A teenager outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal, taking a knee on a block crowded with protesters, relished the feeling lost these last months — of being part of something.
A 23-year-old art teacher, Evan Woodard, was thrilled to see his city at the fore of a nationwide event. “I’m proud to call myself a New Yorker,” he said. “This is everyone’s city.”
People who just last month were dutifully keeping behind doors and masks have turned out by the tens of thousands in the past week to gather in the streets and shout to be heard.
The lurch between twin crises with opposing aims — isolation and assembly — has been jolting, and to many, positively liberating. People feeling penned for months, then pushed past a tipping point by images of a man’s life ending under an officer’s knee, have surged to the streets — for some, mask be damned — to be part of something.
For those coming out day after day to protest, marching with friends and strangers under cheers from the open windows above feels something like normal. If sheltering at home was a reaction to a threat, this is the opposite — action.
For those coming out day after day to protest, marching with friends and strangers under cheers from the open windows above feels something like normal. If sheltering at home was a reaction to a threat, this is the opposite — action.
Simonez Dega, 23, a waiter at Olive Garden at a protest near the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, welcomed the change from making music alone in his apartment to marching elbow to elbow. “It feels truly warm,” he said. “It felt like we were all bees in the hive. Now it’s like, that’s another bee, that’s another person that is here for the same reason. It’s a different energy.”
Mr. Dega added: “As a black male, I had to go out and protest.”
The demonstrations would consume the city at any time, but they arrive at a particularly anxious moment, with virus restrictions about to start easing after months of a curve-flattening quarantine.
Even as new cases ebb, New York City remains the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States. More than 200,000 residents have contracted the virus and 21,000 have died, or are presumed to have died, of Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.
More than 2,000 people have been arrested. The arrests continued on Thursday, with thousands of people still on the streets past the curfew, and confrontations with the police again flaring up.
Encircling of Peaceful Protesters Shows Aggressive Shift by N.Y. Police
Officers have charged and swung batons at demonstrators after curfew with seemingly little provocation. The mayor said he would review any reports of inappropriate enforcement.
NY TIMES
It was about 8:45 p.m. in Brooklyn on Wednesday, 45 minutes past the city’s curfew, when a peaceful protest march encountered a line of riot police, near Cadman Plaza.
Hundreds of demonstrators stood there for 10 minutes, chanting, arms raised, until their leaders decided to turn the group around and leave the area.
What they had not seen was that riot police had flooded the plaza behind them, engaging in a law enforcement tactic called kettling, which involves encircling protesters so that they have no way to exit from a park, city block or other public space, and then charging them and making arrests.
The kettling operations carried out by the city’s police after curfew on recent nights have become among the most unsettling symbols of the department’s use of force against peaceful protests, which has touched off a fierce backlash against Mr. Blasio and Mr. Shea.
In the past several days, New York Times journalists covering the protests have seen officers repeatedly charge at demonstrators after curfew with seemingly little provocation, shoving them onto sidewalks, striking them with batons and using other aggressive tactics.
In an interview on WNYC on Friday, the mayor said the encircling of protesters was sometimes necessary for public safety. “I don’t want to see protesters hemmed in if they don’t need to be,” he said, but he added “that sometimes there’s a legitimate problem and it’s not visible to protesters.”
Some protest organizers urge crowds to go home. Others marched on, and were arrested.
The protests that have filled New York’s streets in recent days entered their second week on Friday with thousands of people gathering at sites across the city for demonstrations, marches and vigils that continued to be overwhelmingly peaceful.
While several groups defied a citywide curfew again and risked encountering the forceful tactics the police had used the two previous nights to clear out those who did not disperse, other rallies broke up voluntarily as 8 p.m. approached amid intermittent rain.
“Everybody go home,” organizers of a group on Manhattan’s Upper West Side implored the crowd as a number of officers approached shortly before the curfew took effect. “It’s a wrap.”
In Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill neighborhood, where mass arrests were narrowly averted on Thursday night, one protester announced to the crowd, “You are nothing less to the cause if you’re not here after curfew.”
In Brooklyn, a line of officers blocked hundreds of protesters at Grand Army Plaza, while dozens of patrol cars kept them from retreating. The protesters stopped and raised their arms, led in front by a line of cyclists who had been acting as a buffer.
In Brooklyn, a line of officers blocked hundreds of protesters at Grand Army Plaza, while dozens of patrol cars kept them from retreating. The protesters stopped and raised their arms, led in front by a line of cyclists who had been acting as a buffer.
Randy Williams, 38, stepped forward and began to talking to some of the officers, working with other organizers to try to ease a tense situation. The group negotiated for the protesters to be able to leave peacefully, without arrests.
“This is the first protest people have not feared for their life,” Mr. Williams said. “The protest has ended for the night. We will respectfully go home now.”
But less than an hour later, the police again employed the more forceful tactics they had used on recent nights, targeting a group that had left Grand Army Plaza.
Officers appeared to surround a number of protesters on Nostrand Avenue. Videos showed officers aggressively pushing back a man who was filming them as they made arrests, then chasing him with a baton and shoving a reporter who was filming while the man was taken into custody.
On Manhattan’s Upper East Side, police blocked a march that started near Mayor Bill de Blasio’s official residence and arrested around 20 people, rushing at some and forcing them to the ground.
The night’s relative calm came on a day that started with the mayor continuing to defend the police’s actions in breaking up demonstrations, even as videos and photos showed officers employing aggressive and sometimes violent tactics to do so.
“What I saw overwhelmingly, and have continued to see, is peaceful protest being respected on both sides,” Mr. de Blasio said at a news briefing.
But with criticism of the mayor mounting — including from Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, who had helped the tension in Clinton Hill on Thursday — he said for the first time that some officers would be disciplined, and suspended, for their treatment of protesters.
In a statement released late Friday, the commissioner, Dermot F. Shea, said that one officer had been suspended after video emerged of him pushing a woman to the ground in Brooklyn on May 29. In addition, the commissioner said, a supervisor would be transferred as a result of the incident.
An officer involved in a separate incident the next day was also suspended for pulling down a man’s face mask and then spraying the man in the face with pepper spray, the commissioner said.
Sherrilyn Ifill
✔@Sifill_LDFThis boy had his hands up when an NYPD ofcr pulled his mask down and pepper sprayed him. @NYPDShea? Mayor @BilldeBlasio?
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Mr. de Blasio’s affirmation of the curfew came even as the Manhattan district attorney joined his counterparts in Brooklyn and the Bronx in saying he would not prosecute those who were arrested during the protests for low-level offense like unlawful assembly.
Commissioner Shea, who has condemned the killing of Mr. Floyd, apologized at a news conference on Thursday for any instances of misconduct his officers had committed.
But he also demanded that demonstrators stop insulting and attacking his officers and he warned that anti-police rhetoric could lead to continued violence against those he oversees.
“For our part in the damage to civility, for our part in racial bias, in excessive force, unacceptable behavior, unacceptable language and many other mistakes, we are human,” he said. “I am sorry. Are you?”
At his news conference, Mr. Shea ticked off ways in which he said the police had been attacked over the last week and said “anarchists” armed with dangerous weapons had tried to undermine otherwise productive protests.
Late Friday, he sought to provide evidence for his assertion, posting photos on Twitter of items he said had been seized from people who were arrested at a protest in the Bronx Thursday night.“These are not the tools of peaceful demonstrators,” he wrote. They were, he continued, “the tools of criminals bent on causing mayhem & hijacking what we all know is a worthwhile cause.”The items included handcuffs, a backpack, lighter fluid, gloves, a pocketknife, a hammer and a wrench.
District attorneys in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx will not prosecute people arrested and accused of low-level offenses in the protests.
Since last week, more than 2,000 people have been arrested in the city on charges like disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, unlawful assembly, assault on a police officer and burglary, according to the police and prosecutors.
Protesters rallied at a Brooklyn jail where a prisoner was pepper-sprayed and died this week.
There were more than 1,000 people in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn on Friday evening at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal jail where, the authorities say, guards pepper-sprayed a prisoner early Wednesday. He was found unconscious and later died, officials said.
“We see you,” one person in the crowd shouted. “We hear you,” another said, as detainees pounded on the jail windows. “You are not alone,” the crowd chanted again and again.
The death on Wednesday of the prisoner, Jamel Floyd, has become another flash point amid the protests that have continued for more than a week across the United States over police brutality and institutional racism, including in the criminal-justice system.
Mr. Floyd, a 35-year-old black man who was serving a state prison sentence for burglary, had been moved to the Brooklyn jail in October, the federal Bureau of Prisons said in a statement on Wednesday
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The guards used the pepper spray on him after he became increasingly disruptive and potentially harmful to others, the statement said. He barricaded himself in his cell and was breaking the cell-door window with a metal object, the statement said.
Mr. Floyd’s family has challenged the official account.
More police violence occurs during protests over police violence.
As protests over the death of George Floyd sweep the nation, the demonstrations have revealed powerful moments of peaceful protest and in some cases among police officers, who have been seen taking a knee in solidarity, reading the names of police brutality victims out loud or quietly crying alongside protesters.
But the protests have also revealed widespread incidents of police aggression, documented with the same tool that captured Mr. Floyd’s death under the knee of a white police officer in Minneapolis: video.
In Buffalo, two police officers were suspended without pay after a video showed them shoving a 75-year-old protester, who was hospitalized with a head injury. In Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Miami Herald reporters filmed officers who were shooting a nonviolent protester in the head with foam rubber bullets, fracturing her eye socket. Cellphone videos show New York City police officers beating unarmed protesters and sideswiping demonstrators with opened squad car doors.
Captured by bystanders and sometimes shown on live television, the episodes have occurred in cities large and small, in the heat of mass protests and in their quiet aftermath. A compilation posted on Twitter by a North Carolina lawyer included over 300 clips by Friday morning.
The episodes have emerged over nearly two weeks of largely peaceful demonstrations in at least 600 cities across America, as thousands of people filled the streets in historic protests against systemic racism and police brutality.
Authorities in the city of Las Cruces in southern New Mexico announced on Friday that a police officer would be fired and charged with involuntary manslaughter in connection with the killing of a man who fled from a traffic stop.
The man, Antonio Valenzuela, 40, died on Feb. 29. The Las Cruces Police Department said he had an open warrant because of a parole violation, and was tased twice by officers while running away after being pulled over. Officer Christopher Smelser then used a chokehold technique on Mr. Valenzuela.
The Las Cruces medical examiner’s office determined this week that Mr. Valenzuela died from the injuries caused by being asphyxiated, the department said.
The death of Mr. Valenzuela, a painter and father of four, has resonated across New Mexico, which was already grappling with some of the highest rates of fatal shootings by police officers anywhere in the United States.
Involuntary manslaughter is a fourth-degree felony. Officer Smelser is also in the process of being fired from the force, said Dan Trujillo, a police spokesman. Officer Smelser could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday, and it was unclear whether he had a lawyer.
The message from the president is to dominate the streets with force. The message from many of their chiefs and mayors is to tolerate, connect and empathize. The message on the streets, at times, is that they are part of the problem. The message from the news media is watch what you say and do.
But the outrage over the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis has upended that notion, inciting social unrest and violence that has put urban and suburban police departments across the country on alert. It has been a challenge for officers, at a time when many are also confronting the coronavirus.
“These type of protests take a significant toll on an officer’s mental wellness, and they add so much stress,” said Manny Ramirez, a sergeant with the Fort Worth Police Department and the president of the police officers’ union. “This is Fort Worth, Texas, 1,000 miles away, but yet these officers have become targets for that rage.”
“I’ve gone home once in the last four days,” said a Los Angeles officer watching the crowd months after having the coronavirus. “My girlfriend had to drop off clothes so I could change. It’s been hell, for everybody. Monsters and Red Bull, that’s the only thing that’s keeping me up.”
In Austin, Texas, a 20-year-old African-American protester was in critical condition after he was shot in the head with a beanbag round fired by a police officer on Sunday. A protester standing next to the man had thrown objects at the police, and in response an officer struck the victim instead. Others hit by similar police-fired rounds include a woman giving medical assistance and a pregnant African-American woman.
In many ways, the police response to what is happening on the streets illustrates a kind of post-Ferguson era of policing. Officers — not only chiefs but even the rank and file — have embraced the demonstrations and aligned themselves so much with protesters that they march alongside them. In some parts of the country, chiefs have become more politically outspoken and more emotional than they have been in decades.
The N.F.L. commissioner said the league should have listened to black players’ concerns earlier.
After President Trump renewed criticism of N.F.L. players protesting during the national anthem, Commissioner Roger Goodell delivered his strongest support yet for their right to demonstrate to fight racism and police brutality.
In a swift response to a video montage that featured star players asking the league to address systemic racism, Goodell said he apologized for not listening to the concerns of African-American players earlier and said he supported the players’ right to protest peacefully.
During the 2016 season, Colin Kaepernick started the movement within the league when he knelt to call attention to racial injustice and violence by police, but no team has offered him a contract since then.
Goodell’s comments were diametrically opposed to the president, who spoke out to defend New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees, who said this week that it was disrespectful to kneel during the pregame playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Brees apologized on Thursday after immediate backlash. But the president said on Twitter that Brees should not have backtracked and that people should stand when the anthem is played. On Friday night, Brees directed an Instagram post to the president.
“We can no longer use the flag to turn people away or distract them from the real issues that face our black communities,” Brees said. “We did this back in 2017, and regretfully I brought it back with my comments this week.”
More than any other major sports league, the N.F.L. has wrestled in recent years with the issue of race, the lack of African-Americans and other people of color in positions of power in the league and the rights of players to protest social issues on the field. While three-quarters of the league’s players are African-American, nearly every team owner is white and several of the most prominent owners are strong supporters of the president.