Hundreds of New Yorkers marched for hours on Monday night in a show of support for Jacob Blake, a Black man shot at point blank range by a white police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin on Sunday.
The demonstration was led by a coalition of local Black Lives Matter groups that first formed in the aftermath of George Floyd's death in May. As protesters convened in Times Square, they described feeling both reinvigorated and discouraged by the latest shooting, and a sense of déjà vu that hearkened back to the summer's early days of unrest.
"I came out here for George Floyd, I turn around and there's another brother shot by cops," said Oz Williams, a local activist and ex-Marine who served in the Iraq War. "I just can’t believe what's going through these cops' skulls that they’re going to go and do that again."
Graphic footage of the shooting showed a Kenosha police officer grabbing Blake by the shirt as he attempted to get into his car, then firing at least seven shots into his back. His three children — all under the age of 8 — were reportedly in the car at the time.
Blake survived the shooting, but is currently paralyzed from the waist down, his father told the Chicago Sun-Times on Tuesday. The officers involved have been placed on administrative leave, pending an investigation by the Wisconsin Department of Justice.
Orlando Hamilton, a 28-year-old founder of the cycling collective Street Riders NYC, said he awoke Monday to a flurry of text messages and social media posts showing Blake's shooting.
"I regret watching that video," he said. "I do a peaceful protest every week. I make sure everyone knows to keep it peaceful. We about this close to not being peaceful no more."
Derrick Ingram, the activist whose home was besieged by NYPD cops and police dogs earlier this month, said he'd also struggled to watch the video of Blake being shot, which he called "trauma porn for liberals."
"We don’t get media support unless we’re going through pain," he said.
As the crowd marched south from Times Square, several participants said they had not seen a group so fired up since the early days of the Floyd uprisings.
"We should be angry. They’re not listening to us, they’re not hearing us, they don't care," said Kimberly Bernard, a 41-year-old registered nurse in Brooklyn.
For more than five hours, the group wended through Lower Manhattan, past City Hall, and onto the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge, engaging in occasional shouting matches with cops and minor acts of vandalism along the way. Despite a hefty police presence, there were no arrests throughout the night, according to an NYPD spokesperson.
But Ingram said he sensed the shift in tone from recent events, as if many protesters had come to the realization that the demonstrations that took over the streets this summer would not be enough to stem the tide of police violence.
"In the beginning with George Floyd, it was more of a visceral pain," Ingram said. "This energy I’m getting here is people who are just fed up with the bullshit."
