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What Law Did We Break?
WHAT LAW DID WE BREAK?
How the NYPD Weaponized a Curfew Against Protesters and Residents
HUSAN BLUE, his family, and his neighbors were having a cookout on the patio outside their apartment in Crown Heights. It was a warm summer night in Brooklyn. Little kids were running around and playing. People were talking and celebrating. Blue’s dad had just had a birthday, and a couple of the neighbors had new babies on the way. “It was a calm night,” Blue told me. “There was a lot of things to be happy about.” Around 11:30p.m., Blue made a run to the corner store. When the 30-year-old came back, a small army of police officers in riot gear were gathered outside his building. They were dressed, in Blue’s words, “for war.”
Blue asked his family and friends what was going on, and quickly learned that the police had ordered them to go inside. New York City was three days into a newly imposed curfew, the first in 75 years, announced in a joint statement by Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo as a measure to restore order amid the protests and looting that followed the killing of George Floyd by Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin. Blue had done his research, and he was fairly certain that the curfew, which was focused on public areas, did not apply to private property. Nonetheless, there was nothing to be gained in testing the New York Police Department. “Let’s clean up,” he said. “No need to get hostile.”
The officers piled on, driving their knees into Blue’s torso. They yanked his arms behind his back and zip-tied his wrists together. Blue had shoulder surgery just four days prior, his stitches were still in. The pain was excruciating.
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Hard to Believe: Police are Treating Protest Movements Like They are Terrorists
The New York Police Department has reportedly been giving young adults free tickets to screenings of “Selma,” and last month, on Martin Luther King Day, officers with the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood even drove a group of local teens to see the film, which depicts the historic march for voting rights. At the same time, however, the NYPD has sought to thwart, criminalize and defame the current incarnation of civil rights activism underway in New York, treating the Black Lives Matter movement as a threat on par with terrorism.
On Feb. 10, NYPD Commissioner William Bratton asked lawmakers in Albany to elevate resisting arrest from a misdemeanor to a felony. Arrestees going limp and forcing officers to carry them off to jail was a common tactic of the civil rights movement — which has continued to this day — and is considered resisting arrest by the NYPD and other law enforcement agencies. At the end of January, Bratton announced he is arming a new unit called the Strategic Response Group with machine guns that will “assist us in dealing with demonstrations.” Speaking at a breakfast organized by the Police Foundation, Bratton explained that the unit “is designed for dealing with events like our recent protests, or incidents like Mumbai or what just happened in Paris.”
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