Black Lives Matter reached quiet
Sunninghill this week as I noticed when I posted a letter.
I asked several friends in the USA what
had happened in their neighbourhood. Their reports follow, unedited, except to
clarify a point or correct a minor eror. In some cases, they are responding to specific
questions I asked so I have summarized my questions to make sense of their
answers.
The combined texts are quite long. For
those who retain faith in the potential of community and politics to work for
the good, but do no have time to read all, I recommend you scroll down to the
account from Indianapolis.
New York City (from two friends):
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The protests are centered in Manhattan and
Brooklyn. There are thousands peacefully protesting racial inequality and
policy brutality throughout the [country]. Union Square, Washington Square
Park are major venues, as is Times Square and the Barclay Center in Brooklyn.
During the day and early evening, the protests are calm and then the evening
brings looters and other evil doers. It has been pretty bad. The protests are
borough-wide, though I wouldn’t imagine there are any protests in Staten
Island, since they don’t welcome people of color under the best of
circumstances.
It is amazing to see the protests in so many
cities throughout the country. I say this because so many of the people
are not black.
Now, if there was something we can do to work on
systemic racism. Sad to say that is for the next generation to see any headway.
The 18,000 police departments in the U. S. (yes) and the big police unions in
NYC, LA, etc. have fought change at every step.
I do remember being pushed, shoved and otherwise
abused during the 1968 Chicago demonstrations and police riots.
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Yes, the ignorant and criminals are at work after
the protests. Thousands of protesters yesterday throughout the city with
virtually no problems. A country that has tolerated systemic racism and police
brutality is facing some terrible truths. Now we need to work on equality and
changing the militarism of the police culture — fostered by police unions and
no transparency. There was an Obama policy/guidelines defining two types of
policing in existence - 1) warrior and 2) guardian, recommending that the
current culture of police as warrior be changed to guardian of the people.
Needless to say, guns, etc. would be involved, but the mentality should be
different. Obviously nothing happened with this — and perhaps it will be
impossible to implement.
It took a video by a 17 year old girl to unleash
the anger masked by denial.
[In answer to my question as to whether there were protests
in all the boroughs.]
And, yes there are even protests in Staten Island
where Eric Garner was murdered by the police in a chokehold in 2014. The cop
was never indicated and never lost his job. He’s been trying to get reinstated.
Here is a list of today’s protests. They are all
registered with the city and are primarily citizens expressing their first
amendment rights
In many of the looting situations, the police are
standing back and helping exacerbate the situation. I have anecdotal evidence
of this, as well as stories and videos from the news. There are 30,000 cops in
NYC. They are all not working on the streets to protect protesters’ 1st
amendment rights.
[In answer to my comments about policing policies
in the UK.]
Entrenched racism and the militarism of police
throughout the country is at the heart of the problem. They are quasi-militarized
and use military equipment given them by the military. There can be no real
comparison with American policing and any other policing. It is up to the
lawmakers and citizens of this country to DO something. These are more like
uprisings than demonstrations. This has been building in the minds and hearts
of many Americans for some years now, seeing what the police do to unarmed
citizens and get away with it. So, no surprises that watching the killing of a
black man (who shouldn’t have been arrested by 4 cops to begin with) sparked
this. Compounded with the COVID crisis, the fact that so many minorities were
impacted by the virus in poor neighborhoods . . . a perfect storm. NYC’s police
department (the largest in the country with 30,00 cops) has been run by the
police union pretty much. There are any number of problems I can talk about,
including the fact that we (pretty much in each state and certainly in NYC) are
not allowed to see the “track records” or complaints against individual police
offers.
This has been a long an intense discussion in this
city and perhaps it takes Minneapolis (with a particularly racist police
department) to get us to do something.
[In answer to my question why a mere accusation that
one man had committed a non-violent crime was responded to by four armed
officers.]
Store owner [in Minneapolis who called the police
and accused George Floyd of trying to pass a forged $20 bill] was Middle
Eastern, as are many of the bodegas and small store owners in cities. There has
been a history of problems of Korean stories owners (when they were primary
owners of small delis) treating black people badly (like calling the police).
There is an underlying movement to work with Middle Eastern store owners
serving the black communities to stop this profiling. But we shall see.
[In answer to my question about the shooting of
Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed jogger, by two men with guns.]
In the case of the jogger, this father and son duo
were just all out racists — with a history of such and they profiled a young
black man running. They are just horrible people with guns. Nothing surprising
here. But, if this wasn’t videoed no one would have followed up.
The word is racism and racism.
_____________________________________________________________________
It's shocking really to see the criminals
destroying property so indiscriminately. The mobs of protesters are
throughout the city in all boroughs - and the looters just follow along.
The 8 pm curfew made a difference, but how disturbing to know that we have to
live in a country that must impose curfews for public safety. The whole situation
is disgraceful.
New Jersey (from two friends):
The cities have been active with protests but are not
seeing the kinds of violence seen elsewhere. Jersey City, Camden and Passaic
are viewed as having community friendly departments. The police chief in Camden,
Wysocki, joined the protesters. Even Newark, where downtown was reduced to
ruins in the riots of the late 60s, has been peaceful. Paterson has not seen
much protest related violence. But it has seen an ugly spike in gun violence,
with two people killed and 23 others wounded in gun violence in the month
of May. A disturbing element of the protests is that it appears some may be hijacked
into violence by white anarchists, leaning left. It serves to escalate the
oppression, discredit the protests, and destabilize the body politic. The [New
York] Times reported that right wing gun nuts are making plans to head out and
protect private property and law and order. Don’t be surprised when the Lunatic
in Chief calls out the Second Amendment Boys to bring order to the cities.
Cities and towns control their local police
departments but most, if not all, are under the ultimate authority of the
state attorney general, who is under the governor. The president does not have
the authority to employ the armed services against American citizens except in
an insurrection like the Civil War. Fear is Trump May claim insurrection and
send in the troops.
__________________________________________________________________________
An email sent to the mayor of Jersey City:
My husband and I moved to Jersey City (from Hoboken)
over 3 years ago, partially because we are appreciative of Jersey City's
position as an incredibly diverse and progressive American City, and because we
are invested in the same values you and your Administration are invested
in.
I am grateful to see you marching with protesters
this week, as I've seen you do before. I am reaching out today to urge you to
advance specific action that would help address police brutality and improve
quality of life for black and brown citizens in Jersey City. I know how proud
you are of our police force - which under your leadership has grown to its
largest size ever - and I think these actions will not only protect residents,
but will make acceptable and unacceptable police behavior clearer, which in
turn helps protect cops.
Please, through legislation or executive order :
- Require De-escalation
- Ban Chokeholds and Strangleholds
- Require a Duty to Intervene
- Require a Duty to Intervene
- Require Comprehensive Reporting
Finally, I urge you to support Councilmember
Solomon's recent resolution establishing the creation of an ad hoc community
review board, once its voted upon by the full Council. My hope is that under
your Administration, this board would go above and beyond what Jersey City's
current police citizen advisory board (which I know has been successful in its
own ways!) can do.
Jersey City has been a leader in so many ways - in
welcoming refugees, in celebrating our diversity, in City-funded rights to
trans employees. I would be so proud to live in a City that, in the wake of
George Floyd's murder, became compliant with all 8 tenents of the #8CantWait campaign.
Indianapolis:
We had two nights of curfew
declared for Sunday and Monday from 8 PM to 6 AM. This was in response to
the deadly destruction wrought in the downtown by violence and vandalism on
Saturday night. The protests rallies during the day on Friday and
Saturday stayed within bounds.
But Friday night and especially
on Saturday night a lot of damage was done in breaking plate glass windows on
any number of downtown buildings---including my branch bank office.
Looters entered and ransacked some of the businesses. To this we
have as well that two people were shot and killed on Saturday in the downtown
protest area.
The police were out with
all their riot gear and fired tear gas and pepper stuff. Unlike the
daytime gatherings, the evening protests were pretty tense and hard to
control. We see how some bad types used the protest rally as a license to
be vandals. The scale of their mischief is shocking to see---and a sober
reminder for why we need the cops.
But let me say that for us living
but two miles from where all this was happening, we heard nothing
directly. Only by checking the news did we discover what was going on
downtown. Sometimes for summer festivals the distant sound of concert music
reaches us in the evening from the downtown parks. But I heard nothing
untoward here coming from that direction Saturday evening.
Last night we got a reprieve as
before the curfew hour the police and the protesters saluted each other and
then paraded together in peaceful, and presumably friendly, tandem up to the
Governor's Mansion some twenty blocks north of Ivy Tech [Communit y College].
There was no alert on my cellphone this morning as there was on Sunday and
Monday telling me of the curfew.
Indianapolis famously did not
burn in April 1968 after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in
Tennessee. Robert Kennedy* was here that evening for a presidential
campaign stop. He spoke movingly to a gathering in a predominantly
African American neighborhood (just over a mile from here), of this latest
American tragedy. The eloquence of his appeal to honor King by peaceful
vigils kept things calm in this city when so many others burned that evening.
So, we had a reputation to
sustain as a community that knows how to keep its head and heart when others
seem to lose theirs. A lot of us are thus pretty disappointed for
what happened here this weekend, even as we know how the underlying issue of
what is labelled as 'police brutality’, has local import. We had two
recent instances of police killing that are being investigated. We thus
have our own tinder here. (We were stunned a month ago when in a two week
span, a police officer and a postal letter carrier---both women---were each
shot to death on the job---by angry young men with guns).
The shocking killing in
Minneapolis justly ignites national outrage. We can add to our fury with
the dawdling in Georgia where officials took two months(!) to charge the
vigilante father and son who chased down in a truck and then shot to death a
runner who was out exercising on a public street.
So, things here in the USA are in
flux and many of us hope we can somehow get through this till November when we
have our rendezvous with destiny. Need I say more on that?
My usual neighborhood polling
site is not open this time. So, I went to another one---in the Culinary
Building at Ivy Tech! It was a surprisingly smooth process such that it
took me all told but a little more than an hour---including to pedal my bicycle
to campus and back home!
Although I felt that Elizabeth
Warren should be our next president given just how smart she is about how the
tricksters game our system, I voted for Joe Biden as our yet great hope.
* For the text of Robert Kennedy’s speech (I
recommend it) on 4 April 1968 see:
This extract contrasts starkly with “When
the looting starts, the shooting starts”:
“What we
need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is
not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness;
but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of
justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white
or they be black.”
Houston:
As for Houston, in comparison to the other
major cities and many smaller ones, despite being George Floyd's home town
(funeral scheduled for next week) it's been relatively chill here, in part
perhaps because the police chief (Art Acevedo) has been super-decent, to the
point of going on CNN to say that if Trump can't do anything to calm the
nation's waters the least he could do is to shut up.
He also accompanied the Floyd family during
the memorial procession yesterday (with up to 60,000 in attendance). But
historically there hasn't been large-scale violence here; in the 60s Houston
was the first major city in the south to desegregate public labor contracting
(a booming economy didn’t hurt either) while elsewhere (and not only in the
south) racist cops, unions and other institutions remained entrenched.
My Chinese-American friend who lives near to
where Floyd was killed in Minneapolis tells the opposite story: one of the most
racist police departments overseeing practically THE most racially unequal city
in the country, liberal as it may be. He thinks it may have been a mix of
boogaloo bois (far right accelerationist gun freaks) and some Antifa provoking
and committing after-hours arson and other violence.
I've said it before and been wrong, but
between the virus, the crash and now this, Trump's show seems to be falling
apart at the seams. Even his lackey defense secretary, who had authorized the
appalling spectacle of a phalanx of soldiers armed to the teeth deployed in
front of the Lincoln Memorial, just came out and said there's no basis for
invoking the Insurrection Act if he has anything to say about it.
Vallejo, California:
[A protester, his hands raised high, was shot
dead by a police officer who suspected that he had a gun in his pocket. This
turned out to be a hammer.]
I’m
in Fairfield now, up the road from Vallejo --we had a curfew in our county for
the past few days, and some of the drug stores and grocery stores have boarded
up windows for safety. The protests are definitely more concentrated in
Vallejo, and the police were very slow to even admit that the killing
happened. Every day there are dozens of new videos and stories on Twitter
from across the country – here, police take a knee as the protesters go by, and
there, police freely wield billy clubs, plant evidence (in plain sight), and
rough up protesters for fun. It’s systemic.
The
police have taken the neo-Nazis aside and given them warnings, saying “oh we’re
going to be using the tear gas soon, just so you know…” But of course, we have
this horrible president, who is setting the tone. Meanwhile, aside from
protesters exposing themselves to Covid-19 in order to defend civil liberties,
the whole country is sick of this whole “Covid thing” and so has decided social
distancing isn’t worth their time. We are going to see a huge spike in
cases in the South and Midwest. A whole lot is riding on this November’s
election!
Meanwhile in Mexico:
This week in Guadalajara, police stopped a
man for ingoring the state edict that masks must be worn in public. The man was
arrested (the police claim for violent conduct). The man’s family could not
find him at the police station. They went to the hospitla where they found him
dead. He had a bullet wound in one foot and died frm blunt trauma to his head.
Casual disregard for human rights is not uncommon in Mexican policing. One
interesting connection with the US situation is that many Mexican police
officers have been trained in the USA as part of the War on Drugs. In other
words, the USA teaches Mexican police the same militarized approach to policing
that is applied in the North.
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