One of the big problems is that processes and tactics that might be reasonable for a huge city like NYC or LA get picked up by smaller cities that probably don't need a more militarized police force. There's no reason East Podunk Noweheresville PD needs military-grade tactical gear and armored personnel transports.
The types, frequency, and severity of crimes are different in different sized communities. The tactics and responses should be different. But somehow, policy-makers and police chiefs see something happening in NYC and think, "Yeah, we need that here to."
In tech, people say "You are not Facebook, you are not Google, you are not Amazon. The solutions that work for them and the huge scale at which they operate are going to be overkill, or flat-out not work at all, for your 10k user start-up." And yet, people expect the tactics of a PD in a city like New York to work in a city like Raleigh, NC.
If you're trying to convince a majority to change its views, labelling them as "extreme" is unhelpful.
Many New Yorkers are within living memory of the Cold War-era crime peaks that almost destroyed our city. 9/11 and the Boston Bombing normalized a more-militarized police, as well as the NYPD building up an intelligence agency that rivals some countries'.
Looting isn't terrorism. And we have had zero mass violence from protesters. But there are good reasons for an island as dense as Manhattan to be hyper-sensitive to incipient lawlessness. (There are also bad ones.)