A few nights ago The Girlfriend’s phone rang after 11 p.m. It was her son, alone in their Flatbush apartment, disturbed by incessant explosions, many quite close. Fireworks, she assured him, not gunshots — harmless, nothing to do with street protests, cops, or Black Lives Matter. He should ignore it, go to sleep.
Kind of an overreaction, I thought. June has always marked the unofficial start of New York City fireworks season; has The Son never noticed?
Then I spent a night at her house. I didn’t even try to get to sleep until 1 a.m. since the explosions — many from what sounded like her building’s courtyard — were continual. It wasn’t just firecrackers, sparklers, snakes, spinners. These sounded like pro-quality displays: bottle rockets, missiles, aerial repeaters, M-80s, blockbusters. The Girlfriend jerked awake every 10 minutes or so, when the percussive booms came too close. This is my 15th New York City summer; I’d never heard the like. Riding my bike home the next morning, block after block of 19th Street and Ocean Avenue was covered with charred red paper and other detritus.
Such nightly displays have increased during the last fortnight. In June’s first two weeks over the past decade (2010-19), the city registered (as 311 or 911 calls) a total of 126 fireworks complaints; this year from June 1-14 that number was 849. Flatbush, Crown Heights, and, in Manhattan, Washington Heights have seen the highest volumes.
"There’s something louder, longer, and crazier about it that’s weird," Phoebe Streblow, a Flatbush resident, told The Gothamist. “Just the sheer cost alone of these productions is suspect. They're about the size of fireworks at a minor league ballpark.”
No one knows why it’s happening, beyond the indisputable fact that Spring 2020 has been the most event-filled, pandemic-stricken, Depression-driven, politically uprisen, batshit crazy season any New York City resident has ever lived through.
Is it cabin fever after three months of Covid-19 quarantine? Too many young people with too much time on their hands? Protesters connected to the #BlackLivesMatter movement? People unleashing noisy if otherwise harmless fury at heavy-handed police tactics?
One thing most city residents agree on: calling the cops for a noise complaint is a response that’s not just heavy-handed but, in this environment, dangerous. Police showed up Sunday night in Flatbush with multiple units in riot gear.
#BLM protests continue to create results, including on Friday when Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a law giving 500 municipalities nine months to enact police reforms before the state can withhold funding. Local plans must include community outreach, restorative justice, crowd management, bias training, crowd management, and use of force.
Cuomo on Saturday called for demonstrators to stop: “You don't need to protest, you won. You accomplished your goal. Society says you're right, the police need systemic reform.” Get off the streets and get to negotiating tables, he said: “How do we design the local police department? What do you want the police to be in New York City? Let's design it.”
Protestors heard that message, then resolutely ignored it. On Sunday, on a day with more than a dozen actions across the city, more than 15,000 people wearing white packed the streets near the Brooklyn Museum for a rally and silent march in support of black trans rights. Protest momentum persists.
Images seem to bear out the experience of The Girlfriend and me: unlike, say, people drinking on the streets as bars reopen to-go service, demonstrators are wearing masks at a 99 percent clip. Actions are reflecting a shared sense of responsibility that’s heartening. And with New York City protests now well into their third week, data shows no signs of a spike in Covid-19 infections.
Still, health experts warn that with an incubation period of two weeks and lagging test results, we won’t likely know of new infection clusters for another week or two.
One social media friend reacted to this photo of the black trans rights protest:
“This scares me shitless,” he wrote. “This. In the middle of a pandemic. In New York City. How many people are going to die?”
I responded by telling him about mask wearers, adding, “For what it’s worth, I’ve participated in actions where people are moving, and I’ve stayed at the edges.”
That said, I’m scared, too.
Another person responded: “When folks are willing to kill you anyway, some may be thinking, sacrifice for the greater good may be necessary.”
My friend wrote, “Always in these cases it's not the folks there that I'm most worried about. At least they made a choice. It's the people they will come in contact with. And the people those people will come in contact with. And the general amount of the disease this will spread throughout the population.
“The Trumpsters and the bar people aren't wearing masks; the protesters mostly are,” he continued. “But all of these things will cause innocent people to die. Maybe a lot of them. For someone like me, it's very hard to watch lots of people relaxing lockdown (for good and bad reasons) when nothing has changed, in terms of risk, since we started lockdown in the first place.
“I suspect me saying this will sound like I don't support the protests or think they should stop,” he concluded. “It's possible (at least for me) to have two things going on in my mind at once. I think that (a) these protests are necessary (without them, many innocent people will likely die); and (b) because of them, many innocent people will likely die. I am not able to flip into a mental state where I just ignore one side of that equation.”
Meanwhile, The Girlfriend and I continue to check the daily Justice For George page for demonstrations; we’d still like to check out the nightly vigil in McCarren Park, or the new one over in Bushwick. And it looks like Juneteenth protests will be robust.
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