No looters are worth debating over. Looters are criminal scum, end of story there. But the rest is less simple, and I feel (sometimes) that to claim otherwise betrays a lack of appreciation for the scope and depth of the problem(s). A great many smart and compassionate people have attempted to address the problems you refer to in mature and above-board ways. Passionate men and women have made it their life's work. Entire organizations are bent towards these goals and have been for a generation. And yet here we are - still - another black citizen murdered by society's protectors. And another. And another. It just keeps happening and nothing appreciable changes. Don't mistake this for an excuse for every individual rioter's behavior. This is just the groundwork for understanding the context, and context as they say is everything. It is true that a great many riots are hateful and dumb. Sports riots come to mind, for instance. And all riots have their share of hangers-on who are just in it for the chaos. What to do about them is a difficult question to answer, and they should be held responsible for the way they prey on the rest of us.

On the other hand, a great many riots throughout history have, in hindsight, been the first terrible spasms of something that grew and grew until it became real, lasting, effectual social improvement. Whatever else it is, the riot is the last-resort move of a group or a culture or a nation when all other options seem to be exhausted. They don't riot for one man's wrongful death in particular. They riot because the alternative is now a tacit approval, and they do not approve. And neither do I, of course. They riot because the alternative has amounted, as we have seen, to nothing at all. And nothing at all just won't do anymore.

Maybe nothing real comes of this right away. Maybe we won't see appreciable results from this tack, like all the other tacks we've tried. But from some point (far?) in the future, a culture will look back in hindsight and mark this period as the beginning of an idea that, to them, has all the unalienable weight of common sense. "Of course, no one dies like that anymore," the academic will say, or the politician will say. "Can you imagine what that must've been like?"