A fourth day of protests against police brutality kept New York City on edge Sunday, as thousands of people marched and many protesters and officers tried to keep the peace after days of unrest that left police cars burned and hundreds of people under arrest.
Demonstrators paraded through multiple neighborhoods, chanting, kneeling in the street, and falling silent for a minute in front of the neon-adorned NYPD station in Times Square in honor of people killed by police.
Through most of the day, in most of the city, a tense truce held, with officers keeping their distance and occasionally dropping to a knee in a gesture of respect.
But after dark, there were ugly confrontations. Demonstrators in downtown Brooklyn and parts of Manhattan pelted officers with objects and set fires. Officers charged into crowds to clear streets, sending people sprawling and battering bystanders who couldn’t get out of the way.
https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1267334796658774018?s=20
Early Monday morning in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood, mobs of people rampaged down the sidewalks, smashing into numerous luxury shops to steal merchandise. Hundreds of people marauded through the area, breaking into Rolex, Chanel and Prada boutiques as well as clothing and electronics stores.
Manhattan: Looters breaking into the @BestBuy on East 14 Street and 4th Avenue. #NYPD advising units responding to use caution as "airmail" raining down on them from rooftops.
— NYScanner (@nyscanner) June 1, 2020
One person was shot amid the chaos and was being treated in an ambulance.
Small fires burned in the streets, which were covered with glass and garbage. Police appeared overwhelmed and incapable of stopping the destruction.
Manhattan: Smoke coming from a 7-Eleven at East 3rd Street and Bowery. Building possibly on fire.
— NYScanner (@nyscanner) June 1, 2020
Earlier in the day, Mayor Bill de Blasio had rejected the idea of a curfew, like those adopted in other major U.S. cities.
The Democrat credited police for “tremendous restraint,” but appointed two city officials to review incidents caught on video, including an officer ripping a man’s mask off to spray his face with a chemical and two police cruisers lurching into a crowd of demonstrators in Brooklyn.
Manhattan: Multiple business looted at Green Street and Grand Street. #NYPD requesting additional.
— NYScanner (@nyscanner) June 1, 2020
“We all better get back to the humanity here,” de Blasio said. “The protesters are human beings. They need to be treated with tremendous respect. The police officers are human beings. They need to be treated with tremendous respect.”
Since the protests began days ago, at least 790 people have been arrested, 33 officers have been injured and 27 police vehicles have been damaged or destroyed, police said. There were no major injuries reported.
BREAKING: BLOOMINGDALES ON BROADWAY IN MANHATTAN IS GETTING LOOTED. #JusticeForGeorge!
— NYScanner (@nyscanner) June 1, 2020
The mayor’s daughter, Chiara de Blasio, 25, was among those arrested Saturday night, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
The arrest report, obtained by the New York Post, said she refused to leave a Manhattan street cleared by officers because people were throwing things. Chiara de Blasio, who is black, was later given a court summons and released.
Mayor DeBlasio’s daughter Chiara de Blasio was arrested at a protest on Saturday night in Manhattan – @nypost
— NYScanner (@nyscanner) June 1, 2020
The mayor, who is white, didn’t mention the arrest at his press briefing Sunday. City Hall spokespeople didn’t immediately comment.
Demonstrators marched throughout the city. At a plaza in downtown Brooklyn, hundreds chanted “No justice, no peace,” outside the Barclays Center, where the NBA’s Nets play.
Marchers chanted “Hands up, don’t shoot” — a rallying cry that originated from the August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri — during a separate, peaceful rally in Queens. In Manhattan, hundreds of people knelt on Fifth Avenue.
https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1267317304238526465?s=20
Around the city, there were gestures from police officers intended to show sympathy with marchers. A few clapped along with protesters in Manhattan. In Queens, officers knelt with protesters in an intersection as an organizer called out the names of people killed by police.
Those gestures didn’t always last. Outside the Barclays Center, two commanders, urged by the crowd to “drop a knee,” did so. But minutes later a small group rushed at a nearby shopping mall, and officers charged into the crowd, beating people with batons in a chaotic scene.
Still, until late, the day’s mood was more peaceful than Saturday, when marches devolved into numerous clashes between police and protesters and demonstrators set police vehicles on fire and scrawled graffiti on Manhattan’s famed St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said peaceful demonstrations were “hijacked” by people with violent intent.
At a briefing Sunday, the department’s top intelligence and counter-terrorism official, John Miller, said some anarchist groups gathered supplies of rocks and bottles and used scouts to spot vandalism targets.
New York City lawyers, one of whom went to Princeton, the other to New York University Law School, were hit with federal charges that they threw a Molotov cocktail into an unoccupied patrol car Saturday.
“We’re going to make sure that everyone has the right to peacefully protest and assemble,” Shea said. “But we are not going to tolerate destruction of property, having our officers put into harm’s way or any civilians put into harm’s way.”
Similar protests flared around the nation in response to the Minnesota death of George Floyd, a black man who died Monday after a white Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee on his neck.
Elsewhere in New York, hundreds of people helped clean up Sunday after shop windows were shattered and vehicles torched in Rochester and Albany and Buffalo.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the National Guard is on standby and that hundreds of additional troopers were made available to upstate cities.
In Schenectady on Sunday, police marched with protesters, with some officers holding signs saying “Black lives matter. Period!” Police Chief Eric Clifford and other officers knelt with protesters. Later, the mayor declared a state of emergency with a 7 p.m. curfew, citing likely civil unrest.
The New York Civil Liberties Union criticized curfews.
“It isn’t the protesters who need curfews, it’s the police. There is no excusing the police terror we have seen this weekend against protesters,” said NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman.
The governor said state Attorney General Letitia James will investigate actions by both NYPD officers and protesters.
At least five burned-out NYPD vehicles that remained near Manhattan’s Union Square were towed Sunday. People walked around broken glass on the street to take pictures. But for hours, Sunday’s protests were calm.
“Compared to how things turned out yesterday, this is a lot better. This is exactly how things should be,” said Domenic Manning, who spoke at a rally in Union Square. “If you want to get your point across, this is the way to do it. Vandalizing companies and stores, that’s not the way to do it.”
Neighborhood resident Ken Kidd said protesters and police tried to remain peaceful at the start before the stress of a city heavily hit by the coronavirus came out Saturday night.
“I think a community can only say ‘Enough’ so many times and the words aren’t heard so then they got to take action and that’s what happened last night,” Kidd said.
(AP)
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
13 Responses
Many will understand the Mayor’s extremely irresponsible statement as equating the police with the rioters. Can’t Democratic politicians try to bring at least a bit of humanity into their politics?
We should announce that davening and learning Torah in public is a DEMONSTRATION, and therefore allowed. If the government allows demonstrations “with more than 10 people”, without “social distancing”, that undermines the argument that Dina Malchusa Dina supports observance of the ban on normal minyanim and Torah learning.
Shopping is a crime looting is the new way .. with masks!!!
The biggest problem in the US right now is the liberal so called socialist leaders like Cuomo & Deblasio in government [who in there sick mind’s have few priorities other than their liberalists agenda and don’t care if they destroy hard working New Yorkers who just want to earn a decent living.] and Liberal Professors featured in the MSM media and in university’s allowing schools for decades to brainwash the yuth into becoming amoral and entitled. We now live in a society that doesn’t believe in right and wrong anymore, just what benefits each individual. It doesn’t matter how many people get hurt or worse in order for them to get what they want. To make this worse, a good number of people think everyone owes them something. If you’re rich you owe them, if you’re successful you owe them, if you’re a government official you owe them, etc.
Conservative Leaders have been warning for years about how bad this direction was going to get, and now we’re seeing first hand exactly what happens to a society stripped of morals and responsibility. This may have started as a cry for help by those impacted by police brutality, but that’s clearly not the case anymore. What we’re seeing now is a generation putting what they’ve been told for years into action, take what you can, and destroy what you can’t, no matter who suffers in the process.
We voted for democRATs Who don’t believe in G-D but rather believe in this new religion called Scientisim (in regard to Coved19 overstepping their authority), the likes of Cuomo, Deblasio, Schumer, Nadler. Now we suffer, it’s time to get these Bum’s out of office.!!
“We all better get back to the humanity here,” de Blasio said. “The protesters are human beings. They need to be treated with tremendous respect.”
DeBlasio is a sick demented individual who clearly has lost all rights to occupy Gracie Mansion. While he encourages his kids to join the mayhem, he won’t allow small businesses to legally open, and in that way enable them to support their families with dignity! This Mayor is lower than the common peasant. He no longer deserves our respect. And don’t give me this, sshhh we’re in galus garbage. Lay low. Lose your parnasa. Take it on the chin. Etc…
Btw, where are Yeger & Eichenstein? Have they suddenly lost their tongue? Do they care in the slightest about their constituents that pay their salary?
“I can’t let those Hassidics gather and pray or open their businesses and endanger lives, but this is totally acceptable!” Just some peaceful protesters who want their voice heard [and who want you dead and your property looted and confiscated]. העולם הפוך ראית . You don’t need to wait for the next world to realize this, see it happening right before your eyes!
Vote Dem the askonim say we should all be embarrassed of such a mayor crazy by the way his daughter was a arrested last night good for him a thx for all the voters that voted dem TRUMP 2020!!
You elected these democRATic bums now suffer.
Don’t be surprised if the mayors son Donte is one of the ring leaders of the violent demonstrators. He didn’t call for curfew because his kids didn’t get yet their free sneakers like all their friends.
Any political leader that makes open statements condoning violence needs to become a victim of that violence. Our askanim that support this evil criminal must be stripped of community support. Are you reading this Ezra Friedlander? You support reshoim like DeBlasio, Schumer, Nadler, and the rest of their evil ilk. We detest this passionately. If you will not be driven by a dominating sense of morality, we will not consider you representing of the Jewish community.
I’m surprised that The communist demo-crack Deblasio hasn’t blamed this entire mess on George Bush yet.
And De Blasio needs to be impeached and committed to an insane asylum! Stop feeling sorry for those two-legged animals who will use any excuse to steal and loot expensive items from stores whose owners were nowhere near the act(s) being protested and the protesters who were nowhere near, either.There is no excuse to condone such evil, animalistic behavior, which is motivated by greed and avarice. Shame on De Blasio!!!
Curious as to why the officers weren’t busy handing out violations to the crowds for lack of social distancing?
the New York Constitution states, “Any town, village, improvement district or fire district officer, except a justice of the peace, may be removed from office by the supreme court for any misconduct, maladministration, malfeasance or malversation in office.” Any citizen within the officeholder’s district may submit an application for removal to the local branch of the appellate division of ther Supreme Court.