May 31, 2020
Several hundred Inwood residents joined local elected officials this afternoon to demand an end to the routine slaughter of black people by police. This gathering was prompted, of course, by the brutal murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last Monday. In the days since then America has seen the cellphone video of a police officer, Derek Chauvin, kneeling on Floyd’s neck for almost ten minutes while bystanders begged him to stop and Floyd repeated ‘I can’t breathe’ over and over.
Naturally, protests sprang up immediately in cities across the country and in some locations they promptly devolved into violent skirmishes with the local police. The national conversation segued from Floyd’s killing and that particular cop’s actions to the bad behavior of protesters and totally different cops in the ensuing confrontations. Here in NYC it’s been a complete mess, with cops plowing into a crowd of demonstrators at one point and activists torching PD vehicles at others. Elsewhere, looting has taken place as well as arson and thousands of National Guard troops have been activated in Minnesota. The President has poured rhetorical gasoline on the controversy by blaming antifascist outside agitators for the violence, labeling them terrorists, and then conflating them with his political opposition.
So against that backdrop, the gathering today near the Indian Road Cafe was noteworthy. There was anger and righteous indignation of course, but it was directed with precision at cops getting away with murdering black people rather than at cops generally. The result was that although hundreds of protesters and cops shared a small corner of Inwood Hill Park for a couple of hours, there was no tension in the air and no confrontations took place. We’d like to believe that’s because we’re a community up here and because the police, like the elected officials, the Padre from Good Shepherd, and the other community organizers who addressed the crowd, are part of it.
It wasn’t always like this. In the bad old days when the Three Four often led the City in homicides, life was very cheap up here. Cops killed and were killed. Thank God those days are over. They give us hope that other cities that are now bleeding and burning will survive these difficult times and see better days ahead as Inwood has done.
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