UNITED STATES – In the past few days, thousands of New Yorkers stormed the streets of the city’s five neighborhoods, setting fire to to police cars, braving the stick blows and suffering from pepper sprays in the eyes, all to be able to shout an urgent message to the whole world: “Fuck the police”.
They walked through Manhattan, where the New York Police Department shot deadPatrick Dorismond.
In Queens, where the NYPD fired 50 bullets atSean Bell.
In the Bronx, where NYPD policeman strangled to deathAnthony Baez.
In Brooklyn, where the NYPD shotNicholas Heyward Jr, 13 years old.
And they walked on Staten Island, where the NYPD took their breath awayEric Garner.
Almost 2000protesters were arrested in five nights when the largest American city joined the national mobilization against police brutality. A movement in nearly 140 cities. Mass unrest such as this country has not experienced in more than a generation.
There were times in New York when it felt like this multiracial coalition of protesters, led mainly by young people of color, was taking to the streets of the NYPD, a larger police force than some armies that terrorize black and brown residents since its creation.
It felt like more and more people here had come to question the cops’ monopoly on force and to embrace the radical idea of cut funds from the police department, or even theabolitionist dream of a New York without the New York’s Finest (nickname we give to the city police) at all.
This is how New York’s Finest exploded in violence.
The uproar videos went viral. A rolling copat high speed in a patrol car amidst a crowd of protesters. A cop removing a man’s mask – worn to protect himself from the coronavirus – and thecayenne pepper spray in the face. Another using a door forhit a man. One of thempointing a gun on the protesters. Anotherpushing a woman on the ground so hard that she madeconvulsions. And another said ”Shoot those bastards″ On the police radio frequency. And the list is long.
I saw the police brutalizing and arresting people before I was violently arrested myself.
And yet, as of Monday, June 1, the Democratic Governor of New York, the mayor of the city and the Republican president of the country had agreed onsolutionssimilar to all this turmoil: quell this historic uprising with more armed state agents.
For the protesters, it seemed that their government had still not heard them, and probably never listened to them at the start.
“The only damn way they understand”
Thousands gathered in front of Parkside Avenue subway station in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn on Saturday afternoon for a series of speeches before the day’s marches. People were at the windows and dressing up the Black Lives Matter banners on the fire escapes while listening to the speakers below.
A man by the name of Kerbe Joseph asks the crowd through a megaphone: “Do you know how crap it is to turn on the news and see another nigga who looks like you dead?” (sic).
“If you are white, adds Joseph, and you are not in the crowd, neither on the shooting line, nor on the roof shouting” Black lives matter “in New York … then get out!”
Joseph and others, all black, Hispanic, and Native American, cited the names of Americans whose recent murders have sparked protests in dozens of cities across the country: Breonna taylor, which police fired in Louisville, Kentucky;Ahmaud Arbery shot dead while jogging in Georgia by a former police officer and his son; andGeorge Floyd, killed in Minneapolis on May 25, when a police officer pressed a knee in Floyd’s neck, squeezing it like a vice.
“We are George!” cried the crowd.
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Constance Malcolm, mother ofRamarley Graham, 18, killed by New York police in 2012, was joined by her son Chinoor Campbell, who was only 6 when he saw a white policeman shoot his unarmed big brother in his own House.
A few years ago, Malcolm showed me the bloodstained bath mat she kept on a shelf in her house, since the cop’s bullet tore her son’s heart. She couldn’t bring herself to throw it away, she said.
Malcolm has participated in many protests against police brutality in this city, and I visited him once when sheslept on the sidewalk outside a Department of Justice building in Manhattan to demand a civil rights investigation into the murder of her son.
But in front of the crowd at Flatbush this Saturday, Malcolm argued that such nonviolent actions simply did not do what needs to be done.
“We see all the looting and burning of buildings and everything that is going on, and they call us thugs,” said Malcolm, referring to allunstable protests across the country, particularly in Minneapolis, where protesters ransacked and thenfire a police station.
“I don’t endorse the fires and all that,” she continued, “but it’s the only damn way they understand!”
The crowd started to scold. Shortly thereafter, Malcolm grabbed a banner that read “Justice for George Floyd”, his son by his side, and led the crowd, which began to parade through the streets.
Songs of “Who keeps us safe? We ensure our own security! ” and “NYPD, suck my dick!” and “Fuck the police!” have filled Flatbush Avenue.
Locals – many of whom were trapped at home, unemployed and sheltered from the Covid-19 epidemic, which devastated predominantly black and brown working-class neighborhoods like Flatbush – crowded onto the sidewalks to observe and sometimes join the march in turn.
An old man inside a bodega explained to another old man what walking was like, pointing to his knee and then to his neck.
People in cars – including sanitation workers in a garbage truck, or drivers of Flatbush’s “dollar vans”, who are regularlyharassed by New York police because they provide inexpensive transportation to residents of a suburban area with subways – honked their horns to cheer on the protesters.
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The car workshop workers came out of their hangars to dance and raise their fists as a sign of solidarity. A crying woman shouted “I love you all” through the window of her fourth floor apartment.
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Protesters marched through the blocks. A black organizer berated white protesters, asking them to stay in the back, so that black and brown voices remained on the front line.
Some in the crowd didn’t want to speak to reporters, and why would they? The predominantly white local and national press often fueled the fear of black New Yorkers or served as a stenographer for New York police.
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As the sun went down on Saturday, some protesters set fire to a first NYPD vehicle, a patrol car. Flames shot out of the windows, just above the car stickers declaring “courtesy, professionalism and respect” from the police. Protesters warned others not to get too close in case the car explodes.
Police in riot gear repulsed the demonstrators. A fire truck arrived, put out the fire and left. Battle lines then formed.
The NYPD stood in a row in the middle of the street, near a Shell gas station. The demonstrators formed a line in front of them. Black and white protesters called on white protesters to join the front line. The white protesters obeyed.
A cycle was then set up: the demonstrators launched projectiles at the cops – glass bottles, stones, and sometimes fireworks – then the cops loaded into the crowd, tackled and arrested the demonstrators before dragging them to the police vans waiting for them. Then the two camps resumed their position.
Michael, a Brooklyn lawyer, stood on the sidewalk for a brief respite from his friend Jerome. They did not reveal their last name.
“The violence did not start with the burning police cars or the glass bottles flying through the air,” said Michael. “The police themselves started the violence a long time ago.”
“Every other week, every other day, we hear another story of a black man being shot or a black woman being shot, and it’s not fair, and then they get away with it, and now this enough, ”said Michael.
“We are tired, and no, we don’t want to be here destroying police cars and destroying our own neighborhoods, but that’s the way to -” Michael continued before his friend Jerome interrupted him.
“I’m tired of hearing this bullshit that” we are destroying our own community, “said Jerome. “Stop telling us that we are destroying our own community. We have absolutely nothing of what is here, damn it! ”
Throughout the day, some protesters held up signs calling forcut food from NYPD, a measure that has begun to emerge among the radical left to gradually take up more space in recent years. The idea is to reallocate a large part of the police department’s huge annual budget of $ 6 billion and instead invest it in housing, employment, health services (especially mental health) and d other non-police solutions to public safety issues.
“Imagine that all of this money, or part of it, is redistributed in communities, in disused schools, in our health care system,” Michael told me as the police prepared to lay new charges. “Like, why not! It is the communities that need it, and yet we do not see that. We just see police cars patrolling ”.
The police around us were getting more and more angry. When they charged this time, a white policeman shouted “Come here, motherfuckers! Sluts! ” while chasing a young black man.
A woman who told me her name was Jennifer L. yelled at a police officer who had just tackled and arrested a protester.
“They have no reason to be afraid,” she said in a shaky voice. “We should havefear! We should be afraid! What are they afraid of? Oh, a few bottles. A few bottles ?! What if it was a knee? What if it was a knee on the neck ?! ”
Nearby, a young white couple stood, amazed and silent, holding hands and looking into the distance through all the chaos. Their masks against the coronavirus were stained with baking soda, used to counter the pepper spray that had left their eyes red and irritated. They were mistreated during the last police charge, they said. A police officer punched the woman in the stomach with a baton.
They refused to tell me their names. “Our names are of no importance in this whole affair,” said the man. “The only names that need to be repeated are those of lost lives.”
Afterwards, each time the cops charged, the protesters gathered, staring at their heavily armed attackers, preparing for the next assault. They sang: “Say his name! Breonna Taylor! ” and “Say his name! George Floyd! ”
They taunted the cops while singing “NYPD, suck my cock!” and climbed on top of a bus abandoned in the street by its driver, arms outstretched as if, for a moment, the city where they lived really belonged to them.
The battle lines have started to thin out. Cops chased protesters all along Church Avenue as helicopters circled overhead, sometimes shining their spotlight on the scattered melee.
I started filming the police load as I backed up with a group of protesters who were retreating, my press card hanging from my neck.
A cop in the middle of a sprint came up to me and hit me on the shoulder as I passed. He shouted “Get out of my way” when there was a lot of room around me.
I had watched the cops bully young New Yorkers all day, pressing their faces into the concrete and cursing them. I was very upset.
“Fuck you,” I said to the cop.
He suddenly stopped charging the protesters and came back to me, sticking a baton in my chest and hitting me against the sidewalk.
I don’t know how many cops piled on me, but there were many. One knee or one foot pressed my head and neck to the concrete. Hands were pulling on my legs and arms, tearing them in different directions while different voices were making incongruous requests.
“Put your left hand behind your back!” My body was twisted, and I couldn’t do it. “Stop resisting!” I couldn’t resist.
I asked them to look at my press card. I told them I was a journalist. I begged them to retrieve my phone, which fell out of my hands during the arrest.
“Shut up,” said a cop.
When they handcuffed me and pulled me up, a white cop, without a mask and with rage in his eyes, came a few inches from my face. “Fucking asshole,” he told me.
Again and again, my press card clearly visible on my neck, I begged the police to take my phone, worried about losing so much of what I had documented that day. The cops refused, leaving him on the street before escorting me to the police van.
I thought to myself: If that’s the way they treat a white journalist …
This article was first published in the American edition of HuffPost.
See also on The HuffPost : 8 minutes and 46 seconds to remember George Floyd and the victims of police violence
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