Remember when over 100K mortgage were falsify, highly likely by both the people who applied for the loan and definitely by the banks who gave out the loan and quite a few intermediaries.... which lead to the GFC... and no one went to jail over it? Maybe a couple of hundred thousand people committed fraud which destroyed the economy and no one went to jail. Yes, I repeated it because its so stupendously stupid. Thanks Bush/Obama. Like the GFC, there is way too many people to arrest now
But, in actual fact, these governors/ PDs probably following the manual on protest developed by the US army a while ago. Cracking down on protest leads to more protest and possibly an overthrow of the government. It was developed because its been used MANY times as a way to overthrow other countries (the latest being Libya). If your objective is to overthrow a government, your objective is to make the government over react to protest. It calcifies the population against the government. A small example of this was the Oregon Mums reaction to federal police cracking down.