Should Minneapolis pay for ALL damage nationwide resulting from their police murdering a citizen?

It's going to be in the hundreds of millions (including the wrongful death lawsuit/s), and it seems to me that Minneapolis - which failed to rein in/fire the white supremacist cop who smilingly murdered an unarmed man - should pay for ALL of it, from smashed cop cars in Los Angeles to the looting of stores big and small.

I'm not saying looters & etc. shouldn't be punished, but since they have no money, and Minneapolis should have known what would happen if they enabled a white supremacist LEO, they're on the hook for ALL of it.

 

Everyone is responsible for what they do- NOT for what someone else does in reaction because they can't control themselves.
The cop comes first. His actions were overkill, and outside his authority and the rules. His superiors are responsible for charging and prosecuting his misdeeds. Unless they instructed him to act this way or knowingly allowed it, their responsibility doesn't go much deeper.

Anything- ANYTHING- that protestors did because "they were angry" is fully and totally the responsibility of themselves. They could easily have killed people in their violent thoughtless rage, and at a minimum did major damage to innocent people's property as well making people see their neighborhood as an extremely dangerous place.
The protestors are fully responsible for all of that, and it IS criminal, it is NOT justifiable.
The people who participate in such riots are the dregs of society- not responsible people.

The cop was wrong, but there is no reason to believe that he intended to kill. There was a crime, most probably manslaughter.
However the rioters most certainly intended to set fire to stores and put the entire community as risk. There is a long list of intentional crimes here, including arson.
There is no justification between these things, both are individually accountable for what they did- and the intent to commit crime is an aggravating factor, increasing the level of responsibility.

 

I agree with almost everything you said. The only thing I would add is that the legal system needs to take care that justice is even handed in the way it is administered.

 

Time was when a police presence was enough to keep order and crime down in any area. Society did a lot of their own policing. Much has changed since then. Social programs that discourage self sufficiency have created masses of people who are caught up in an endless cycle of poverty and all of it's attendant problems. This group has become completely demoralized by their situation, hope has been replaced with a sort of law of the jungle mentality, it's about survival. For some it is just about protecting what is theirs and trying to steer their families away from the more negative aspects. For others it's manifested in drugs, crime, gangs and complete disregard for law and order. These people have a skewed sense of self respect and have no respect for others especially those outside of this culture and law enforcement. The flip side of the coin is law enforcement that suffers from their own demoralization. In many cases police work is a hazardous, underpaid, and thankless job and police officers suffer the same sort of hopelessness that people in the inner city suffer from. There is a sense of frustration that arises from an endless cycle of failure, that what they do achieves nothing and that they're trapped. It takes an extraordinarily solid professional to perform in such an environment. Thankfully the majority of law enforcement officers are of this ilk but there are those who for one reason or another adopt the us v them mentality. It is those individuals in a situation like what happened in Minneapolis that create a sort of perfect storm. Usually there's a lot of finger pointing but nothing addresses the real problems. Law enforcement candidates need to be more thoroughly vetted and paid commensurately with the demands of the job. Solving the problems of the inner city is more complicated and until there is the political will to deal with it, a genuine desire to change the culture the cycle will continue. We are almost six decades in with this problem and nothing of consequence has changed and things actually have gotten worse. This is not just a problem in Minneapolis.