Police do not exist primarily to prevent or punish crime. They exist to regulate access to space, and they manage criminality -- including generating it where it otherwise would not have occurred -- in order to legitimate the spatial hierarchy they enforce.

Police let looting happen because it vindicates their violent attempts to exclude certain types of protestors (Black people and their allies) from certain spaces. They aggressively police and imprison Black communities to justify penning them into their segregated areas.

Just look at it on the level of competency: the police are absolutely terrible at solving crimes. If you get robbed, you are never getting your stuff back, no matter who you are. But they are *awesome* at drawing lines in the sand and beating the shit out of people who cross them

The "order" in "law and order" is the order of space and which bodies belong in it. It's the order that says that a Black person doesn't belong in a nice suburb except as an employee and must therefore be chased out, or that protestors must be kept out of the Magnificent Mile.

More than individual property, police protect the *order* of property undergirded by the spatial distribution of certain types of people. And that's what the Kenosha shooter was signing up to protect -- not any individual business or home in a city he had never even visited.