What a Joke: Black Lives Matter activists word distinction in police response at capitol

Written by John Eligon
While protesting the police killing of a Black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, a number of years in the past, Johnetta Elzie mentioned she was manhandled by officers. She mentioned they pointed rifles at Black girls who had been pushing toddlers in strollers and cursed at them to show round.
Similar scenes unfolded all summer season, as cops clashed with scores of Black Lives Matter protesters. Many occasions, officers used batons and chemical brokers to disperse crowds. Follow US Capitol Hill Siege Live Updates right here
And so what Elzie noticed on tv Wednesday afternoon infuriated her: A mob of largely white Donald Trump supporters stormed previous cops and vandalized the U.S. Capitol whereas officers, after initially providing resistance, largely stood by. Some officers parted barricades, others held doorways open and one was seen on video escorting a lady down steps.
“What a joke,” Elzie mentioned. “I mean, they didn’t even pinch the white people. It wasn’t even like a family dispute. In a family dispute, you might at least hit your sister or something like that. This wasn’t even that. It was almost like tear gas was not readily available.”
Black Lives Matter activists throughout the nation expressed outrage Thursday at what they mentioned was a tepid response from regulation enforcement officers to largely white protesters, saying it stood in stark distinction to the aggressive techniques they’ve endured for years — officers in full riot gear who’ve used tear fuel, rubber bullets and batons. It additionally underscored the nation’s uneven system of justice, many mentioned, and lent credence to their insistence that Black individuals are devalued and considered as inherently harmful.
In a nationwide handle Thursday afternoon, President-elect Joe Biden acknowledged the seemingly disparate therapy, saying he had acquired a textual content message from his granddaughter who questioned the police response on the Capitol.
“She said, ‘Pop, this isn’t fair. No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very, very differently than the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol,’” he mentioned, including, “We all know that’s true. And it is unacceptable. Totally unacceptable.”
Officials with the Capitol Police, a federal regulation enforcement company chargeable for securing the Capitol constructing, have defended Wednesday’s response, saying the officers had been underprepared and overwhelmed by the pro-Trump mob.
Joel Shults, a former police chief of Adams State University in Colorado, mentioned “the right balance of quelling a disturbance versus allowing the disorder to continue” was a tough calculation for regulation enforcement to make. Every case presents its distinctive challenges, he mentioned, including {that a} lack of expertise and the situation of Wednesday’s riot might need influenced the police’s response — and never the race of the largely white crowd that stormed the constructing.
“To have a lot of citizen-police violence on the steps of the Capitol,” he mentioned, “I think it was really important that that not happen.”
Black activists famous that once they have deliberate protests, the police have not often appeared ill-prepared. This week, as an illustration, National Guard troops descended on Kenosha, Wisconsin, and steel barricades had been erected round that metropolis’s courthouse the day earlier than a prosecutor introduced that no fees can be filed towards an officer who shot a person, Jacob Blake, a number of occasions within the again final summer season.
Last summer season, a peaceable violin vigil in Aurora, Colorado, to memorialize a Black man who died throughout a police arrest was disrupted when officers in riot gear charged the park and dispersed pepper spray, sending households with youngsters fleeing. Police argued that there was a small group of agitators among the many crowd, a rivalry disputed by many in attendance, who had been sitting on the garden listening to folks play the violin when police descended.
And the day after the presidential election in November, tons of of activists marched by the streets of Minneapolis, advocating for an finish to police brutality. The group, which was spirited however peaceable and included mother and father with youngsters, finally marched onto an interstate. The plan was to stroll to the subsequent exit, one thing that ought to have solely taken about quarter-hour, mentioned Sam Martinez, one of many organizers.
Instead, the state police surrounded the group whereas on the freeway and demanded that everybody sit right down to be arrested. Local elected officers frantically tried to barter with authorities to let the demonstrators depart the freeway, to no avail.
Police, saying that the demonstrators violated the regulation and endangered public security by getting into the freeway, both arrested or cited and launched practically 650 protesters. The course of took about 5 hours. Most got misdemeanor fees, however a 19-year-old girl acquired felony riot fees for shining a laser pointer into the eyes of a police officer.
“It’s a glaring example of how unjust this system really is,” mentioned Martinez, noting the disparity between the tons of of arrests on the freeway versus the handful of arrests on the Capitol. “If that had been us, there would have been way more than one casualty.”
The freeway protest in Minneapolis got here months after metropolis cops killed George Floyd, sparking widespread protests and requires an finish to systemic racism. Amid chaotic demonstrations within the days following the killing, police retreated from a police precinct headquarters, permitting protesters to descend on it and burn it down.
But even that was not corresponding to what unfolded on the Capitol on Wednesday, mentioned Jeremiah Ellison, a Minneapolis metropolis councilman. In the times previous the burning of the precinct, police had been firing rubber bullets and tear fuel at protesters in what Ellison mentioned he believed was an overreaction at occasions.
The police on the Capitol didn’t present that very same hostility towards the demonstrators there, he mentioned.
“I think the police will view a leftist protester with a gas mask as more dangerous than a right-wing protester with a semi-automatic rifle,” Ellison mentioned.