This is typically after police have antagonized the situation and created it through tactics like kettling and surrounding protesters and then throwing grenades of tear gas and misusing rubber bullets in potentially lethal ways on nonviolent crowds.
"declared a riot" is political speak for when the police don't like a protest and begin attacking.
Here is a video of the recent Seattle protest from an aerial view. There’s no escaping this. https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/gv0ru3/this_is_the...
You say this like it's a conspiracy when there are clear maligned motives for cops to approach these things in this manner, as well as a history of it.
Sometimes, but not often.
More often, when there is a gross “overreaction”, it's a calculated attempt to suppress the message of the protestors, coordinated by leadership and instigated by various means including feeding false intelligence to the cops on the line that distorts their interpretation of facts.
But in the case of race-related issues it's often much worse than that, and this is apparently the case now. The infiltration of American law enforcement agencies by white supremacists is long-documented, there is, at the moment, an active white supremacist effort to trigger a race war, and the President of the United States is actively using language invoking historical racist government violence, and directly initiating violence against peaceful protestors. This isn't impulsive police violence, or merely violence as instrumental to winning a political debate, this is a (mostly loosely) coordinated campaign of racist violence where the violence and the harms it inflicts is, itself, a goal, and not just a callously accepted cost of some other end.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/gv2ogk/news_ch...
>Tinted windows, have to verify not occupied, 200$ insurance claim vs. potential gun in the back of your neck, stop being ignorant
For all Americans talk about having rights and freedom you do seem incredibly quick to give them up in the face of authority.
If you don't want to be told what to do, don't riot, loot, and destroy.
If you're trying to say that our citizens can just burn our cities down, and there's nothing that can be legally done about it, I really don't understand you.
In all the clips you see, they're no longer peaceful protesters. All of the clips cut out all of the context. That's the piece you're missing. Peaceful protests happen every day and the police don't order them to disperse. Police only order them to disperse when they've become a public safety hazard.
Categorically false
There are hundreds of videos showing the police brutalising peaceful protest. Watch them.
Single example - How about peaceful protestors at the Whitehouse being tear gassed, batoned and charged to make way for the president's photo op?
[1] https://twitter.com/GarrettHaake/status/1267824405876359173
Or maybe you think that holding an umbrella wrong is reason to gas and throw explosives at an entire crowd of people.
What world do you live in? I could just go on a murder spree and when police come to arrest me I can just tell them "you can't tell me what to do", and they'll say "shucks, he's right, guess we'll let him on his way".
By the way, you're being doublespeaky when you say "protest is legal". It sure is. But the vast majority of these altercations come from after a group has been declared a riot, a public safety hazard, and ordered to disperse. They're no longer peaceful protesters when the cops have to use force to shut it down.