Saturday: The Girlfriend and I take a post-dinner walk south, toward Prospect Park. Dusk of another lovely spring evening approaches. Thousands of protestors gathered this afternoon at the corner of Prospect and Ocean, at the park’s southeast corner; that’s where the police helicopters have been hovering for hours. Unlike last night, it looks like my neighborhood will be quiet tonight.
The helicopter might be a good sign, I say. Friday night at Barclays Center, police said they responded to water bottles being thrown; they then moved with batons, pepper spray to clear the plaza, sparking hours of clashes. Protestors say the police charge was unprovoked. Mayor de Blasio said, “We don’t want ever want to see another night like this.”
“Maybe tonight they’re just watching,” I say. “The helicopter’s the eye-in-the-sky. Maybe cops won’t move unless people start breaking into buildings or lighting fires.”
On Vanderbilt a few groups of white folks, 20- and 30-something, dressed in black, walk north, away from the park. One trio tells The Girlfriend that marchers are heading northwest on Flatbush Avenue. I’m inclined to head in that direction; The Girlfriend is more cautious. But as we approach Grand Army Plaza we see four police cars, sirens blaring, speed toward Flatbush Avenue; she agrees to check it out.
As with our walk last night, it seems like we’re trailing a group of marchers, now further north on Flatbush. Police presence is heavy, in cars, SUVs, on foot. Garbage, garbage cans, a yellow newspaper box litter the street. We walk north, toward onlookers viewing an apparent commotion. Four African-American teens pass us; one of them, smiling, sings, “It’s the end of world.” (Not the R.E.M. song; he couldn’t be quoting the Skeeter Davis love song from 1962, could he?) His friend says, “Not the world — just New York City. Nowhere’s as bad as here.”
Between Prospect Place and St. Marks a group of cops mid-avenue forms a circle around something; I think they’re moving garbage, maybe a barricade. Then I see the circle surrounds a teenaged white boy, backing toward the opposite sidewalk; a cop shoves him to the ground. Up ahead a woman yells, “Leave him alone! Hey!” — The Girlfriend, it turns out. (How’d she get up there so fast?) “He’s just a kid!”
The kid stands, backs closer to the sidewalk; the cop swings an elbow to his temple, knocks him down again. “Leave that boy alone!” The Girlfriend yells, walking onto the street. Will I have to restrain her?
The cops yell at the kid to stay on the sidewalk, march north. Immediately a middle-aged Latina woman starts berating the teenager: “You think you’re smart?” she screams. “You don’t have a fucking clue!” She’s carrying a sign: “My Students Matter.”
A trio of young black pedestrians passes us; one says, “They’re going to try to take the precinct.”
If protestors haven’t thought of it, the cops sure have — they’ve put up metal barricades backed by lines of officers on Flatbush, Bergen, Dean, Sixth Avenue to protect the 78th Precinct building. A middle-aged South Asian man pleads to be let through to the Bergen Street subway station, just beyond the barricade; after a minute, a cop relents. Nobody else approaches.
The marchers seem to have moved on. We walk through an almost-empty Barclays Center plaza, head toward Fort Greene Park. At Lafayette The Girlfriend sees a friend she knows from her HIV/AIDS activism circles; we stop to chat.
He and his partner are healthy, doing OK. He’s lost his job; his partner remains employed. They have a new dog. We commiserate about CoronaWorld. Everything feels surreal, he says.
And now the protests, The Girlfriend says. Were they out last night?
“We weren’t. You know, I’ve been in a lot of marches, a lot of protests,” he says. He’s measuring his words. “This feels different. More dangerous. We were driving home last night from upstate, got caught in the Barclays traffic. And — I know it was just one person; I know there were thousands of protestors. But this guy walked past our car and said, ‘We’re coming for you faggots next.’ That didn’t make me feel like we’re all in it together, fighting for the same cause.”
We say good-bye, walk to the park; in the twilight a half-dozen groups sit on picnic blankets with food, bottles of wine. You wouldn’t know 18 hours ago a police van was burned 50 yards away, or right now marchers are clashing with cops three miles south.
We get home after dark; soon the sound of helicopters, police sirens becomes continuous.
I stay up late, doom scrolling social media feeds. Protests have spread to 75 cities; more than two dozen mayors (not de Blasio) have set curfews; governors have called in the National Guard in Minneapolis, Atlanta, Los Angeles. Columbus, Little Rock, Miami, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Indianapolis — all see violent clashes Saturday night between cops and protestors.
Protests hit all five New York City boroughs. By Sunday morning, NYPD says, 345 are arrested, 33 police injured, 47 police vehicles damaged or destroyed.
They provide no tally of the number of injured protestors. Apparently cable news feeds aren’t reporting it, but I scroll through clip after clip of police violence — some provoked, often not. (More here and here, including evidence of officers taping over names and badge numbers to avoid detection.) Minneapolis officers shot a paint canister at a group sitting on their own porch. In Brooklyn cops apparently targeted medics. Slate is the first media outlet I see to frame the story as one of police violence, not violence against police.
In city after city, cops target reporters, too, or at best ignore their press status. (Receipts here and here and here. The Washington Post has a roundup, Vice a first-person account.) With the president waging a non-stop campaign against news he doesn’t like as “fake” and “corrupt,” describing media members as “enemies of the people,” this turn feels inevitable.
Police don’t have to respond this way. Indeed, in many cities they’re doing just the opposite. In New Jersey, Flint, Ferguson, Mo., police have banded with community members to march in solidarity; Forbes sums up.
One cop tweets, “Please stop framing this as a political or partisan issue. Police misconduct & the militarization of local police is a bi-partisan & very much all-American disgrace. … We must not be warriors cuz we are not at war with our neighbors.”
A Brooklyn College sociologist, Alex Vitale, notes that the Minneapolis police force (where the killing of George Floyd and inept handling of protests started this week’s conflagration) has received plenty of recent trainings and other “reform” measures.
“Over the last 40 years we have seen a massive expansion of the scope and intensity of policing. Every social problem in poor and non-white communities has been turned over to the police to manage,” Vitale writes. “Police have also become more militarized. The Federal 1033 program, the Department of Justice’s ‘Cops Office,’ and homeland security grants have channeled billions of dollars in military hardware into American police departments to advance their ‘war on crime’ mentality. A whole generation of police officers have been given ‘warrior’ training.”
All of this reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from “The Wire” (2002-08), the great HBO drama about, among other things, Baltimore cops and criminals. A major, “Bunny” Colvin, tells one of his sergeants — a man he thinks has potential — “You ain’t shit when it comes to policing.” He then describes his view of what’s gone wrong with policing in the drug war era:
“I mean, you call something a war, and pretty soon everybody going to be running around acting like warriors. They going to be running around on a damn crusade, storming corners, slapping on cuffs, racking up body counts. And when you’re at war, you need a fucking enemy. And pretty soon, damn near everybody on every corner’s your fucking enemy. And soon the neighborhood you’re supposed to be policing — that’s just occupied territory. … Soldiering and policing, they ain’t the same thing.”
Sunday morning, I ride my bike south of Prospect Park, to parts of the borough that saw most of last night's conflict. Broken glass, piles of trash line Church Avenue for blocks, from New York Avenue to Flatbush. Few people are out. I hear plenty of sirens, no helicopters. In front of separate bodegas I see two African-American workers on the street stuffing trash into Hefty bags, brooms and dust pans lying on the sidewalk unused, tools too meager to tackle the task.
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