Scenes from a local protest
Driving down Fourth Avenue toward Grant Street last weekend on Friday afternoon, I noticed a heavy police presence — officers on motorcycles, in cars and on foot -- at a few intersections in a row.
As I parked on Fourth facing the City-County Building, a big black SUV rolled past, accompanied by police. The motorcycle cops stopped at Grant while the cars drove on, but one officer fell back and parked just ahead of me, turning his bike sideways to block the road.
What was up?
I approached him as I left my truck and, thinking of recent political events, I asked, “What’s going on? Are there special guests in town for something?”
“No, just our usual guests.” He nodded toward Forbes Avenue, where the front ranks of a marching crowd were just appearing across the blockwide parking lot. It was a Black Lives Matter protest.
I turned back to the officer. He was African American. His voice had been completely neutral when he spoke, his eyes hidden by his helmet’s visor. I said, “OK — thanks” and headed off.
Things got weirder. The police had set up on the south side of the intersection, and by the time I reached Grant, protesters on bicycles had lined up on the north side, five or six of them, facing the pedestrian crossing and the police, their backs to their own crowd. A similar double cordon — police and protesters — lined Forbes.
As I reached the other side and turned toward city hall, the young bicyclist nearest me called out, “I think the Grant Street entrance is closed. You’ll have to go around to Ross.”
People were exiting the building onto Grant, so I decided to try it, but the young man was right. As I came back down the grand steps, I paused to watch and then record a few seconds of the demonstration.
Several things struck me. Most of the protesters wore masks and stood responsibly apart, most were relatively young, and more were white than Black. It seemed almost as many participants were recording the event as were taking part. Despite the hoarse chant-leading via megaphone, the whole vibe was rather listless. Then again, it was a hot Friday afternoon in July.
The bicyclist and I nodded at each other as I headed around the corner. I was there to pay property taxes. I’d been out of town so long that I’d missed the window for reliable snail-mail. I’d also missed weeks of Pittsburgh news, absorbed by a family crisis in my Missouri hometown, so what might seem old-hat to you felt new and different to me.
The Finance Department was silent. Staffers were not working the counters, and a sign said “Taxes” with an arrow pointing to a small bin.
As I returned to my truck, it occurred to me that the taxes I’d just paid probably didn’t cover 5 minutes of the security necessary that day to keep the protesters safe.
Protest is the great American way, but BLM is a cause I can’t support, and the reason was obvious right there on the street: A bicycle brigade won’t protect protesters of any stripe from violent extremists.
The protesters would correctly point out that on some tragic occasions, the extremists have been within the police force. Thus the wary lines facing each other across Grant.
But the insurmountable fact is that police are crucial to upholding our right to assemble and protest. So long as BLM embraces their defunding, it cannot earn my trust.
I believe we should continue to reform the system, not to dismantle it. “Isms” of any kind are useful in identifying problems, but as cures, they are usually worse than the disease.
We can reject the Black Lives Matter movement and still proclaim that Black lives matter — all of them — Black police, Black civilians and Black victims of the recent, alarming surge in gun violence.
Wherever you stand on this, I bet we agree that peaceful protests like the one I saw help keep injustice at the front of our civic thinking. That’s sadly necessary.