Culture

A Night of Violent Protests Sets a Nation Ablaze


Is the United States coming apart? That is the question many people are asking after another night of demonstrations and violence following the horrific death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police. In Minneapolis, Atlanta, New York, Dallas, Oakland, and other cities, there were violent clashes between police and protesters, which left at least two people dead, businesses looted, and local politicians combining appeals for calm with expressions of fury. In Washington, D.C., Secret Service agents scuffled with demonstrators outside of the White House, as Donald Trump and other officials were locked down inside.

On Saturday morning, Minnesota’s Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat, announced that he was mobilizing the Minnesota National Guard and accepting offers of support from National Guard units in neighboring states. He also said that he had spoken with officials at the Pentagon about dispatching elements of the military to Minneapolis, and the Department of Defense subsequently confirmed that it had ordered U.S. Army units to stand by. Walz claimed that the “wanton destruction and chaos” seen in Minneapolis on Friday night had been perpetrated by highly organized outsiders, including ideological extremists and experts in urban warfare. “Our great cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul are under assault by people who do not share our values . . . and certainly are not here to honor George Floyd,” Walz said during a press conference. Appearing alongside Walz, Minneapolis’s mayor, Jacob Frey, who is also a Democrat, echoed the claim that outside agitators were primarily responsible for the violence, saying, “they are coming in largely from outside of the city, from outside of the region, to prey on everything that we have built over the last several decades.”

In Atlanta, demonstrators set fires and destroyed property at the CNN Center, Centennial Olympic Park, and a mall in the Buckhead neighborhood. In an impassioned press conference on Friday night, Atlanta’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, tore into the protesters, saying, “When you burn down this city, you are burning down our community. . . . You are disgracing our city. You are disgracing the life of George Floyd.” Earlier on Friday, before the protests turned violent, Atlanta’s police chief, Erika Shields, had expressed sympathy for the demonstrators. “People are understandably upset,” she told reporters. “Black men are routinely killed. And whether it’s by police or other individuals, the reality of it is we’ve diminished the value on their life. Think about that.”

That is the tragedy of the situation: the main force driving the demonstrations is outrage and righteous anger about the callous murder of Floyd and the long history of racism in U.S. policing. Given the seemingly endless procession of cases in which unarmed black men have been killed by the police, it is a sign of societal strength rather than dysfunction that so many people, of all races, are protesting. “There is something fundamentally wrong with American police training, police culture, police organization,” Orlando Patterson, the eminent Harvard sociologist, noted in a conversation with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell on Friday night. All too often, Patterson explained, the American culture of policing “sees the community as the enemy.”

In some places on Friday, the police tactics appeared to inflame situations rather than deëscalate them. During a largely peaceful protest outside of the Barclays Center, in Brooklyn, members of the New York Police Department were captured on video hurling a woman to the ground and rushing into the crowd with their batons raised to make arrests. They also pepper-sprayed and handcuffed a local politician who was taking part in the protest. In Louisville, Kentucky, police opened fire on reporters with pepper balls for no apparent reason. However, there were clearly elements among the protesters who were intent on causing trouble, in New York and in other demonstrations across the country, and many of them appeared to be white. Outside of Fort Greene Park, in Brooklyn, protesters attacked a police van and set it alight. “I saw non-black allies in particular escalating the situation,” Jumaane Williams, New York City’s public advocate, said. “That decision should not be yours to make.”

As the unrest continues, some commentators are comparing the situation to 1968, when there were riots in Baltimore, Chicago, Washington, and other cities following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4th, and unrest that continued throughout the summer. There are undoubtedly some parallels: 1968 was an election year; political activism was on the rise; in some cities, aggressive police tactics exacerbated the violence; and there was a Republican Presidential candidate, Richard Nixon, who exploited the turmoil to appeal to frightened white voters. At this stage, though, making a full historical comparison seems premature.

Despite the dramatic footage of demonstrators confronting police and burning police vehicles in Atlanta and other cities, the unrest has been localized and scattered; the number of injuries and deaths has been relatively small; and the property damage has been fairly limited—certainly compared to what happened during the large-scale rioting in 1968. Also, after an inexplicable delay, authorities in Minneapolis have finally arrested Derek Chauvin, the police officer who knelt on the windpipe of the cuffed Floyd for more than eight minutes, and charged him with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. It is possible that things will calm down. But with more protests planned in many cities, including Atlanta and New York, such an outcome is far from guaranteed, especially given the potential for Trump to further provoke things.

After appearing to suggest in a pair of tweets on Thursday night that the police should shoot some of the demonstrators in Minneapolis, the President backed off a bit on Friday. He said that he had called Floyd’s family, whom he described as “terrific people,” to express sorrow about Floyd’s death; and he tried to walk back his incendiary tweets, claiming that they had been misinterpreted. In tweets on Saturday morning, Trump praised the Secret Service agents for how they had handled the protests outside of the White House on Friday night. “They were not only totally professional, but very cool. I was inside, watched every move, and couldn’t have felt more safe.” He could have left it there, but, of course, he didn’t. In another tweet, he said that the demonstrators, had they breached the security fence on Pennsylvania Avenue, would have “been greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen. . . . Many Secret Service agents are just waiting for action.”

In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo struck a very different note. Appearing at his daily COVID-19 press conference, Cuomo announced that the state’s attorney general, Letitia James, would carry out an inquiry into Friday night’s unrest, examining both the police’s tactics and the crowd’s behavior. “People do deserve answers, and people do deserve accountability,” Cuomo said. “If someone did something wrong, they should be held accountable.” Cuomo also sought to deëscalate the situation, appealing to New Yorkers to take inspiration from the health-care workers and other people on the front lines who have helped get the state through the worst stages of the pandemic. “Yes, be outraged, be frustrated,” Cuomo said. “Demand better, demand justice, but not violence. . . . There is nothing we can’t overcome. We showed that here. We beat this damn virus. But the way we beat this virus, we can beat the virus of racism, we can beat the virus of discrimination, we can beat the virus of inequality. If we can beat this virus, we can beat anything.”

These are fine-sounding words. It remains to be seen if they will have any effect.





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