Welcome the Bronx: A First Hand Account of FTP 4
They played the automated curfew message as a formality. It rose above the crowd from an unknown source. It wasn’t even eight yet. Those of us in the back facing the advancing Special Response Group heard the people in the front start to roar. We stood in a line directly facing a huge group of armed police gritting their teeth trying to hide their grins. After a few seconds of silence, we heard the ubiquitous “Grab em” and they charged us with riot shields. One particularly offensive looking white cop immediately ran into the first woman he saw and repeatedly bashed her on the head with his riot shield. She stood fast for a while until she was pressed on the ground and arrested by several others.
As another cop ran in with his baton swinging he screamed “Welcome to the Bronx, bitch.” They grabbed maybe a dozen people but not before coming at all of us with batons and shields bashing their way into the crowd. The terror at both ends created a lethal crush of people. There were arms and legs sticking up all around and I could see the bodies and faces of people trapped below. Everyone was hanging on to one another for support but the pressure was causing some people to fall beneath the crush. “Kettling” they call it. The police a couple nights earlier had used the controversial tactic to trap thousands on the Manhattan Bridge.
Thursday night was Fuck the Police 4. The first Fuck the Police George Floyd protest organized. The other FTP actions over the winter were focused on subway violence but were always concerned with police accountability and racial justice in the neighborhood.
FTP is just the name of the protest though. It’s organized by a coalition of groups: Take Back the Bronx, Decolonize This Place and others. Decolonize This Place has the biggest presence on social media, mainly Twitter and Instagram. The events of previous FTP actions worked to embarrass the NYPD and the MTA through peaceful protest and direct action. They did a pretty good job by getting a lot of media coverage of their stunts. Back then the cops didn’t have a curfew at their disposal. Even so, MTA cops did a number on many of the relatively peaceful protesters at FTP 3, serving to further radicalize the movement towards action against police.
So the stage was set. On one side, a group of protestors determined to do more than the average “Whose streets? Our streets!” parade and a bunch of exhausted, pissed off cops with the mayor’s authority to do whatever necessary to restore order. The looting that rocked Fordham Rd. and 3rd Ave in the Bronx had to be connected to the peaceful protestors. The specter of Antifa had to be raised for NYPD to justify what they knew they were about to do. It was no coincidence that the NYPD “found” a pile of Antifa bricks” on Ave X in Brooklyn a few days earlier.
I had my press pass in my pocket. But I didn’t plan to use it. I don’t technically work for any news organization at the moment. Plus my press pass would probably make me more of a liability in that crowd. After watching the police behavior over the previous week at various protests and the mayor’s response to their actions I felt that it was necessary to attend.
It was a long, silent journey up to the intersection known locally as the “Hub” on 149th and 3rd near Mott Haven in the South Bronx. Far from my home in Brooklyn. I knew it would be worth the ride though. I felt more passionately about the FTP message and believed in their ability to take more effective action. From the location of the march I thought we were eventually going to go into Manhattan, we were that close.
I was glad to be in the Bronx. No one should be looting in the Bronx, but there should be way more protests there. The cops there are out of control. They’ve been locked in a war mentality since the seventies. When I got to the “Hub”, a large open plaza near the train station, there were only a few hundred assembled.
The atmosphere was very relaxed despite the heavy police presence and the ominous appearance of the “fascist power rangers” aka the fully armored NYPD bike unit. A local was gleefully dancing to some lively Latin music in front of the cop line. There was definitely something in the atmosphere.
Dozens of people continued to arrive from the subway. Going to some of those Manhattan marches in the previous days, I witnessed large groups of peaceful protesters move along during the day on routes largely predetermined by cops. It wasn’t until the sun set that the confrontations would start.
After standing around for a little while we heard “mic check”. Various speakers from neighborhood organizations spoke on the rules for the march and their own much needed radical agendas. They spoke passionately about a neighborhood and a people abused by people they called “the largest gang in the city”.
The people of the Bronx are tired of being targeted for who they are, they exclaimed. The policing system there is broken. Too many people have experienced profiling and wrongful arrest. Too many have died. “Give us social services. Give us money for our communities.”
This was about reminding people in our neighborhood that this movement is about them too. George Floyd is everyone. We set out around half an hour before curfew, determined to make it through the housing projects and to the other side of Mott Haven.
As we marched along chanting “Fuck the Police” a lot of locals came out to support. The march snaked through the narrow innards of the vast apartments and rows in the NYCHA development. Residents of New York’s beleaguered public housing have more reason to protest than most. Constantly underfunded and over-policed, the frustration is pretty much always at a boiling point.
Weeks earlier during the worst of the Coronavirus quarantine a plain-clothes housing patrol officer at a NYCHA building in the Lower East Side was seen violently arresting a man for “not social-distancing.” The officer, Francisco Garcia, charged at Donni Wright, a NYCHA groundskeeper, “while shouting the n-word, brandishing a taser, and subsequently kneeling on Wright’s head” according to Gothamist. Cops recovered some marijuana, and he was charged with assault on a police officer, menacing and resisting arrest. The Manhattan DA said he would defer prosecution on the case according to the Daily News.
Meanwhile the same police force was out handing out masks to people picnicking in Central Park. This incident was part of a narrative that established itself during the pandemic. The NYPD being given the power to search and arrest people for “not social- distancing” was a mistake. They used it as a loophole to go back to Guiliani era levels of harassment. It was not a clearly defined law and was enforced in a completely unconstitutional way.
The march continued through the NYCHA buildings. At one point a basketball court came into focus with five portraits of young black men killed in the area. How can you expect someone not to say fuck all authority when their communities have been abandoned by said authority? I don’t know if the marchers had the police fooled by staying going through the NYCHA buildings but the police presence in the beginning was light.
As FTP actions go, this one started off with remarkable tranquility. One firework went off as we started in an intersection, that was it. Since the cops were tailing us the whole time we never knew when to expect them to rush in. I was stuck in the back and I could never tell why the march had stopped. After we left the buildings courtyard we stopped suddenly but I was relieved when I saw it was a local restaurant that had been giving free food to protesters and people in need.
It was now only around seven fifty eight and the white shirts arrived with a heavily armored Strategic Response Group. The SRG was created in 2015 by Police Chief Bill Bratton as a response to terrorism and civil unrest. Ever since 9/11 there has been unlimited funds for these anti-terror squads in the NYPD. Bratton was expert at combining these funds with his infamous ‘Broken Windows’ policing. Activists have long decried the fact that an anti-terror unit had been turned into a tool against peaceful protests. One activist, Keegan Stephen, told Gothamist in 2015 that the SRG are considered the NYPD’s “goon squad”.
On Thursday night they were being used to enforce a curfew on people in their own neighborhood before a single act of violence was committed. By this time the police had formed up behind us in force. It was getting closer to eight. The night before they had let people march in Manhattan and Brooklyn for an hour or more after curfew, so it felt like we still had some time to keep this going. Right as we turned onto a particularly narrow street lined with cars and debris, the clock struck eight.
A rush on the left and the heavily armored bike squad came up on us. People tried to stand in their way to avoid them getting in front but they weren’t stopping. “You’re gonna get it” one cop said as he slammed into someone standing on his right. There was a moment when people in the front noticed a blockade ahead and some people started running to the left down another side street. But it was too late. Since so many people had already been trapped, everyone ran back to help defend the group for as long as they could.
They wanted to cause harm. They kept moving, beating people as they went. Some refused to go quietly and it took five officers to secure the “body”. Everywhere people were being thrown to the ground and pinned down.
After holding on to others for a while I looked around and realized I was part of a small group that had yet to be arrested. Everywhere I looked there were people getting hit and arrested. I caught a couple from a baton but I wasn’t resisting. A few cops motioned over at me and one grabbed me and dragged me over with the rest of them. At that moment I was again reminded of my privilege. These cops have a harder time roughing me up because I look like them. They didn’t seem to mind when I got in their face screaming at them that they were hurting people.
The one white shirt lieutenant, now recognized for the picture of him, violently arresting a legal observer at the protest, was directing a lot of the violence before that as well. As more people were arrested we were pushed farther and farther back into each other. Someone screamed that their leg was injured. We tried to stop falling on the people under us.
It all happened in the course of five minutes. They would arrest some, move them back through the lines and charge again. I was holding on, trying to use my bodies to protect others from the indiscriminate blows. The clouds of mace were making it difficult to breath and hold on. Many people arrested were just locals who had wandered into the protest as it passed their building. Within fifteen minutes they had almost every demonstrator in handcuffs. Some had to be handcuffed on the ground after wrestling with the cops. There was a lot of blood coming from protesters’ faces and bodies. Marching after curfew, most of us expected to go to jail that night, so there was a lot of determined silence as we were lined up for the Corrections buses. We chatted with each other to keep our spirits up. Each of us gave our name and birthday to the remaining legal observers who promised to be waiting for us wherever we ended up.
We didn’t make it very far and it felt stifling how they stopped us but the cops were in disarray from the amount of arrests. They were overwhelmed. It took them hours to line us up and transport us to Queens Central Booking.
The police action meant to break us and punish us, gave them more camaraderie and determination than any thought possible. The sheer amount of violence may have been staggering but unfortunately, it was not surprising given the history of the SRG unit.
Not everyone was lucky to walk out with a summons. Many are still stuck in jail. I hope those who remain locked up have been spared from hearing the mayor’s comments. Apparently he saw no violence on Thursday night. Just the NYPD doing their job. That’s the problem. We saw more phony justifications after the fact too. The cops tweeted a picture of the “weapons” recovered at the protest that showed some bike tools, a hammer and some small knives recovered from two backpacks. According to the NYPD, what happened Thursday night was justified by “information” they received from local businesses, that the protesters had been infiltrated by “outside-agitators” bent on violence. Despite what the NYPD has claimed, no bottles were thrown, no one started attacking cops. They tweeted that they found gasoline and a gun on the protesters. In fact, the gun was found during a search miles away from the protests in an unrelated incident.
At least three people were wounded so badly they needed stretchers. One protester was hit repeatedly with batons until he fell unconscious. The plastic handcuffs were so tight some screamed they couldn’t feel their hands. As they loaded us into buses, several bystanders were arrested for standing around too long on their own street. One man was just standing on the corner with his bike until five officers jumped on him, beat him and arrested him. The most violent people there were the cops.
While waiting to get booked in Queens I talked to one smug cop who told me he “knew we were all paid” to protest. He really thought we were all desperate enough to come out and risk our lives in the middle of a pandemic, for money. This scared me. It scared me more than the faces of the cops before they attacked our line. It scared me more than seeing them attack peaceful protesters. It scared me because I have no idea how many of them think this way.
