It's like OWS in a lot of ways, in that the local flavour is different depending on where you are, and it doesn't really have a national leadership so much as it does a national consensus. Anyone can say that they are BLM and not exactly be lying, so the actual crazy types who would've acted alone or joined an explicitly extremist group like the NBPP pick up the label to get themselves a sense of legitimacy and poison the well as a whole.
Isn't the lack of a true consensus what did Occupy in?
No, I'm pretty sure that was overwhelming surveillance/infiltration/police brutality. The camps were broken up with extreme force. There are organizations that spawned out of the Occupy movement that were using the label, active, and doing good things up until a couple years ago. May still be, but that's around the point I no longer had the time to pay close attention. There was a one Occupy group that organized to eliminate millions in debt for people who needed it. Multiple organizations in various cities that helped people fight against foreclosures. A couple others that helped with disaster relief in impoverished areas. That's just off the top of my head. All operating under the Occupy banner long after the camps had been destroyed, and frequently discussing their activities with the larger movement on social media.
But the mainstream portrayal of Occupy was just a bunch of people camping out in public spaces being unruly. Those people would still be around if they weren't shot with rubber bullets and tear gas, and mass arrested for weeks on end, and after police cleared that up, the mainstream portrayal of what Occupy was had been essentially eliminated. And then the story was pushed that they all broke up and wandered back to their individual lives, because they had no organization or clear message...
Seriously, there are videos out there of some of the larger war camps looking like 3rd world urban warzones, and it took many such sweeps over the course of weeks to get erase their presence. There was no lack of solidarity or tenacity, and it pisses me off the historical revisionism that I see about it so frequently, when it's not even been 5 years yet.
Disclaimer: Not sure if anyone else has commented on this, but I'm still working on catching up on the thread (I haven't been caught up in here in like a month). But I'm getting close, and thought this was recent enough that I could get away with a response.