These things usually involve backroom deals to "permit" certain places to get looted. Someone running away with loot in their arms is likely not in the business of attacking police.

Hate to say it, but the practice goes back pretty far. Even ancient Roman times. Letting the savages sack a wealthy villa can pacify the barbarian leadership and keep them from pushing further into areas more critical to the Empire.

-mart stores are on the list of "giveaways", then come the strip malls, then regular shopping malls, lastly is main street, but not gun shops. The government will always let civilians be looted as a delaying tactic which keeps the mobs from focusing attacks on government buildings.

My "directive" to do site security and evacuations is a mulit-purpose strategy. That is to make "civilian" targets such hard targets that the mobs want to bypass them and focus their efforts on the mechanism of oppressive government.

Why? I saw this play out in California in the 1990s, once the easy targets arm up and fight back, you just watch, the riot mob leaders will then demand victim disarmament. Now carefully, watch, who do they demand serve the function of disarming victims? They will make those demands to the police through their pet politicians, like Maxine Waters during her day. That's the play that needs to be made. It really forces them to show their true colors and make demands with their insider alliances. It's like when a criminal is not entirely successful in their hostility to a victim and demands the police step in and finish the job. You know where their street cred goes after that? The pits. They may be feared, but they will never be respected.

On the government side, the minute they take action against neutral parties, and do anything to restrict reasonable security measures (given the circumstances), they have abdicated authority and just become an unlawful combatant force.

Here is where that needs to be clarified. Legitimate law enforcement functions with the consent of the community and rule of law. They need both in order to maintain lawful authority status. In that, they gain certain protections according to the Constitution and recognized international law which are not afforded to military combatant forces. Popularity OR law are not sufficient, they need both. Maybe one more than the other, but they can't abandon either. Now if they manage to have both, yet carry out unconstitutional action, we can still look at that as "enemies domestic", but it varies a lot on a case by case basis, and we need to see institutionalize repression, not just some habitual "probable cause to search" violator.

It is one thing to say "without rule of law" another to bring it to pass. It puts characters like Chawn Kweli in the position of needing to focus their efforts on the police, and whoever wins that, just ends up owning city hall. City hall does NOT control the town, without consent of the governed, it's just another big building downtown.

What to wait for? Someone gets on the steps of the hall, declares the conflict over, says the militias need to disband and disarm, and that my friends, is where you hold your little press conference and tell them what the new reality is - whatever deal they made with each other, is just with each other. If they roll up hard on the people and places the militia are protecting, then its time to put someone down hard.

That's recognizing the lessons of Los Angeles of the early 1990s. During the "uprising" the Koreans organized very quickly. Many of the strip malls owned by ROK military veteran officers, and they knew how to play - against the mobs. When the police rolled up on them in force, both sides were not quite sure how to deal with it, so they cautiously parted company. In the following years however, a lot of the Korean paramilitary leadership were systematically identified and retaliated against. It is that systematic reprisal mostly at the hands of the DAs office that not so many people fully understand. Even a lot of the cops carrying out the reprisals were not sure what it was about since the whole thing was being handled by a relatively small investigative squad which was shepherded into place by Maxine Waters, making good on her political promises to her constituency. They even got a lot of the liberal Asian college students to turn against their parents and participate in rallies AGAINST those who had protected them just a few years earlier. The left had succeeded in bringing about generational warfare among the Asians in California.

Among the callouts and betrayals in that were calls that those who armed and defended neighborhoods from the rioters did so on their own initiative and were unwelcome. People even testified "when uncle showed up with a rifle, it scared us, but we did not say anything, he was in a bad mood and we just cowered as he shot at the blacks". "Uncle Pow" then goes and does a little prison time for an unregistered assault weapon... Not much time, but enough to give him felony paper and a stern warning about taking the law into his own hands. Prison rapes were threatened, until the smart old Asians figured out that there were plenty of tough convicts who would happily dismember a prison rapist for a few thousand dollars, racial hatreds not required, as the Asians got a reputation for paying on the bounties they offer.

Lucrative targets and civilian population become hard targets, and not just hard targets, but wild cards. Potential third, fourth, fifth independent pissing mad factions if their turf is violated.

It is a requirement though, for those under militia protection to openly and without duress, voice consent to that protection. If they come along years later claiming they were "intimidated" by the fat guys in camoflage with rifles, then someone needs to break out the archive tapes and newspaper clippings of the people giving consent.

That lesson is very well laid out in the Mexican Rurale militias who are fighting against the Templar Cartel in Southern Mexico. Big town meetings where everyone gets a chance to get on stage and speak welcome and support to those who have volunteered for the militia patrols and checkpoints.