> No, the people demand that everyone respect the laws and remain peaceful.

I don't think that's true in practice in America, at all. It's certainly the cover story, though.

Demonstrably, the people (as a collective group) have only ever demanded that from non-police. Police have a long, long history of deploying illegal violence against anyone even suspected of breaking the law, prior to trial, up to and frequently including executing them.

Historically, "the people" (again, as a group) do not seem bothered by this at all, simply because that's the way it's always been. It's expected and accepted that the police will deploy a significant amount of (not legally permitted) violence against anyone even suspected of breaking the law, hence the common shout of "STOP RESISTING" (usually deployed against those who aren't resisting at all) during police-initiated violence. It's a farce; the police are de facto exempt from the laws regarding battery by American social consensus. This is obvious to anyone paying attention. No effort is made to conceal this fact because there is no significant outrage or pressure to change anything about the situation. Violent police in the US are the widely-accepted and expected norm, and there isn't usually even a debate about it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/2020PoliceBrutality/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Davis_pepper_spray_incident

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE#1985_bombing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots

Seriously, think about it: the police have no special legal exception from the laws for beating or otherwise battering people when dispersing riots, giving chase to a suspect, or effecting an arrest. Most people seem to have entirely lost track of that fact in the "police vs baddies" battle narrative, and assume that anyone suspected or accused by police must be deserving of at least a few whacks with a nightstick, or possibly even execution if the officer, at their sole discretion, deems it appropriate. That's about as far from "due process" or "presumption of innocence" as you can possibly get. The set of laws that applies to police is simply not the same set of laws that applies to you and I, and that gap is entirely a social contract one, not a legally-codified one.

It's reflected in the intense indignation of police and police unions when they are (very) occasionally charged with crimes of violence whilst doing their jobs. To them, they're doing what's expected of them: deploying expected (yet illegal) violence against suspected criminals.

https://news.wttw.com/2020/06/08/having-talk-how-families-pr...

https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000003575589/a-conv...

> To that end, the people fund and enact a police force to protect life and property, and to apprehend suspected criminals.

The police in the US have only ever been really diligent about protecting the life and property of a small subset of the population, primarily large landowners. Meanwhile, they pose a significant danger to the life and property of a much larger segment, and always have. The reason the police were first created in America was to capture escaped slaves and to keep the poor from looting and torching the mansions of the white landowning class.

The tradition continues to date. You can see this gap in the amount of case-solving effort the police in the US put into crimes against the police force themselves or large buildings/retail, and the amount of case-solving effort they put into crimes against the property of non-HNWI individuals, or the amount of case-solving effort they put into violence against women. Their priorities are extremely clear, and to hold up police behavior as "law and order" is simply the motte in this argument, as their behavior is anything but a reasonable or fair application of the law. The police, for example, basically never enforce any laws against other police (or their families), even when violations are entirely obvious, and this is extremely well-documented.

It extends to the prosecutorial apparatus that supports the police, too. This is one of the primary reasons that minorities and poor people are incarcerated at an extremely out-of-proportion rate to the rest of the population.

Those calling for the abolition or defunding of the police would, funnily enough, actually be thrilled with more thoroughly consistent application of actual "law and order" and not the two-tiered system of police-initiated violence and authoritarian choke-holding and skull-cracking that passes for same by tradition in the US.

I wrote about one facet of this bizarre police-to-American-public apparently undocumented social contract in June:

https://sneak.berlin/20200628/the-problem-with-police-in-ame...