
Quite a few of the protesters have documented why they're out in the street. If anyone is having difficulty understanding the situation, I recommend reading what they've said.
For me personally, it was very educational to bear witness to people protesting police brutality being met with more police brutality---not justified force escalation, but attempts to bait protesters into breaking laws to justify arrests, antagonize nonviolent protests hoping for violent ones, and straight up lying about the situation on the ground. The last part I find insulting, because it's not like the video cameras aren't there. They know the video cameras are there. They believe the system will protect them from violating their own protocols and the law, and so far, it does.
