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The steelman to there being no two-tier policing is that the difference in police response to different demographics is motivated not by racism, but instead by a desire to prevent escalation to violence. The police know that if they break up a BLM riot, the next day half of London will be aflame, so they don't touch it. But milquetoast anti-lockdown protesters, who are maybe protesting for the first time in their life? There's no risk to baton charging them, so they get baton charged. Repeat for Hamas vs Israeli marches. If they start arresting tens of thousands of Islamists for terrorism offences, as the letter of the law would demand, they'd face retaliatory terror attacks. Peaceful Jewish counter-protesters might similarly provoke the violent Islamists, however, and need to be stopped.
This steelman is the mainstream response to arguments of two-tier policing (when not simply ignored). The police are biased because they're pragmatic, rather than because they are racist or serving as the paramilitary wing of the Labour party.
It has two problems
Yeah, my gut says we're failing the Turing test. That reads too closely to online doomer well-of-course-the-whites-won't-revolt rage thinking. A person that thinks that nativist uprisings in this context are completely unjustified isn't going to defend their position with a through-and-through justification of the lopsided enforcement. Maybe they do, but if they're a dedicated pragmatist, then surely they can see the inherently impractical nature in failing to sufficiently placate the majority native population? All you have to do is demonstrate that the majority is sufficiently cared for and protected from [bad people]. It doesn't take much to Set Examples for said population. If there were enough examples to support a policy choice they'd be easy to point to?
It may be the case that the authorities deliberately decided it was safer to align against the majority to some extent, but I'm struggling to think of alternatives explanations that aren't ideological. If it's been a misjudgment of pragmatic policy (less strife and chance of ethnic misgivings if we stack the deck this way) that'd be one thing, but it's ended up so predictably wrong I don't know how you can really say it was a practical policy choice at all. UK decided to do this in 2005 when all was nice enough and inertia carried it through 20 years I guess?
You are right, but you asked for the Steelman argument. That isn't the political turing test argument for it, which is that two-tier policing in any form doesn't exist.
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