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But in 2020, after George Floyd died at the hands of police and wave of protests against police brutality spread across the US, police drove their vans into crowds of protesters, shot paint canisters at people standing on their own porches, fired rubber bullets at reporters and arrested other reporters live on television, and pulled down protesters’ masks to pepper spray them in the face in the midst of a respiratory pandemic.
There is a gap between the ways in which the police behave and the ways in which the public perceives them. And for a long time, police have behaved as though they think pop culture is responsible for that gap.