I Was At the Brookyln George Floyd protest on Sunday, May 31, 2020. For several hours it was an epic event that made me feel more powerful. And then, in a few minutes, it all fell apart. The failure of this rally falls on many heads and tells us why kneeling with cops is a pointless hollow gesture. (Originally a twitter thread.)
So I was out at the Brooklyn George Floyd protest tonight and it was beautiful and powerful… until it wasn’t. And I saw it fall apart.
There was a march from the Barclays Center up Flatbush toward the Manhattan Bridge around 8pm. Thousands of people. White and Black. Shut down that big street. Totally peaceful. Really powerful and enlivening to be in this huge crowd of people standing up and agitating for a better future.
It was definitely a charged atmosphere. People chanted “Black lives matter!” and “Say his name! GEORGE FLOYD!” and “Whose streets? Our streets!” I heard a Black woman yell at the white people marching with us that they should be prepared at any moment to form a barrier between Black marchers and the police and if they’re not prepared to sacrifice their bodies for us they should go home. Traffic was shut down, stranding many cars on Flatbush. I saw a graffiti writer tag “GEORGE FLOYD REST IN PEACE” in gold on the side of a big white truck. Many drivers honked in unison with marchers and some stood atop cars and raised their fists in victory. I saw no violence and felt no fear. This was a celebration.
We marched past Whole Foods, which was then quickly throwing up plywood to cover their windows, and Trader Joes, which had already finished plywooding their exterior as if a hurricane was coming. Of course the Apple Store on Flatbush went the aesthetic extra mile and painted the plywood covering their windows and door a stark white that matched the white of their products and created a classy way to prevent customers from breaking in.
The march went onto the Manhattan Bridge and closed that just as another huge group came off of the Brooklyn Bridge. Thousands marched up Flatbush back toward the Barclays shutting down traffic again. Someone marched through the crowd with a speaker on their shoulder playing “Fuck Tha Police” over and over. At Flatbush and Dekalb everyone took a knee and got quiet and a leader with a mic affirmed that it was a peaceful protest. One person said, Why should we be peaceful? Fuck that. No one responded to that but surely others agreed.
I don’t know the leader’s name. He seemed full of passion as he stood before speaking about how we had made great progress today but he was not quite as captivating a speaker as you’d expect from a leader. This would become important later.
Around 10pm thousands of people were back in front of the Barclays, chanting George Floyd, then kneeling. Protesters chanted “Peaceful protest!” They chanted at cops “Take a knee!” None did. At that point. When cops formed a long single line blocking protesters from going back onto Flatbush it seemed like an aggressive move. A long line of white people faced them, forming a barricade between the crowd and the police.
It was a peaceful, powerful protest but around 10:30pm, the tide started to turn. The leader, standing by Atlantic Ave side of the Barclays Center, somehow arranged for a photo op where he and the leadership of the police on site were kneeling together. Photographers, professional and amateur, squeezed in to capture the moment. But many in the crowd found the idea of police and protesters kneeling together to be offensive and they were loud about their feelings.
To many people, the police are the problem and the solution is not simply to form better interpersonal bonds with them. We need to fundamentally reform American policing. Talking about how we can both treat each other better is obscuring the real issue — policing needs to change.
It’s not just that there’s a few bad apples, there’s a system of policing that is inherently unjust and there’s tactics that police use that are incredibly problematic. Chokeholds are legal in many places including NYC. There’s not enough de-escalation. There’s not proper regulation around the use of force. There’s no duty to intervene if you see another officer breaking the law. There’s not enough fear that if you murder a citizen you’ll go to prison. On this same night, probably at this moment, in Manhattan in front of the legendary Strand Bookstore, a police officer pulled out his gun and pointed it at unarmed protesters who were running away. This is on video. That is a crime. He doesn’t need to hug a citizen, he needs laws and regulations that do better at constraining what he’s allowed to do to the citizens who pay his salary. The issue is not about cops and the community being nicer to each other. That framework puts both sides on an equal moral plane when so often the problem is police attacking or murdering unarmed people.
We need to change the way policing functions in America. We need prosecutors to take police breaking the law more seriously. We need police unions that don’t mindlessly defend even the worst of police behavior. We need Mayors, like Bill DeBlasio, who don’t see both sides when two police SUVs drive into crowds of protesters.
By kneeling with cops you take the focus away from the real policing reforms that need to happen and put the energy on how we can all just get along.
So that moment of kneeling with cops angered several people in the crowd. The leaders saw it as a photo op that would be powerful—I heard them telling this to people in the crowd who were angry at the direction the rally was going. Then the leaders of the rally gave their mic to a police officer and let him address the crowd. Wow. His speech was anodyne — as long as you protest peacefully I will support you — but why is a cop getting the mic at all? If he’s not going to say something about how the murder of George Floyd was wrong and the other officers need to be arrested then he should not be getting the mic from protesters. Why should the crowd have to listen to him remind them to be peaceful?
Again, that falls to the ‘let’s have a nice relationship with the cops, can’t we all just get along’ ethos rather than dealing with the fundamental changes we need to make to American policing. Cops who murder citizens need to go to prison. Every time. Giving nice speeches about peaceful protesting drives us away from that. Protesters did not need that cop to tell them to continue being peaceful. What they needed was for him to tell his fellow officers to continue being peaceful.
So by this point the crowd was getting restless and losing faith in leadership. And it’s very dangerous to have the attention of a thousand angry people and not focus that attention somewhere. Because something will happen. And it did…
Leadership (two men and a woman, I don’t know their names or what organization they’re from) tried to rebound by giving some speeches with a microphone. For people who live in Brooklyn, leadership was now standing on the Target side of Atlantic with 50 or more helmet-wearing cops standing between protesters and Target. So leadership is trying to give speeches while a phalanx of cops stood behind them. Terrible optics but whatever. The speeches were impromptu but that’s really no excuse — these leaders did not know what to say to the crowd. Their words meandered, their energy lacked, they were not at all up to the challenge of addressing this large crowd. The crowd kept chanting and leaders could not get control. Four people tried to address the crowd but all of them were unable to say compelling things that would hold the crowd’s attention. One of them said “I’m hurting!” eight times in a row which was heartfelt but they were unable to meet the moment. Which is extremely dangerous. So now it’s late, almost 11pm, and you have a large, angry, unfocused crowd and a huge group of cops standing directly in front of them. Leadership did not realize it’s time to give the crowd something to do. If you don’t direct the crowd then some fringe members of the crowd will direct it…
So a few people started throwing water bottles at the cops. Not many, I saw maybe four small plastic water bottles go flying toward the phalanx of cops. (There were several people handing out free water and snacks to protesters throughout the day.) There is no need for cops to respond to water bottles being thrown. I’m sure it’s annoying and disrespectful but it doesn’t hurt, especially when you’re basically wearing riot gear. You can shrug it off if you want to. Police restraint is incredibly important. You don’t have to respond to every provocation. But when you’re given a hammer everything looks like a nail.
I saw groups of cops, batons out, moving quickly toward pockets of protesters who had not thrown bottles. A group of cops were moving toward where I was standing and no bottles had come from my vicinity. I saw people start to sprint away. I couldn’t see why they were sprinting but when I see several people running as fast as they can, I tend to think, I should go. Don’t wait to find out what they’re running from. Just go. But as a Black person, running puts you danger by itself—it attracts police attention, it suggests guilt. So I walked, but quickly. I saw a cop in front of me and my heart sank. What’s this going to be? He nicely said, “Yeah, just get outta here.” I passed him by.
As I walked away I saw at least ten police cars and vans racing up Flatbush toward the scene, sirens blaring. I’ve been told by cops that if they feel in danger, they push a button and everyone in the vicinity is supposed to drop whatever they’re doing and rush to the scene. And I’m sure they were ready for tactical backup to race in at a moment’s notice. That backup was rushing in. I left but reporters from Gothamist stayed and then posted several videos showing cops attacking citizens, chasing citizens, pepper-spraying peaceful people… It was a riot by police. So many people ask why protesters are rioting but no one asks why police are rioting.
So, about 15 minutes after cops and leadership were kneeling together and literally holding hands, the cops were in attack mode, batons out whacking people. The Gothamist’s videos show this wasn’t just young, inexperienced cops—there were a lot of white shirts wacking people. Cops in white shirts are in leadership.
All of this bolsters the argument that protest leadership should not have aligned with cops. It’s like the frog who asks the snake to take him across the river. When the snake bites the frog and they both start to drown, the frog says why did you bite me? The snake says, you knew I was a snake.
We know that they’re cops. We know what they do. They didn’t have to get aggressive because a few bottles were thrown but then again, they do because that’s who they are and that’s what their regulations, their leadership, and our Mayor affirms. They see themselves as the biggest gorilla in the jungle and the least provocation requires full on attack mode to make sure their superiority is maintained. This wasn’t about protecting people or property, this was abut protecting police supremacy.
The crowd was angry about aligning with the cops and humanizing them in that way and moments later they were proven right. If we’re there to protest police behavior we need to demand meaningful reform, not hold hands with the police.
Did holding hands with the cops make them say hey let’s give this crowd another chance, they’re just bottles, we’re tough, we can take a couple of bottles because these people are angry that one of our guys murdered someone and we know he screwed up and we get it? No.
This wasn’t just in Brooklyn—my friend was protesting peacefully in Union Square, Manhattan, taking a knee with thousands of people, when, he says, cops yelled something and attacked the crowd. My friend is not a physically aggressive person and he ran and was hit in the back by a baton and arrested. And he’s white.
Cops have an aggressive mentality — I must prove that I’m in charge at all times. They don’t drive in reverse and outwit you. They drive over you. How dare you get in my way. I’m the police. We saw tonight that even if you hold hands with them, if you provoke them a moment later, they’ll strike.
And thus a beautiful protest devolved into madness because leadership made several critical mistakes in judgement that put everyone there in jeopardy. They’ve gotta do better than that. And the police put people’s lives in jeopardy because they’re not being properly policed by their leadership. You would think that cops would want to avoid being violent at protests against police violence but you would be wrong. Some people are seeing riots and condemning protesters without realizing that these are protests with moments of mass violence that are quite often created by police. Stop talking to protesters about the need to protest peacefully and start talking to police about the need to use far more restraint. Don’t talk to any of us about what communities (read: Black people) can do to make the world a nicer place for our poor, scared police officers. Talk about what political and police leadership can do to create laws and rules that make police behave in humane ways toward the citizens who pay their salaries.
Cops love to say, ‘We’re trying to keep these communities safe,’ but far too often they are part of making the community unsafe.
The cause deserves better.
George Floyd deserves better.
We deserve better.
