After Portland tonight (/Hong Kong over the past year) we need condemnation of the universal legitimacy of state violence in International norms and the inherent illegitimacy of any non-State reaction to that violence.
Police reform needs to start delegitimising that violence.

The idea that only legitimate state actors can perpetrate violence is inherrently oppressive, but almost universally accepted.

Non-state actors transgress, by their very existence, the jus ad bellum (right to wage war) which makes any response to them unconstrained by the jus in bello (laws of war). This gives state actors free reign in the to commit violence against them and it be legitimate, regardless

Geoffry Parker, in 1994 observed that the treatment of non-state actors has been long excluded from the general trends of the increasing humanisation of war. and it leads from the Clausewitzian distinction between the state and its people, with only one being granted legitimacy.

This distinction has long meant that non-state actors have been horribly mistreated during violence from the commander of US troops 'pacifying' the Philippines ordering treating rebels like "highway robbers or pirates", but has been folded into the formal laws of war.

The legal concensus has long been that civilians are only protected as long as they are passive to a state authority.
https://books.google.com.au/books?id=CyXl4IMF9TsC&pg=PA9&lpg=PA9&dq=Evolving+Conceptions+of+Civilians+and+Belligerents:+One+Hundred+Years+after+the+Hague+Peace+Conferences&source=bl&ots=EiNHagz7ic&sig=ACfU3U3NV-yGll6hxoZIiWdxMxNJw8zB6w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjR5-LSyurqAhWKV30KHX52BAUQ6AEwAXoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

This makes violence from state authorities towards non-state actors the purvew of domestic laws and denies any recourse to this violence

The Responsibility to Protect in someway challenged these norms, but has effectively died in the international system after the polarisation of the Libyan intervention, and the abject moral failure of the global resonse to Bashar al-Assad's violence against Syrians.

But short of war, it allows inherent impunity and unaccountability of security forces in 'peacetime' against civilian actors. From the Philippines drug war, to the draconian crackdown on Hong Kong protesters, to the complete oppression of Uyghurs to the last hour in Portland.

While I've been writing this thread, I've heard people yelling at Federal cops in Portland:
"You're not above the fucking law"
"Where is the accountability?
"There's no oversight, what are we as citizens supposed to do?"

Exactly.

In the current international system (using levers built by the Global North and quickly being encouraged by the Global South) there is NO legitimate avenue for non-state actors to express anger, and there is only legitimate violent responses to it from state actors.

You also can't separate the intense violence used by oppressive dictatorships as in Syria from the unaccountability of Western police. Defending Assad's murders while opposing the Feds in Portland is idiotic.

Doing it while defending police violence in Hong Kong, doubley so.