Kiwi in US says riots raise fears
As Wellington man Evan Roberts walked his neighbourhood, he saw George Floyd’s name plastered across signs and walls. Brittney Deguara reports.
GEORGE Floyd’s name is plastered across the city of Minneapolis in the United States.
Phrases like ‘‘F... the police’’, ‘‘Damn, I really hate cops’’, and ‘‘All cops are b ........ ’’ have been painted on shop fronts, signs, and infrastructure.
Kiwi man Evan Roberts, who has been in the US for almost 20 years, lives in the area and ventured out following a disruptive night of riots.
‘‘It’s been a pretty tough . . . few days,’’ he said. Roberts described the mood in the city as ‘‘tense’’ and ‘‘fearful’’.
Riots erupted from days of protests in Floyd’s name. He was the African American man who was handcuffed and pleading for air as a white police officer knelt on his neck. The officer, Derek Chauvin, has been charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter.
A protester from a young age, Roberts, who grew up in Wellington, stayed home with his family as the streets filled with placard-wielding and chanting Americans, hoping to make a difference.
From what he heard from friends who attended, the protests started off peacefully with people trying to practice physical distancing. However, as the night wore on, the crowd changed.
‘‘Every night, it was after dark when things turned more violent to a much more substantial degree. It is sort of tense and uncertain.’’ He suspected the looting and destructive actions were conducted by ‘‘opportunistic’’ people who weren’t actually part of the protest.
From their home they could hear what was going on. Roberts mentioned that they double-checked that their front door was locked, but overall, they didn’t feel as though they were in danger. They had friends who lived closer to the riots and were concerned for their safety.
The former Victoria University of Wellington teacher hoped Chauvin’s arrest would relieve a lot of the tension, but there remained a feeling that if it happened sooner, Thursday night’s (Friday New Zealand time) riots could have been avoided.
Minnesota Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington said the arrest, made within four
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days of the incident, was ‘‘extraordinary’’ because a case hadn’t been charged in that timeframe before.
Walking the streets of Longfellow yesterday after the 3rd precinct of the Minneapolis Police Department and several other buildings were set alight, Roberts noted how it seemed like a completely different city than the night before.
‘‘So many people were biking with brooms strapped to their bikes and there was a lot of clean-up going on.’’
People were picking up broken glass and debris, but the evidence of what happened the night before remained, especially within a couple of blocks of the police station.
‘‘You could see what had happened on the fringes,’’ he said.
But the city wasn’t in ruins. ‘‘It’s not blocks and blocks ruined,’’ he said.
‘‘There are some buildings [damaged] in a very concentrated area . . . [It’s a] couple of hundred buildings in a city of . . . 3.5 million people.’’
A heavy police presence also remained.
The state police and the national guard had been deployed to control the situation. Roberts said these officers were noticeably more relaxed than the local officers, who were often aggressive and more physical in their interactions.
From his observations, a lot of the buildings that were targeted
were ‘‘corporate, larger, institutional-owned places’’, places such as services stations and pawn shops.
Some shopfronts had boarded up the front doors and erected signs saying ‘‘minority-owned business’’. It had worked to a
degree, as many remained untouched, but there was still a significant amount of destruction.
On Friday night a curfew was in place. From 8pm local time until 6am the following morning, the streets were supposed to be clear. During this time, Roberts expected police patrols to increase, especially in the area where Floyd was arrested.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic erupted and a stay-at-home order was put in place, Roberts, an assistant sociology and population studies professor at the University of Minnesota, remained at home with his family. They would work from home during the day and go to the supermarket as a family in the evening but were being a little cautious at the moment.
‘‘Normal life has been pretty different,’’ he said.
The difficulties of the past couple of months, including the rising threat of the pandemic – the country’s death toll had surpassed 100,000 – unemployment rates soaring, and the death of Floyd at the hands of a police officer, all just ‘‘boiled over’’.
This wasn’t the first time race riots had erupted in the United States. In 2014, for example, riots broke following the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson.
‘‘This [has] been a recurrent thing in American history . . . playing out some old, old tensions,’’ Roberts said.
However, what was distinctive and different about Floyd’s death and the outrage that ensued was the state’s prompt response to fire and charge the police officer responsible.
‘‘This is a history, we’ve got to address it in the broader sense, as well as addressing the specifics of [Floyd].’’