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Notes -
The idea that "the media" manufactured the George Floyd protests is putting the cart before the horse. Protests were already kicking off in the twin cities by the time major media coverage started - that is what drew media coverage in the first place. They might've been able to discourage the spread of protests from the twin cities by refusing to cover it (but then, maybe not - virality is a powerful force), but they're not able to conjure conflict from nothing.
The crucial factors in the George Floyd protests were:
Poor police-community relations. In places where there's high levels of trust between the police and the community, the police get given the benefit of the doubt when they fuck up (even when they probably shouldn't). I'm not from Minneapolis, so I'm forced to rely on the opinions of acquaintances who are, and they're pretty much uniformly negative on the police department and especially the police union. See also: the Ferguson and Baltimore protests in 2014/15, where community relations were also terrible. It isn't just that one guy got killed, it's that the local police had a pattern of harassing and abusing people to the point where malice was simply assumed.
An (apparently) egregious incident. At lot of people who get killed by police either clearly deserve or at least there's enough ambiguity that people aren't going to get up in arms and the media will describe it as an 'officer involved shooting'. The absolute best you could say about Derek Chauvin is that he did nothing while a man in his custody died, and there was widely viewed footage of him doing it. It didn't help that during subsequent protests the police kept vindicating their critics.
Covid - you had a bunch of stressed out people and a larger than usual share of people not working. Without this there probably would have been protests, but nowhere near the magnitude that we actually had.
Better policing will raise trust in police, which will a) make people more willing to cooperate with the police b) make them more willing to extend the benefit of the doubt when something happens. (To a large degree this already happens - the vast majority of instances of the police misconduct pass without evoking protests and many pass without comment beyond a sanitized blurb in the local news).
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