New York protests like day and night
Police officers clash with looters at an AT&T store in Manhattan on Monday night. Brooklyn marches start as peaceful indignation, but change after dark
NEW YORK— Rewind, before the trash fires and lootings and arrests, to the scene outside Brooklyn’s Barclays Center on Sunday evening.
A gate agent at Kennedy International Airport, Victoria Sloan, stood in the crowd with the setting sun at her back, thinking about the time police hassled her little brother. Several feet away, Daniel English, a young media consultant who lives close by, handed out free pizza and water with friends at a table one of them had brought along. And Cory Thomas, a 40year-old lead abatement specialist, held his phone aloft, sharing the scene by video with an old friend — the two had once been beaten by police, he said, when they were teenagers. Young men and women threaded through the crowd with bottles of water and free snacks. A woman offered squirts from a bottle of hand sanitizer.
Soon, the group would begin marching through the broad avenues and narrow side streets of Prospect Heights, greeted at every turn with applause and honking horns and raised-fist salutes. Bryce Stewart, 35, stopped his motorcycle and climbed atop it for a better look. “This is beautiful,” he said. In Brooklyn, the Barclays Center, rising up at the intersections of several neighbourhoods, old and new, white and Black, has become a starting point. And the men and women who arrive, many night after night, for protests on a scale without precedent in their generation, bring with them a breadth of backgrounds as wide as the city around them.
That mood, one of spirited, shouted, sometimes vulgar but essentially peaceful indignation, in a pattern seen daily since Friday, seems to last until dark. Then, the glass starts to shatter. On Sunday, it began around 10 p.m. in SoHo, when a knot of young men on the periphery of a large march from Brooklyn smashed a clothing store window and stole a jacket, dragging the entire mannequin out onto the sidewalk.
Someone above shouted from a tall window: “You’re ruining it for everyone else!”
Scenes of looting — rampant in SoHo by early Monday — and violence between police and protesters have dominated news coverage of New York City’s protests around the world and contributed to the announcement Monday by Gov. Andrew Cuomo of an 11 p.m. curfew in the city. The crimes being committed have frustrated the protest’s earliest arrivals, the ones who write slogans on the lids of pizza boxes to hold overhead, only to see their efforts hijacked by the shadowy newcomers with their metal bars and stolen clothing.
“There are people out there who are very negative,” said D.J. Elliott, 30. “And this is their golden opportunity.”
Leroy O’Brien, who, at 63, was among the older of the protesters, was less charitable about the motivations of looters and vandals. “Knuckleheads,” he said. Sunday’s protests began throughout the city in the afternoon with the eager flush of civic duty, of the I-was-there brotherhood borne of a sweeping communal moment. In Union Square, a gathering place for protest and activists going back some 150 years, a 19-yearold man who gave only the name Christian H. saw an image that struck him: a highranking police official cheerfully engaging protesters like himself.
“He was with us,” Christian said. “It was fine.”
Tiffiney Davis, 39, a managing director and a mother, said she had long feared for her son’s safety around the police. She attended the Barclays demonstrations for the first time Sunday and was struck by the diversity.
“I’ve got my white friends out here with me,” said Davis, who is Black. “Now we feel like we’re getting a little power.”
Nearby, Gabe Jones, 18, was also attending for the first time — it was his first protest anywhere, actually. Jones, who is Black, said that his own background with police informed his reaction to the death of a man almost 2,000 kilometres away.
“The world is watching,” he said.