Thousands of new yorkers over the last few days have taken to the streets in all five boroughs, setting cop cars aflame, braving beatings by batons and suffering pepper spray to the eyes, all so they can scream an urgent message for all the world to hear: fuck the police.
They marched in Manhattan, where the New York Police Department once gunned down Patrick Dorismond.
In Queens, where the NYPD shot 50 bullets at Sean Bell.
In the Bronx, where an NYPD cop 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 stole the breath from Eric Garner’s lungs.
Nearly 2,000 protesters were arrested over five nights as America’s largest city joined a national uprising against police brutality that saw demonstrations in about 140 cities, a mass unrest the likes of which this country hasn’t seen in over a generation.
There were moments in New York when it felt like this multi-racial coalition of protesters, led largely by young people of color, was taking back the streets from the NYPD, a police force bigger than some nations’ armies that’s terrorized this city’s Black and brown residents since its founding.
It felt like more and more people here had come to question the cops’ monopoly on force and to embrace the radical 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’s Finest erupted in violence.
The videos of tumult went viral. A cop speeding a patrol car into the middle of a crowd of protesters. A cop pulling down a man’s mask — worn to protect against the coronavirus — and pepper-spraying him in the face. Another using a car door to hit a man. One aiming a gun at demonstrators. Another shoving a woman into the ground so hard that she went into a seizure. And another could be heard saying “Shoot those motherfuckers” over the police scanner. The list goes on.
I witnessed cops brutalize and arrest people before being violently arrested myself.
And yet by Monday, New York’s Democratic governor, the city’s mayor and the country’s Republican president had settled on similar solutions to all the turmoil: suppressing this historic uprising with more armed agents of the state.
To the protesters, it felt like their government still hadn’t heard them at all, and probably had never been listening in the first place.
“The Only Fucking Way They Understand”
On Saturday in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, thousands gathered outside the Parkside Avenue subway station under the afternoon sun for a series of speeches before that day’s marches. People hung out of windows and draped Black Lives Matter banners off of fire escapes while listening to the speakers below.
“You know how fucked 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 megaphone.
“If you white,” he added, “and you not in the crowd, not on the fire escape, not on the roof screaming ‘Black lives matter’ in New York City … then get the fuck out!”
“Shut the fuck up,” I heard one cop say.
When they cuffed me and stood me up, a white cop, maskless and with rage in his eyes, came within a few inches of my face. “Fucking asshole,” he called me.
Again and again, my press pass clearly visible on my neck, I pleaded for the cops to get my phone, worried that I’d lose so much of what I’d documented that day. The cops refused, leaving it on the street before escorting me to the police van.
If this is how they treat a white journalist, I thought.
Inside the precinct lobby, a tired and demoralized cop stood by the front desk as new detainees were brought in for processing. He had only three years left until he could retire with a full pension, he told me. “If I could, I’d drop my belt and walk out of here right now.”
The officers then put me in a cell with 15 other guys. Everyone had been arrested at the demonstration; most were Black or brown, save for me and three other white guys. The cops wouldn’t provide anyone with masks, and it was impossible to socially distance.
One of the white guys had a badly broken foot, bare and swollen on the cell floor. He pleaded with the cops for medical attention, and the cops assured him it was coming.