Others have written at length on these topics and with greater eloquence and erudition than I can muster. Of course, this kind of treatment is nothing new for America’s over-policed low-income communities of color, yet the brazenness and impunity on display now is nonetheless shocking. Police helicopters have flown low over residential neighborhoods every night for a week, creating a constant, pervasive sense of surveillance. ”) That night, like every other night this week, hundreds of protesters were beaten and arrested while exercising their rights to freedom of assembly and free speech. In short, it was obvious they were spoiling for a fight. The protestors had signs, allowed city buses and ambulances to pass, and displayed zero inclination towards violence, and yet the officers formed lines to prevent them from entering the public plaza around the Barclays Center and were spinning their clubs as if warming up for the Home Run Derby. There was no reason for them to be there. Case in point: on Tuesday, while thousands of peaceful protestors walked through downtown Brooklyn, scores of NYPD officers in riot gear with clubs were already forming up. There’s more video footage of cops beating and otherwise attacking unarmed protesters than you could watch in a month at this point, but the perverse inclination of American police departments to meet free speech with violence is evident long-before officers actually begin striking their fellow Americans with truncheons. The disproportionately aggressive, violent and authoritarian approach of the NYPD toward protesters has been on full display. While these massive peaceful protests have been marred at times by violent opportunists - anarchists seeking to co-opt mass unrest and looters out to rob businesses while the authorities are distracted - the vast majority of violence has been perpetrated by the police themselves. The primary motivation of the Black Lives Matter protests has been opposition to pervasive police brutality directed primarily at black and brown communities in the United States. Since the death of George Floyd at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis, a national, sustained protest movement has sprung forth on a scale unseen since the civil rights and anti-war protests of the 1960s and 1970s.
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