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Thousands Of New Yorkers Protest Police Killing Of George Floyd As NYPD Responds With Batons And Pepper Spray
By
Nick Pinto
and
Jake Offenhartz
Published May 30, 2020
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Scott Heins / Gothamist
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By
Nick Pinto
and
Jake Offenhartz
Published May 30, 2020
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Busloads of people were arrested and some hospitalized across New York City on Friday as thousands of New Yorkers gathered for the city’s largest street demonstrations of the pandemic era to protest racist police violence.
The protesters were met with an overwhelming show of force from the NYPD, who beat them with batons, shot them with pepper spray, shoved them to the ground, and knocked into them with moving vehicles.
The protests, like others around the country, were touched off by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Floyd was videotaped by bystanders pleading for his life as officer Derek Chauvin, who has since been fired by the Minneapolis Police Department, knelt on his neck. Three days later, Chauvin was charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter. Thursday night, angry protesters in Minneapolis had taken over a police precinct and set it on fire.
Listen to the Gothamist reporter Jake Offenhartz on WNYC
“I’m angry. I’m very angry,” said Shirley, a 25-year-old black woman from Yonkers who attended a rally in Manhattan yesterday. “Racism isn’t a black person’s problem,” she said through tears. “It’s a white person’s problem to correct it. But we, we have to carry it in our bodies.”
“I’m tired of the injustice, and of nothing being done,” said Tyrese Cheeseboro, a 49-year old teacher from Brooklyn, who also attended the protest. “To see that the Minnesota cop could do that in broad daylight, it shows how acceptable it is. It wasn’t done in an alley, in the darkness of night. He knew that what he was doing is accepted in this country.”
“I’m full of anguish,” said Tiffany Murrell, a 38-year-old from Prospect Heights who was recently laid off as a financial administrator. “Being out here is hard—I have hypertension, I’m at special risk in this pandemic, but I feel I have to be out here. I’m scared for my brothers, my nephews, and for myself.”
By the time the evening’s protests were over, the frustration of the New Yorkers gathered had run headlong into the aggressive mass-arrest protest-policing tactics of the NYPD. Some protesters were in the hospital. Police vehicles were on fire. And with more protests scheduled over the weekend and in the days ahead, there was every indication that the outpouring of anguish over police violence, and the violent police response to it, will only continue.
New York’s protests yesterday began in Lower Manhattan on a comparatively restrained note of grief and exhaustion. Perhaps a thousand people packed into Foley Square in Lower Manhattan, surrounded by the classical facades of the city’s courts and thousands of police officers determined to keep the protesters under their control. Gwen Carr, whose son Eric Garner died after being choked by police on Staten Island in 2014, drew a straight line from her son’s death and that of George Floyd.
“Almost six years ago, my son was murdered. We were doing the same thing. Now we have to be here for George Floyd,” Carr said. “Enough is enough. They have to stop coming into our neighborhoods and terrorizing, brutalizing, and murdering our young men and women.”
Listen to WNYC reporter Gwynne Hogan on last night's protests.
Carr expressed sorrow and frustration that little seems to have changed since the death of her son. “The same thing keeps happening over and over again,” she said. “I do not condone violence, I don’t. But I understand it. We just get fed up, so we just go and combust. But we’re here to get justice.”
Public Advocate Jumaane Williams echoed the sentiment. “Those of you who are asking for peace, please ask for justice,” he told the crowd. “It is morally irresponsible to ask for peace and not for justice.” Williams said he had spoken with Mayor Bill de Blasio earlier in the day, and had impressed upon the mayor, who has expressed public outrage at the killing of Floyd, that if he is serious about police reform, there are any number of steps he could take today in his own city: disciplining the other officers involved in the death of Eric Garner, and of Delrawn Smalls, and pushing for the repeal of the police secrecy law the mayor has helped strengthen.
After more than an hour, penned in by police barricades and thousands of police officers, the protesters filed uneventfully across the pedestrian walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge, coursing through downtown Brooklyn before joining thousands more people outside the Barclays Center, where another protest had been called for 6 p.m. Densely backed into the plaza and surrounded by police, protesters milled about uneventfully for the rest of the afternoon.
By early evening, though, the tenor changed. Someone tossed water bottles towards police, and officers responded by charging into the plaza, shoving protesters to the ground, shooting pepper spray at their faces, and beating them with batons. More police forays into the crowd followed, as police waded in, wielding pepper spray and batons, to arrest teenage skateboarders who had climbed the artificial hill atop the Barclays Center subway entrance.
A few minutes later, police used a Long-Range Acoustic Device to order the protesters to leave. “This assembly is unlawful,” they announced. “If you do not disperse, you will be subject to arrest.” Protesters were having none of it.
“You are unlawful!” they shouted back. Some people threw more bottles. Police fired more pepper spray into the crowd and made more arrests. New York Assembly Member Diana Richardson said that she was pepper-sprayed by police while peacefully protesting. State Senator Zellnor Myrie said he too had been pepper sprayed.
As the number of arrestees mounted, police attempted to commandeer a city bus to transport them, but were unable to do so. The union representing city bus drivers announced that its members were refusing to transport arrested protesters, as it did during Occupy Wall Street and as Minneapolis city bus drivers are doing. Instead, police loaded handcuffed protesters into Department of Corrections buses.
As thunderheads gathered overhead and twilight fell, the scene began to scatter. Police forced protesters off the sidewalks and then threatened them with arrest for being in the roadway. Soon they had succeeded in displacing the protesters into smaller separate knots around the surrounding blocks, where they continued to make arrests.
On Pacific Street, police grabbed a reporter wearing press credentials and carrying a 1010WINS microphone, throwing him to the ground as he attempted to cover their charge at protesters.
Another group of demonstrators gathered outside the 88th Precinct in Clinton Hill, smashing a police car and spray-painting the building (though not “overrunning” it, as was first reported by a CNN analyst and widely shared online.) Hundreds of cops quickly cleared the area, then focused their attention on a group of marchers walking west on Dekalb. With little warning, officers in riot gear doused the crowd with pepper spray and detained dozens of people, seemingly at random. A tense stand-off followed at Hall Street, on the edge of the Pratt Campus. After some protesters burned an orange barricade and tossed bottles over the police line, officers swarmed the group once again, swinging their batons at fleeing protesters. One woman caught in the ensuing stampede appeared badly injured and cried out for an ambulance.
Meanwhile in nearby Fort Greene, protesters joyously set fire to an NYPD van. The FDNY quickly extinguished the blaze, though once they left the scene, protesters went about burning it once again—before stuffing it with fireworks and attempting to flip it. The area remained largely unpoliced for the next hour, as a voice on the NYPD scanner urged cops to avoid chasing protesters through the park. As a score or more of white police officers in riot gear with two black officers at their head formed up on Dekalb to push the crowds back, protesters jeered them. “Don’t you think it’s kind of funny that they’ve got you two up front for this?” one man called to the black officers. “You were born black, you weren’t born a cop.”
Further south, as Friday night turned into Saturday morning, hundreds more protesters gathered on Fifth Avenue at Saint Marks Place in Park Slope, smashing a brick through the window of a police cruiser and dropping flower pots off of rooftops as police pushed the crowd out of the intersection.
Reporters covering the protests estimated that more than 100 people had been detained by police. Contacted Saturday morning, police officials could not provide a precise number of people arrested, but said it was “dozens.” While some officers were injured in the course of the evening, none of those injuries were critical.
Towards the end of the evening, as videos of police violence and mayhem saturated social media, Mayor de Blasio insisted on Twitter that his administration’s “sole focus is deescalating this situation and getting people home safe.”
Critics were unpersuaded, blaming the police for turning an already tense situation into a violent free-for-all. City Council Speaker Corey Johnson blamed police for the violence and called the evening’s events “a failure of leadership.”
Chris Dunn, legal director for the of the New York Civil Liberties Union, agreed. “The mayor needs to take accountability for the NYPD’s provocation, aggression and violence on display tonight,” he said. “New York City’s priority must be to de-escalate immediately and respect the rights of New Yorkers to demand justice.”
Tagged
bill de blasio
nypd
eric garner
George Floyd
Nick Pinto
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Jake Offenhartz
Jake Offenhartz is a former Gothamist reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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