NEW YORK– Countless New Yorkers over the last couple of days have required to the streets in all 5 districts, setting cop vehicles aflame, braving whippings by batons and suffering pepper spray to the eyes, all so they can shriek an urgent message for all the world to hear: Fuck the cops.
They marched in Manhattan, where the New York City Authorities Department once gunned down Patrick Dorismond
In Queens, where the NYPD shot 50 bullets at Sean Bell
In the Bronx, where an NYPD police officer choked the life out of Anthony Baez
In Brooklyn, where the NYPD shot 13- year-old Nicholas Heyward Jr
And they marched on Staten Island, where the NYPD took the breath from Eric Garner‘s lungs.
Nearly 2,000 protesters were jailed over 5 nights as America’s biggest city signed up with a national uprising versus police brutality that saw demonstrations in about 140 cities, a mass discontent the likes of which this country hasn’t seen in over a generation.
There were moments in New york city when it felt like this multi-racial union of protesters, led largely by youths of color, was reclaiming the streets from the NYPD, a police force bigger than some countries’ armies that’s terrorized this city’s Black and brown homeowners since its founding.
It felt like a growing number of individuals here had come to question the police officers’ monopoly on force and to embrace the extreme idea of defunding the department, or even the abolitionist dream of a New York without New York’s Finest at all.
And so New york city’s Finest erupted in violence.
A cop speeding a patrol vehicle into the middle of a crowd of protesters. A cop pulling down a male’s mask– worn to protect against the coronavirus– and pepper-spraying him in the face. Another pushing a lady into the ground so hard that she went into a seizure
I experienced cops brutalize and detain people before being violently arrested myself.
And yet by Monday, New York’s Democratic guv, the city’s mayor and the country’s Republican president had actually chosen comparable services to all the turmoil: suppressing this historical uprising with more armed agents of the state.
To the protesters, it felt like their government still hadn’t heard them at all, and most likely had never been eavesdroping the first place.
” The Only Fucking Way They Understand”
On Saturday in the Flatbush area of Brooklyn, thousands collected outside the Parkside Opportunity train station under the afternoon sun for a series of speeches prior to that day’s marches. Individuals hung out of windows and curtained Black Lives Matter banners off of fire leaves while listening to the speakers below.
” You understand how screwed up it is to turn on the news and see another nigga that look like you dead?” a young Black man asked the crowd through a loudspeaker.
” If you white,” he included, “and you not in the crowd, not on the fire escape, not on the roofing system shrieking ‘Black lives matter’ in New york city City … then get the fuck out!”
He and all the other speakers, all Black or Hispanic or Native American, invoked the names of Americans whose recent murders had actually triggered the presentations rocking lots of U.S. cities: Breonna Taylor, shot by authorities in Louisville, Kentucky; Ahmaud Arbery, shot and killed while jogging in Georgia by a previous police officer and his child; and George Floyd, killed in Minneapolis just 8 days ago, when a police officer pushed a knee into Floyd’s neck and kept it there like a noose.
” We are George!” the crowd chanted.
Protest in Brooklyn getting huge. pic.twitter.com/aAI2kNn2H6
— Christopher Mathias (@letsgomathias) May 30, 2020
Constance Malcolm, the mother of 18- year-old Ramarley Graham, who was eliminated by the NYPD in 2012, was signed up with on the podium by her son Chinoor Campbell, who was only 6 years of ages when he saw a white police shoot his unarmed big brother inside his own house.
A few years earlier, Malcolm revealed me the bloodstained bath mat she continued a shelf in her home, from when the cop’s bullet tore through her kid’s heart. She could not bring herself to toss it away, she stated.
Malcolm has marched in many demonstrations against authorities cruelty in this city, and I as soon as visited her as she slept on the walkway outside a Department of Justice building in Manhattan, demanding a civil liberties examination into her boy’s murder.
But to the crowd in Flatbush on Saturday, Malcolm argued that such nonviolent actions just have not accomplished what requires to be accomplished.
” We see all the looting and burning structures down and whatever going on, and they call us goons,” Malcolm said, describing all the unpredictable demonstrations throughout the nation, particularly in Minneapolis, where protesters ransacked and after that burned down a police precinct.
” I’m not condoning the burning and things,” she continued, “however it’s the only fucking method they understand!”
The crowd roared. A brief time later on, Malcolm grabbed onto a banner that said “Justice for George Floyd,” her making it through son at her side, and led the crowd as it began to march through the streets.
Chants of “Who keeps us safe?
Citizens– much of whom have been stuck in their houses, out of work and sheltering from COVID-19, which has actually devastated predominantly Black and brown working-class areas like Flatbush– piled out onto the walkways to watch and in some cases take part.
An old guy inside a bodega described to another old man what the march was all about, pointing to his knee, and then to his neck.
People in vehicles– consisting of sanitation workers in a trash truck, and the chauffeurs of Flatbush’s one-dollar vans, who are routinely bugged by the NYPD for offering low-cost trips for locals in an area with scant subway service– honked horns to cheer on the protesters.
Auto shop employees stepped out of their store to dance and toss up fists of uniformity.
Every automobile the protesters pa