New York. It is a quarter past nine on Tuesday, the second night of the New York curfew that followed the rioting following the killing of African American George Floyd. And if the mayor’s orders had their 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 them prepares to smash a shop window, the surrounding demonstrators hold him back. At the end of the street there are two police cars with flashing lights, but 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 fifth of the anti-police violence protests in the city. At seven o’clock, the date New Yorkers have been celebrating their doctors and nurses for weeks, protesters in Times Square paused for five minutes to pay tribute to the lifeguards in the hospitals. It’s an uplifting moment of solidarity and togetherness in a tense week in New York.
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Organized hundreds of protest marches
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, he, like many young people, was drawn into politics by the vision of Bernie Sanders, who was defeated by Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary at the time. And when the election was over, he just kept going.
Since then he has helped organize hundreds of marches, with a lot of 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.
Again mass protests in the USA
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Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in the US on Tuesday to demonstrate against racism, discrimination and police brutality © Reuters
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Since the day George Floyd died, there has been a lot of talk online in the various political networks about the need for action. “But in the end, people took to the streets spontaneously. I’ve never seen anything so wonderful in my political career. “
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, “a lot of people cursed us. This time it was the opposite. ” That was last Friday. And so it has continued since then. Day after day and there is no end in sight.
Governor accused mayors of failing
Of course, there were also violent eruptions. Especially in the first few days. Police cars were smashed and set on fire with Molotov cocktails. A surrounded police vehicle drove into a crowd and injured bystanders. And there is looting night after night. Just like on Monday evening, when cars with teenagers appeared out of nowhere in Midtown, the teenagers systematically ran into the shops and department stores, loaded the trunk full and then disappeared again. “Of course, that doesn’t help anyone,” says Efram. “But you have to understand that. The people are under enormous economic pressure. “
US professor Layne: “Maischberger’s editorial team did not contact me until Tuesday afternoon”
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The American professor Priscilla Layne is switched on in Sandra Maischberger’s talk – and sharply criticizes the guest selection. © RND
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This is how many think about the looting now. The words of Martin Luther King are quoted again and again when he said: “Riots are the language of the unheard. You cannot condemn them without condemning the unbearable conditions in our society. ” Still, it was these incidents that led to the curfew earlier in the week. Governor Cuomo publicly accused the mayor of failing. Above all, however, both want to avoid further provoking an already angry president and, in the worst case, risking military intervention.
The New York police try night after night to walk the fine line, to keep order, but not to pour more oil into the flames. Sometimes it works. Sometimes not. Again and again there are scuffles and arrests. Still, Efram thinks the New York cops are doing pretty well under the circumstances. Nevertheless, he has no confidence in the police force, which like most police forces in the nation has a long tradition of excessive violence.
Memories of the Eric Garner case
It was just six years ago that 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. 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 Donald Trump demands. And of course deep-seated assumptions about minorities, even if they are heavily represented in the New York Police Corps. “It takes decades until that changes.”
After all, there were scenes like this one in those days. In the borough of Queens, police took off their equipment and knelt with the demonstrators in memory of the victims of police violence. A 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 his way, it will go on for a long time. “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.”
For activists like Efram, the death of George Floyd was the shock that shook 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. You are tired and disgusted. They want to be heard. And they don’t want to wait any longer.
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