The mayor of New York was booed Thursday by a crowd gathered in tribute to George Floyd, accusing him of tolerating increasingly muscular police interventions against protesters who denounce racial inequalities.
• Read also: Another night of protests in New York
• Read also: Extended curfew for Tuesday in Manhattan
At the ceremony in the Brooklyn neighborhood – held alongside a tribute in Minneapolis, where George Floyd died of suffocation by a white policeman on May 25 – the mayor struggled to get his speech heard: the crowd of several thousand people shouting “De Blasio Go Home!” (“De Blasio goes home”) or “Vote them out!” (“Drive them out of power”). The mayor left shortly after.
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Since the imposition of a curfew in the American economic capital on Monday evening, extended to last until Sunday, the New York police have sometimes charged demonstrators who defied the order to return home.
On Wednesday evening, she notably repulsed with batons nonetheless peaceful protesters in Brooklyn, according to videos posted by social networks.
Asked Thursday, the Democratic mayor, who had promised that the curfew was there only to prevent looting and clashes and not to prevent peaceful demonstrations, did not denounce these methods.
“In the context of this crisis, in the context of the curfew, there is a time when enough is enough,” said the councilor, reelected for four years in November 2017.
After visiting injured police officers in the morning, he assured that the police had shown “generally a lot of restraint”, while indicating that if there were “things to review, it would be done”.
Mayor since January 2014, Mr. De Blasio, 59, has never been very popular in New York. His candidacy for the Democratic nomination last year was derided.
Since the start of the protests, he has been criticized both for tolerating police brutality, and for having been slow to crack down on the looting that shook up upper Manhattan neighborhoods on Sunday and Monday evening.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has notoriously difficult relations with the mayor, even raised the possibility of his dismissal on Tuesday. If he added that he would not do it in order not to aggravate the crisis, an opponent of Mr. de Blasio, Eric Ulrich, elected Republican in the city council, took up the idea and calls for a vote of no confidence in him. .
In this climate, a petition launched last year on the site change.org calling for the removal of the mayor has gained new momentum, gathering more than 115,000 signatures on Thursday.
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