New York lives a night of chaos and looting

Chaos, violence, looting and dozens of arrests prevailed in New York during the first curfew decreed in the city in 77 years, thus challenging the authorities and also President Donald Trump. The police, however, started yesterday afternoon with good intentions, exemplified by the head of the New York department, Terence Monahan, who knelt next to the protesters in Washington Square in the style of Colin Kaepernick, the American football player who protested racial injustice in 2016 when he dropped his knee while listening to the American anthem.

An emotional Monahan also hugged those present at the protest, which took place after some protesters began throwing objects at the officers. “People who live in New York want New York to end the violence,” said the senior agent. However, minutes after sunset, tense clashes between protesters and police could already be seen in the heart of Manhattan on Sixth Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares of the city. Of course, on some occasions, groups of protesters tried to stop looters, with little success.

Agents blocked the passage of citizens at the height of 55th Street, where before 9 p.m. fires had already started, lighting the mounds of garbage that accumulate on the sidewalks of New York every afternoon for collection.

Looting in Manhattan stores

Shortly after, just started the night, the huge Microsoft store on luxurious Fifth Avenue was being looted by young protesters despite the large wooden planks placed on the doors of the establishment to try to prevent an attack. After a struggle, three plainclothes policemen managed to arrest one of the looters while a group of young people tried to intimidate them by throwing wooden planks at them.

And it is that the police tried to control the chaos unleashed in the center of Manhattan, where convoys of police cars made up of up to 30 vehicles could be seen traveling the streets of the Big Apple. And from there the chaos, arrests, the throwing of objects, the breaking of windows of luxury stores and of all kinds derived already. He fell down to the Lego store in Rockefeller Center.

“There have been shots but they weren’t from bullets, they looked like rubber,” a neighbor who preferred to remain anonymous told EFE, watching the riots from her rooftop and expressing her concern. “I’ve never seen the city like this, not even after 9/11”, New Yorkers who walked through downtown Manhattan late at night said on social media.

The vicinity of Trump Tower was one of the most protected areas, where the forces of order had deployed barricades that prevented citizens from approaching the building owned by the US president.

Curfew challenge

And they struck 11 at night and with it the start of curfew. The police applied more forcefully and then charged on Eighth Avenue, already near a fenced off Times Square, where a group of about 500 protesters, mostly young blacks, wanted to access while they looted all the stores that were in their path . Many stores were useless to shield themselves with boards installed during the day by workers called emergency.

It was in the vicinity of Times Square that a large number of arrests took place, with the curfew in motion, with many young people lying on the ground while police officers handcuffed them and put them into riot support vans. Simultaneously, many citizens defied government orders and remained in the street after eleven at night.

Brooklyn, quieter

Things were more peaceful this time in Brooklyn. In several protests in which thousands of people participated, some groups continued their marches after nightfall, controlled by a huge police deployment, which included numerous barricades and public buses marked “Police Bus”, in anticipation of possible mass arrests.

Hundreds of agents surrounded the Barclays Center, the complex in which the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets play and one of the main points of the protests in recent days in New York, an hour before curfew, but there was hardly a trace of protesters.

Chase, a 22-year-old black man who lives in the Bronx, is the first day he participated in the protests. “I have come today because people are being murdered every day and they rob us of the future, because they have robbed us for generations,” he said.

Kill niggas without consequence

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Erin, a young white woman also from New York, has been participating in the marches for three days and although she confesses that she is afraid of the curfew, she says she stays. “They have decreed it to prevent us from demonstrating and it is our right,” she says before insisting that if they arrest her, they will have to release her at some point.

Another protester, Serie, assured her that she has been in protests against the Iraq war and in those organized by the feminist movement TimesUp. “The NYPD is used to killing black people without consequences, and this has to stop.” Whether or not this is the case, the truth is that the mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, has brought forward the start of the curfew at 8 in the afternoon today.

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