No Stupid Questions

Don't forgot you are in a country were police bombed a rowhouse (both with surface level explosives and dropping a bomb from a helicopter on it), starting a fire that they allowed to burn that killed 5 children (all children of the ~7 people they were targeting) and burned 61 homes, damaging over 100 more homes (making 100's of people homeless) within the lifetime of almost all non-local elected officials and then re-elected the mayor responsible: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-largely-forgotten-history-of-philadelphias-police-bombing-of-black-organization-move https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/jmurj/vol7/iss1/3/

Yet, after the bombing, Mayor Goode and the Philadelphia Police Department received support from around the country. The Los Angeles Police Chief at the time, Daryl Gates, defended the use of an explosive device, declaring it “a sound tactic.” Gates also stated that Mayor Goode had “provided some of the finest leadership [he had] ever seen from any politician” and that he hoped Mayor Goode “ran for national office.” Michael Nutter, then an assistant to a city councilman, said “[MOVE] is a group of people whose philosophy is based on conflict and confrontation.” Roy Innis, who was the chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), called Mayor Goode’s handling of the crisis “heroic.” Tom Cremans, the former director of Accuracy Systems Inc., which sells munitions to police departments, said “the police exercised remarkable restraint in not using the device earlier.”

While there was lots of negative media, there was also a lot of positives:

The New York Times referred to MOVE as a radical group, focused more on the complaints from the neighbors against MOVE, and framed the incident as a city reacting against behavior that was well out of the norm for a working-class African American neighborhood. In the Times article, Dee Peoples, the owner of a store two blocks away from the MOVE house, said that “all you hear is aggression. You sleep with it, you wake up with it, you live with it.” The San Francisco Chronicle wrote about the group’s strange philosophy and how while it was, in theory, a “philosophy of anti-materialism, pacifism and concern for the environment,” in practice “its history was replete with violence, obscenity and filth.” The Chronicle article stated that former MOVE member Donald Glassey had testified John Africa “had planned an armed confrontation with police and had MOVE members make bombs and buy firearms.” The Lexington Herald-Leader, like the Times, described MOVE as a radical organization and defined the cause of the siege as MOVE refusing “to leave the house under an eviction order from police.” The Herald article also discussed neighbors’ complaints of “assaults, robberies, and a stench at the house.”

People justify state violence, even when it harms 100s of uninvolved people, based on how negatively they can portray those the violence was targeted at and call the their actions "law and order" and point to the aftermath of their own actions as a warzone to justify additional violence.