Photo: afp/Bryan R. Smith
New YorkIt’s a quarter past nine on Wednesday, it’s the third night of New York’s curfew, and if the mayor’s order had its way, the streets would have been empty for more than an hour. But on Lafayette Street in the SoHo shopping district, a crowd of around 1,000 protesters are still moving north and chanting “Black Lives Matter”.
Some of them have hammers with them, but when one of the demonstrators prepares to smash a shop window, the bystanders hold him back. At the end of the street there are two police cars with flashing lights. The cops make no move to break up the crowd as long as there is no riot. Nobody wants to provoke an escalation this evening.
So far it has been a peaceful day in New York, the seventh day of protests against police violence in the city. At 7 p.m., the time New Yorkers have been celebrating their doctors and nurses for weeks, the demonstrators in Times Square paused for five minutes to thank the lifeguards. Among them are around 100 people in hospital clothing. It’s an uplifting moment of solidarity and togetherness in a tense week in New York.
Dan Efram stayed home this Tuesday, he’s been there every day so far. “Maybe it’s too late anyway,” he says, “but at some point I’ll have to think about my Covid risk.”
Efram is a seasoned political activist. In 2016, in the run-up to the presidential election, the photographer, like many young people, was drawn into politics by the political visions and hopes of Bernie Sanders. And when the election was over, he just kept going.
With diligence and passion
Since then he has helped organize hundreds of marches and has invested hard work and passion. “It was often an insane effort to get 200 people together to demonstrate for a criminal law reform bill in New York State.” But this time he didn’t have to do anything.
“Nothing was organized in these protests,” says Efram. It is true that members of the various political networks have spoken vigorously about the need for action since the day George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis. “But in the end, people spontaneously took to the streets. In my career as a political activist, I’ve never experienced anything so wonderful. “
There was never a march in New York, a meeting point, or a route. In all parts of the city people went to the larger squares, met and then marched down the boulevards together. And people ran along everywhere. “When I think back to Occupy Wall Street,” says Efram, “I was isolated after the demonstrations. This time it was the opposite. ”The movement has reached central America, and not just in New York.
The first spontaneous demonstration in New York, at which tens of thousands flocked to the streets in different corners of the city, was last Thursday. It has been like this every day since then. And there is no end in sight.
Of course there were the eruptions. Especially in the first few days. On Saturday police cars were smashed and set on fire with Molotov cocktails. Images of demonstrators dancing triumphantly on the roof of a hijacked patrol car made the rounds.
In Brooklyn, a surrounded police vehicle drove into a crowd, injuring bystanders. Later that evening, Mayor Bill de Blasio defended the officials’ actions by saying that the demonstrators had put them in a difficult position. He later apologized for this assessment. This also shows the balancing act that the city is currently trying to achieve.
And then there is the looting evening after evening. Just like on Monday evening, when cars with teenagers appeared out of nowhere in Midtown, ran systematically into the shops and department stores, loaded the trunk full and then disappeared again.
Stephanie Keith, who has accompanied the demonstrations as a photojournalist since day one, observes that the looters always come after dark. “As long as it is light, there are peaceful demonstrators on the street.” Most of the time, Keith believes, it is young people from the Bronx and Harlem who have nothing to do with the protests.
Nevertheless, Stephanie Keith has a certain understanding of her: “People are under economic pressure from all sides.” Many families in these areas of New York have no more jobs and no economic security since the beginning of the Corona crisis. In many families someone is sick or even died. Keith’s sympathy for the looters is shared by many Americans.
Over and over again these days the words of Martin Luther King are quoted, who said: “Riots are the language of the speechless. You cannot condemn them without condemning the unbearable conditions in our society. “
In a 15-minute monologue last week, the black talk show host Trevor Noah philosophized about what moves the so-called looters. “If you feel that the social contract doesn’t apply to you, then you have no reason to stick to it yourself. For a black youth it doesn’t matter whether he loots or not. He’ll be arrested and beaten up or worse anyway. “
It’s an old discussion in America. Since the race riots in the 1960s, the white bourgeoisie has been stunned when the frustrated black underclass plunders and pillages and destroys their own neighborhoods. The civil rights activist Cornel West dealt with “Black Nihilism” in an essay in 1992 after the riots in Los Angeles. Lawlessness and a lack of prospects as well as the collapse of social structures in the black community, West argued at the time, lead to destruction and self-destruction. One can only counteract this by fighting the causes.
Donald Trump, President of the USA, of course, sees it differently. In his conference call with the governors on Tuesday, he instructed them to “dominate the streets”. Otherwise, he threatened, he would mobilize the military.
For advising against protests against police violence with violence, Trump received harsh criticism. Nevertheless, the threat is in the room and is causing tension in New York between the governor and the mayor. After looting became rampant over the weekend, Governor Andrew Cuomo reprimanded Mayor Bill De Blasio for not being tough enough and threatened to deploy the National Guard, which is under his command. Better, so the consideration, to use the National Guard yourself than to risk Trump sending the army.
Bill de Blasio replied that the last thing the city needed now was the military. Since taking office in 2012, de Blasio has tried to improve the complicated relationship between the New York police and the population after his predecessor’s complaints about police violence and the controversial practice of stopping and filing suspects for no reason had increased. To bring in the National Guard now, so de Blasio, would destroy all the arduous work of building confidence again.
The New York police are now trying to successfully walk a fine line night after night: on the one hand to ensure order, but on the other hand not to pour more oil into the flames. Sometimes it works. Sometimes not.
On Tuesday evening, the police let protesters march over the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn at ten o’clock in the evening. In the Bronx, on the other hand, the poorest part of New York City, the police cracked down on people who weren’t home at 8:30. Batons were used, as well as pepper spray. Again, state power was measured with double standards.
Nevertheless, one gets the impression that the New York cops are coping well with the circumstances and that they are trying to protect peaceful demonstrations and the right to freedom of assembly. Unlike the president, who had a peaceful demonstration in Washington broken up by the military police in order to be photographed in front of a church.
However, Dan Efram does not trust the New York Police Corps, which, like most of the nation’s police forces, has a long tradition of excessive violence. It’s been just six years since Eric Garner died in the stranglehold of the police on the streets of New York with the same words as George Floyd: “I can’t breathe.”
The New York police did not really learn from it. Dan Efram says that everything about the police is still military and martial. Equipment. The habit. And above all the mentality, a mentality that has grown over generations. It’s a confrontational mentality. And dominance like the one that Donald Trump demands. And deep-seated assumptions about minorities, even if they are heavily represented in the New York Police Corps. “It will take decades for that to change,” predicts Efram.
Sign of hope
After all, there were scenes like this one in those days. In the borough of Queens, police took off their equipment and kneeled down with the demonstrators in memory of the victims of police violence. Symbol of hope. Still, things remain tense on the streets of New York. And everyone wonders how long both sides can hold out.
If Dan Efram has its way, it will continue like this. “We have to keep applying pressure until something really changes,” he says. “Basically, it’s already too late, everything should have happened from day one of the Trump administration.”
The death of George Floyd was not only a shock to activists like Efram, it shook many people in America. Not only in terms of police violence, but also the state in which the whole country is. The racism. The extreme social inequality. The corruption.
The people of America have had enough. They’re tired and disgusted, not just from racism and police violence, but from Trump and the whole broken system. You want to be heard. And they don’t want to wait any longer.
– .
