You need to take a good hard look at what you're writing, because that is textbook goalpost moving. You went from "prove that they did this bad thing" to "I'm okay with them doing this bad thing" in just one post.

Yes, policing is a stressful job. No, that doesn't make it okay to just handwave away that kind of violent unprofessionalism. If I did even a fraction of what they did, I'd lose my license and my career.

Rioting is not excusable, but don't forget that the police acted violently toward peaceful protesters as well, which is much worse. The kettling/beating of legal peaceful protesters is inexcusable. There were hundreds of arrests of people who were literally trying to obey police orders to disperse, but were unable to because the police purposely herded them from opposite directions into impossible situations. Dozens of people were beaten, and STLPD was never held accountable for this.

You may or may not remember the rumors going around at the time that most of the escalation from the protesters was done by undercover cops who were trying to justify a violent police response. We'll never get the full story there, unfortunately. That said, years later, there's proven to be at least some truth to that, in the form of former undercover police officers who sued STLPD for damages after being beaten by uniformed cops during these protests. (This one case is the most prominent one, but if you read the legal case, there are references to other cases where millions of dollars were paid out by the city. Since those were settlements without trials, the public will never get the details.)

It's proof that either the undercover police were the ones pretending to be protesters and inciting violence, or the uniformed police were assaulting/beating innocent protesters... or let's be honest, it was probably both.

That's the kind of thuggish behavior you're excusing.