There are no heroes here
Anarchists, the NYPD and Blaz
Mayor de Blasio, yet again making a bad situation worse with his profound planning and messaging failures, has been laying low when things are on fire after dark and showing up in the daylight to deliver scripted messages about how this is fine, save for a few hot spots and troubling incidents triggered by outsiders.
Sunday morning, the mayor widely distrusted by police and police reformers quoted Bob Dylan to back up his assertion that national anarchist groups are working in New York City to provoke violent confrontations with the police. Mayors across the country were seeing the same thing, he said, so “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
Something is happening, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Mayor?
De Blasio isn’t wrong that this protest has been different from anything I’ve seen in 20 years of covering street unrest here, that there is a more aggressive and confrontational contingent. The optics of these protests, amplified on social media and by news outlets, are largely coming from groups looking to provoke violent clashes with the police to dramatically frame them as the domestic agents of the state’s monopoly on authorized violence.
I hate every part of that. I hate the way that tactic hijacks a much larger and far more righteous movement against abusive and racially biased policing, and the way that police keep taking that bait as we’ve seen here in a series of horrific videos: a woman being blindsided and shoved off her feet and face-first into the curb by an officer, a police car driving by an unsuspecting protester and opening a door into him, a cop pulling down the mask of a young black man with his hands up to pepper spray him.
Photos keep circulating of officers covering their badge numbers, an image that captures a fundamental betrayal of the public trust vested in them to protect and serve. Dylan again: “The cops don’t need you, and man they expect the same.”
One of those videos, widely circulated including by me just after I saw it on Saturday evening, shows a police SUV in brownstone Brooklyn — its path blocked by a barricade protesters had put in the street and surrounded by people banging on the vehicle, hurling debris, and even jumping on it — driving ahead into a scattering crowd.
Having paused to think through what I saw there, which I didn’t do before posting it to Twitter along with a quote from the mayor that morning vowing the NYPD would do better, I regret sharing that footage.
As de Blasio said on Sunday, those officers had been placed in an impossible situation that could have become much worse if they hadn’t acted quickly. A second video from the same user, taken minutes later and much less widely circulated, shows what a scary scene this was for the police — one that apparently ended with no one hurt.
All of this to say that when the media does the work of promoting people who want to spark violent conflict with the police — like the two sisters arrested Saturday after throwing a Molotov cocktail at an occupied police van in Brooklyn — we’re not doing ourselves or anyone else any favors.
American policing is in need of deadly serious reforms, as New Yorkers are reminded every time union officials here deliver another incendiary statement pushing their usagainst-them worldview, where “them” is the rest of us and especially New Yorkers of color—and every time a new video of abusive policing in these protests, or in “ordinary” life, inspires revulsion and erodes trust.
But the idea circulating now that we’re going to abolish policing, or even get to real reform through violent confrontation with the police, strikes me as a very dark joke, with a grim punchline. It’s a routine I heard a lot of variations on in 2015 and 2016. How’d that work out?