George Floyd Protests
After many peaceful protests on Sunday, there was more violence at night. Here is a round up of the clashes.
While many cops are running amuck indiscriminately firing rubber bullets and tear gas on both people who are and are not protesting, others are kneeling along with protestors as a sign of solidarity: “The scenes offered a stark contrast to images of officers ignoring the pleas of protesters in other instances, and at times resorting to the use of overwhelming force, sometimes seemingly unprovoked by the crowds before them. In numerous cities, including New York and Los Angeles, police vehicles were filmed plowing into throngs of people.”
There have been many report of police targeting journalists: The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker and a writer for the Bellingcat website have each tracked about 100 instances of reporters being harassed or injured at the protests.
Experts on policing said that the videos showed, in many cases, examples of abrupt escalation on the part of law enforcement that was difficult to justify.
There was serious unrest and protests outside of the White House Sunday night. And word spread over the weekend that Trump was taken into the White House bunker Friday night due to protests near the White House.
On Wednesday in New York City, police were enforcing the 9pm curfew: The police were quicker to enforce the clampdown than they had been before, moving swiftly to disperse demonstrators from rainy city streets and to arrest those who failed to clear out. The curfew was lifted over the weekend.
According to the Washington Post: Barr was tapped by President Trump to direct the national response to protests.
Even before the photo op George Will wrote a blistering column calling for voters to sweep Trump and the Republican Senate out of power: The person voters hired in 2016 to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” stood on July 28, 2017, in front of uniformed police and urged them “please don’t be too nice” when handling suspected offenders. His hope was fulfilled for 8 minutes and 46 seconds on Minneapolis pavement.
Monday: the church photo-op
Trump made a Rose Garden address where he said: “If a city or a state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.” Mr. Trump told the Army on Monday to deploy active-duty military police to Washington. “I am dispatching thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel and law enforcement officers to stop the rioting, looting, vandalism, assaults and the wanton destruction of property.”
He also had a call with governors in which he argued for swift and strong breaking of the protests: “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it,” Mr. Trump said. “Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.”
“And just before the city’s 7 p.m. curfew went into effect, they were hit with flash-bang explosions and doused with tear gas.
It was because the president, who spent part of the weekend in a secure bunker as protests roiled, wanted to have his picture taken holding a Bible at a battered church just beyond the gates.”
“He did not pray,” the bishop, Mariann E. Budde, said in an interview. Referring to the death of the black man in police custody that set off the protests, she added: “He did not mention George Floyd, he did not mention the agony of people who have been subjected to this kind of horrific expression of racism and white supremacy for hundreds of years. We need a president who can unify and heal. He has done the opposite of that, and we are left to pick up the pieces.”
After the photo-op, the Mayor of DC tweeted: I imposed a curfew at 7pm. A full 25 minutes before the curfew & w/o provocation, federal police used munitions on peaceful protestors in front of the White House, an act that will make the job of
@DCPoliceDept officers more difficult. Shameful!
Here is some before and after video. The Washington Post has a minute by minute account of the attack on protestors.
Here is how NPR covered it: Trump’s Rose Garden remarks came as just across the street, law enforcement officers deployed tear gas and shot rubber bullets to forcefully disperse peaceful protesters. Washington, D.C., had set a curfew Monday of 7 p.m. ET.
The protesters were removed from the Lafayette Square area across from the White House, apparently to clear the way for the president to walk to St. John’s Church, where he posed briefly for photographers, holding a Bible.
Yglesias point out the significance of the timing:
But starting at 7 pm, a group of officers forcibly expelling protesters from the park would have been enforcing the law.
Doing it at 6:36 pm or so served no real purpose except to make the law enforcement action flagrantly abusive. And that itself sends a powerful message.
Washington Post: Hundreds of protesters were pushed away from Lafayette Square, where they were protesting the police killing of George Floyd, by the National Guard, U.S. Park Police and Secret Service. The ambush began half an hour before the city’s newly imposed curfew of 7 p.m. went into effect. When the crowds were cleared, the president walked through the park to visit the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church, which had been set on fire Sunday…. the scene in front of the White House when federal law enforcement descended was far from the “violent mobs” Trump described in his speech. The gathering was smaller and calmer than previous evenings, with people dancing and singing to a woman playing a guitar instead of knocking over barricades. … The FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Marshals and Bureau of Prisons were all involved in the federal response, according to a Justice Department spokeswoman.
The Washington Post reports: Attorney General William P. Barr personally ordered law enforcement officials to clear the streets around Lafayette Square just before President Trump spoke Monday, a Justice Department official said, a directive that prompted a show of aggression against a crowd of largely peaceful protesters.
The DOJ had activated riot police from the Bureau of Prisons to gather in unmarked gear in Washington DC.
Administration Response
Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper initially tried to send home a small portion of the 1,600 active-duty troops on Wednesday, only to have Mr. Trump order him to reverse course during an angry meeting. The president finally acquiesced on Thursday, according to an administration official who asked not to be named discussing internal deliberations, but it did not appear the two men spoke directly.
Military and IC Response
The Washington Post rounds up interviews with CIA analysts and people who have covered dictatorships, who say what they have seen this week in the US has shaken them: “It reminded me of what I reported on for years in the third world,” CIA analyst Polymeropoulos said on Twitter. Referring to the despotic leaders of Iraq, Syria and Libya, he said: “Saddam. Bashar. Qaddafi. They all did this.”
Former intelligence officials said the unrest and the administration’s militaristic response are among many measures of decay they would flag if writing assessments about the United States for another country’s intelligence service.
Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen spoke out in a piece in the Atlantic: I am less confident in the soundness of the orders they will be given by this commander in chief, and I am not convinced that the conditions on our streets, as bad as they are, have risen to the level that justifies a heavy reliance on military troops. Certainly, we have not crossed the threshold that would make it appropriate to invoke the provisions of the Insurrection Act.
Mattis released a statement on Wednesday: Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.
We must reject any thinking of our cities as a “battlespace” that our uniformed military is called upon to “dominate.”
We do not need to militarize our response to protests. We need to unite around a common purpose. And it starts by guaranteeing that all of us are equal before the law.
Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.
Floyd’s funeral in Minneapolis was on Thursday.
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