These police tactics aren't working

This is not something I just thought of, I first noticed it in 1992 standing on a hill, watching the MLK day riot in Denver (In an insane IRL troll, the KKK got a permit to have an assembly on the state capitol steps where the MLK day parade ended).

The last few days I've been watching the helicopter feeds with scanner audio from Los Angeles and it's obvious that the LAPD has well-defined strategies of setting up police lines to attempt to direct the protests in certain directions and often using multiple lines to squeeze protests and then make arrests (which fails to happen in numbers) ...but these tactics don't seem to work for 2 reasons:

1. When the mass of protesters move by themselves they are somewhat predictable but when the police lines start attempting to move protesters they scatter chaotically and reassemble in areas where there are no cops because all the cops are concentrated on their lines which means...


2. When cops are concentrated in one or a few areas and protesters are moving chaotically that leads to looting because protesters know where the cops are so they know they can get away with mayhem.


It seems like the obvious change would be to closely monitor protests with cops more visibly spread out in the area and let the protestors move organically because they would be move more predictably, which is good, and a police presence over a wider area would be a visible deterrent to property destruction and theft.


I understand that there are significant downsides to this as far as to possible officer safety and that traffic may be more negatively impacted for longer periods but the way police deal with these situations now isn't working evidenced by all the damage and theft. There are two options, let the cops go full assault mode on protesters, which won't happen, or come up with better strategies.