Stirring gospel music wafted from the speakers of the Byways and Hedges mobile youth ministry truck on Saturday night in Flatbush, drifting out over the ruins of a police SUV spitting flame and thick black smoke from its smashed windows. Standing on the whistlestop platform at the back of his truck at the crowded corner of Bedford and Snyder Avenues, the Reverend Terry Lee surveyed the chaotic scene. “Father, I pray tonight, O God, for every youth that’s standing under your presence,” he intoned over his sound system.
All around him, young demonstrators were variously engaged: Crouched on the curb, bawling and snotting uncontrollably as their comrades tried to flush pepper spray from their faces with milk; lying face-down in the asphalt, batons in their backs, getting cuffed; posing exultantly for photographs in front of the flaming SUV; hurling bottles, bricks, traffic cones, and fire extinguishers at an army of police officers in riot gear.
Listen to Gwynne Hogan discuss the Saturday night confrontations on WNYC:
Footage of the Battle of Bedford Avenue probably weren't the most shocking images to come out of New York’s third day of protests against racist police violence and impunity. That honor likely belongs to the widely-circulated videos of a police officers elsewhere in Brooklyn driving a vehicle straight through a crowd of protesters, collecting them on its grill like insects before they slid off. Speaking towards the end of the night, Mayor Bill de Blasio celebrated the police and defended the officers driving the vehicle, explaining that the protesters it ran into “did the wrong thing.”
Another alarming video, which appears to show a police officer in Union Square flashing a white-power hand signal, is being investigated by the New York Attorney General.
The escalating protests were hardly confined to Brooklyn. People in every borough filled the streets, chanting names: George Floyd, killed by police in Minneapolis last week; Ahmaud Arbery, by a former police officer and his son while jogging in Georgia in February, Breonna Taylor, killed by police in Kentucky in March; and the names of New Yorkers killed by the New York Police Department in recent years, such as Eric Garner, Shantel Davis, and Kimani Gray.
Protesters’ tactics varied widely. Many of the marches were entirely nonviolent, and early indications had been that the NYPD was backing off its hyper-confrontational approach of the previous day. When thousands of people pressed into the plaza in front of the Adam Clayton Powell office building in Harlem on 125th Street at 1 p.m., the visible police presence was light. Official speakers emphasized the importance of dialogue and the transformative power of the ballot box, but when frustrated protesters streamed out of the plaza and into the streets, chanting “NYPD, suck my dick,” the police presence was light. For a moment it seemed the department’s leadership was reassessing its approach after videos of NYPD’s violent interventions on Friday circulated widely on social media.
It wasn’t until those protesters made their way onto the F.D.R. Drive on Manhattan’s east side, snarling both southbound and northbound lanes, that police showed up in any meaningful numbers, clearing the highway and making arrests as they did so. Even then, as the remaining demonstrators marched south on surface streets through the Upper East Side, police largely receded out of visibility.
Other afternoon protests were similarly free of violence: A march westward from Union Square in Manhattan was orderly and proceeded largely without incident. Another that began near Prospect Park in Brooklyn began with words of encouragement from mothers of people killed by New York police.
“We can’t get mad for one day, we can’t get mad for two days,” said Constance Malcolm, whose son, Ramarley Graham, was 18 in 2012 when police broke into his home without a warrant and shot him to death in his own bathroom in front of his grandmother. “We gotta keep it up, we can’t let up. ‘Cause the minute you let up, there’s gonna be another Eric Garner. There’s gonna be another Shantel. There’s gonna be another Kimani… and the list goes on.”
Throughout the day, city bus drivers honked their horns in support of passing protesters. In Brooklyn, O’Neil Bonner said he was encouraged by the protests. “It’s all for equality, all for justice most of all," he said. "I’m loving it. And I love the support, everyone from all races turning out, it’s excellent.” Bonner was pleased that the Transit Workers Union had announced that its members would refuse to transport arrested protesters for the police. “I loved it. We don’t work for the cops,” he said. “We shouldn’t be allowed to take nobody to no precinct, especially ones that are protesting for our rights.”
But as the march that began in Prospect Park coursed down Flatbush Avenue, circling through Flatbush, it was met with a growing police response. The NYPD buzzed the marchers with a helicopter, kicking up trash and dust and bending trees.
Some marchers threw bottles at police. Police responded with the liberal application of pepper spray, batons, and handcuffs. By early evening, many of the Brooklyn marchers had returned to the southwest corner of Prospect Park, relaxing on the golden-hour lawns and triumphantly sitting in the intersection outside the park blocking traffic.
But a large number of protesters never made it that far, having been snagged at the intersection of Bedford and Tilden Avenues in Brooklyn, where police reinforced themselves, establishing a line of conflict with protesters that would last for the next eight hours.
Michael Bernard, 72, a longtime resident of the block, blamed police for the turn toward violence. “All of a sudden they come up with a reinforcement of police, uncivilized police, and just started pepper-spraying the innocent peoples like no one has a right to demonstrate. This is not right! We say black lives matter,” he said. “They were walking down peacefully all of a sudden all these nincompoops, these ugly creatures, reinforcements, start hitting people, hitting people with batons and everything.”
Ann Marie Adamson, 50, a Flatbush resident, urged protesters not to throw things at the police, but endorsed the need for protest. “I’m a professional black woman who has just had enough,” she said. “I’m tired of seeing blood on our sidewalks in our community. You can’t tell me it is my community when you feel free to kick in my door and kill my kids. It’s not my community. So I’m taking it back.”
Many officers on the front line on Bedford wore dark ribbons obscuring their badge numbers, making it difficult to identify them. The ribbons, nominally worn to honor recently deceased officers, are officially intended to be worn on officers’ badges above their numbers, but it is a longstanding practice, evidently tolerated by the department, for officers policing protests to anonymize themselves with the ribbons. “It’s old,” said Officer Meneses, who gave his badge number, 14069, when asked for it said of his ribbon. “It fell down.”
Journalists covering the protests found it difficult and dangerous work. Police pepper sprayed reporters, shoved them to the ground, and in at least one instance arrested them.
The police work was hardly safe either. Confronting crowds enraged at police, officers were ordered to form up and stand their ground. Early on, most of the missiles hurled at police were plastic water bottles, but as the evening escalated, more protesters were throwing glass bottles, fireworks, rocks and bricks. On Bedford and Albemarle, a chunk of brick and concrete the size of grapefruit arced 50 feet or more before landing a direct hit on an officers neck. He collapsed, and was carried away.
As the evening wore on, the cycle of violence between police and protesters developed a rhythm. The two sides squared off; someone would throw something at the police, or climb a traffic sign, or set a neglected police vehicle on fire; police would respond, pepper-spraying anyone who got too close, pushing through the crowd with batons, tackling suspected perpetrators; protesters would hurl invective at police for their violence; the two groups would reset, and repeat. Over hours of repetition, the line of scrimmage inched northward along Bedford, from Tilden Avenue, past Albemarle and Snyder, to Church Avenue, where protesters filled the intersection with flaming dumpsters setting off a long stand-off that ended when a freshly replenished police force drove them east along Church, picking off protesters as they came.
An NYPD spokesperson said 345 protesters were arrested, and 33 officers were injured on Saturday. The spokesperson declined to provide further detail about the charges or injuries. Forty-seven police vehicles were damaged on Saturday, according to the NYPD.
Additional reporting by Gwynne Hogan and Jake Offenhartz.
