I guess one person dead qualifies as "harmless" in america, huh?

That one person was (at least based on what we know currently) shot dead by police. All of the HN comments about how dangerous this is and how the police needed to be more aggressive are effectively calling for more people to have died - because that's the inevitable consequence of what they want. (I've seen people in communities less polite and aggressively moderated than HN, but pulling from more or less the same tech community, outright calling for the police to open fire.)

Normal police are trained in crowd control, and they plenty of non lethal ways to achieve that. Calling for police to be more aggressive is not the same as calling for more people to be killed.