"And I know that most protesters for BLM have not engaged in violence, vandalism or looting, but BLM does not seem to have gone out of its way to condemn the minority who have carried out this behavior either."
I am sorry but that's simply not true, BLM talked immediately after the first night of unrest requesting protesters to not resort to inappropriate behavior and remain peaceful (which actually caused them a lot of backlash in Minneaopolis), the problem is that the peaceful protests got hijacked, by looters who had nothing to do with the BLM movements and were working, in part to discredit it (not saying no one from BLM looted, because some did, just that the violence wasn't necessarily started by BLM protesters and got escalated by people outside the movement.).
On the FIRST night of the protest, 2 men in a van shot and killed an officer guarding an official building in California.
Of course, people immediately assumed it was protesters and that BLM protesters where now out there begging for blood, and making their own justice. This death and the scale of the protests, meant that ALMOST IMMEDIATELY, the national guard was sent to California and all over the place and we started having curfews and police cars, absolutely everywhere (helicopter included), because Trump branded BLM protesters as Domestic Terrorists, emphasizing that they (we) were a threat to the country, giving with those words, almost total impunity to police to sort the problem however they saw fit, police immediately escalated violence, turning fairly peaceful protests into violent scenes (again, I am sure you have seen the videos of Police Cars running over protesters, police violence etc...) they arrested over 10 000 protesters, most of them for no reason other than being there.
It's important you grasp the context of what happened here, and how it started and how far it went, because turns out what? Turns out that the two people who killed that first officier in California (and ended up killing a second one 2 weeks ago in Santa Cruz) got arrested, and not only were they white and had NOTHING to do with Black lives matter, but they were actually part of a right-wing extremist group officially recognized as a domestic terrorist organization, but not only THAT, one of the two perpetrators was an ACTIVE Air Force army officer on his permission.
I don't know if you grasp what it means? It means that the violence you saw on TV, started and escalated because 2 white right-wing guys, ACTUAL domestic terrorists, one of them an active soldier, HIJACKED the protests, killed a first officer (black!) and escaped long enough to give enough time and leaving not enough information on who they were and/or their race to not assume it wasn't protest-related (conveniently for the government may I add), which gave enough leeway to the government to not only label BLM protesters as domestic terrorists (note the irony) but to send heavily armed police AND the army (again note the irony) on mostly unarmed civilians and giving them almost free room to keep the ''peace'' and forcing civilians to stay indoors against their will (due to enforced curfews) in any way they saw fit. Conveniently the perpetrators of the first murder (again against a black officer) were only found after they killed a (White) police officer in Santa Cruz, in the SAME van they killed the first one.
I am not sure if you realize how unlikely this is, California was surrounded by cops and army guys, absolutely everywhere, we had curfews and everything, how is it possible that for over a week 2 guys could kill people with one van, easily identifiable via video travel from one major California city to another, in a police filled city ( California was the strictest with quarantine so you had patrol even before the protest as we weren't allowed further than 5/10 miles away from our home) without being caught.
What I am trying to say is that BLM did send out a peaceful message, but the protests were hijacked from day 1 (by white right-wing extremists) in a way that was orchestrated to force people to increase and or respond in violence.
If when you watched the protests on TV the main thing you saw and focused on was the looting, then you only had a glimpse of what happened here in California and the US, you only saw what they wanted to show you, yes people were looting, but a black officer was the FIRST victim of the protest (at the hand of two white men, one an army officer), plenty more died as a results of this hijacking, some women lost their baby, some are hospitalized with life changing injuries.
I don't stand for everything the organization BLM stands for, but the was no way for BLM to stop it because the bad apples didn't come from them.
In other words, if you felt bad looking at the stores being destroyed and burnt but didn't grasp why and how it had escalated, and felt it was just ungrateful twats, destroying their neighborhoods, I hope it helps.
Protests are STILL going on right now, every day, massive ones, if you don't hear or see about them anymore, it's because they are PEACEFUL, and there is nothing interesting to twist anymore. The stores you saw burning on TV two weeks ago? People have come together to fix them, repair them, paint them, if you go to the city you saw burning you won't see the destruction shown to you, because people did loot, but people also owned up to their responsibility and came back to fix it (at least for the most part).
What you are shown about the US is probably about 10% of what happens here ( I am not American so I remember European news about the US vs the reality of life here and what's actually going on, on top of what's publicized), it's okay if you (or others) don't understand most policies BLM wants to implement (I don't always either) because the UK is a much different place anyway, but it's important to understand that there is A LOT going on here that's fucked up and justify a lot of what might come across as extreme policies.
Right now, as we speak, hangman noose are being hanged at trees, all over the place, and in recent days, a suspicious amount of black men have been found hanging, all (conveniently) ruled as suicide.
The US needs a massive overhaul, it needs extreme policies, things we would never consider and might seem crazy to us as Europeans but as a mixed race (half-black) queer woman who have lived all over the world, sometimes in not the most liberal or safest places, have never felt as mistrusting and scared as I am living in the US, because I know the government would do me more harm than good in almost every possible situation, and I live in the most liberal part of California/the country.