Stop Romanticizing the George Floyd Protests

A question I’m asked religiously is what happened? So many people are convinced that in 2020, we were united in a demand for change and because they believe that falsehood, they feel gutted because police budgets continue to increase, copaganda rages on, and relentless attacks on progressive reforms and political candidates persist; and they impute their feelings of defeat to the movement.

However you want to characterize the different or combined efforts to fight police brutality, mass incarceration, racism, and systemic oppression—it didn’t begin in 2020. No movement started in 2020. Whether it be abolition, Black Lives Matter—none of it began in 2020. And what happened to George Floyd was a tragedy but in America, it was not and is not an anomaly. We’ve seen what happened to George Floyd happen to Eric Garner. But George Floyd’s death led to so many protests Black Lives Matter became arguably the largest civil rights movement in American history.

It’s true that in the summer of 2020, after Americans who’d been locked in their homes for months watched police choke George Floyd to death, people protested in over 500 places across the country each and every day. But what were we united in? What were people protesting and why?

I believe that just as much as people had felt compelled to leave their homes in the name of people who’d been wrongfully killed, it’s also the only reason people who’d been involuntarily locked in their homes for months in the name of saving their neighbors lives, could justify leaving their homes and being surrounded by people at the risk of catching and spreading a virus. And I think that played a role in people’s willingness to go out and protest that American ego won’t allow us to admit in fear it’ll stain our altruism.

That doesn’t mean people weren’t genuinely horrified at Derek Chauvin’s actions. In fact, that’s exactly what they were protesting—a specific instance of police brutality where they wanted criminal charges brought against an officer. But few argued that the officer shouldn’t have been called. Many lamented about how the officers could’ve arrested him without killing him, few argued that he shouldn’t have been arrested. Many questioned what kind of civil society doesn’t charge the officer who murdered George Floyd but much less questioned the need to police him in the first place.

Many people may have chanted along with us when we said, “the system isn’t broken, it’s working as intended,” but they didn’t and don’t truly understand what that means in application. They don’t understand how the different parts of the system function to make what happened to George Floyd possible; and thus, they don’t really know what policies, candidates, and initiatives they should be supporting where criminal justice and Black liberation is concerned.

The failure to consider over-policing explicitly as a cause of George Floyd’s death is why we were never truly united in the same vision for changing or dismantling the system, or even preventing what happened to George Floyd from happening again. Which is why I want to illustrate what it means to be criminalized, how over-policing Black and brown communities makes way for tragedy everyday.

I live in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Little Caribbean to be specific, dubbed that because that’s precisely what it is. Every establishment has a different Caribbean flag on the banner, you’ll likely hear some form of reggae or soca music playing in the streets at some point, and most of the people walking by are probably more than willing to tell you what Caribbean flag they’ve got hanging at their nearby homes (I’ve got a Bahamian flag at mine). I often joke to my friends that I’ve never been around this many Caribbean people and I was born and raised in the Caribbean. I love this incredibly Black neighborhood and the people in it. I take daily aimless 5-mile walks, I walk around at all hours of the night, and chop it up with so many people (and their pets) that I’ve come to know. I do that because I can, it’s a great and safe neighborhood.

You likely wouldn’t realize how great of a neighborhood it is if you were judging it by the visible police presence on every corner, where they stand in clusters, with their back to the stores they’ve been tasked to protect, looking through us, stone-faced like London soldiers. They delight in harassing the Black school kids getting off the subway and playing on the basketball court after school. They take the joy out communal interactions and criminalize them. And that’s precisely what they did to John Guerra.

Guerra’s story went viral on twitter recently because people were outraged to see video footage that showed NYPD shove Guerra as he held his 20-month-old son in his arms. The discourse largely revolved around condemning the police brutality, but the events leading up to and following the brutality are both worse, and what I believe we should really be talking about.

On April 24^th, right here in Flatbush on Woodruff Ave, John Guerra was outside with a group of other adults and their children, as is common in the neighborhood. The adults were playing Baby Shark on the stereo for the children to enjoy, and someone made a noise complaint to 311 and the police were dispatched to the scene. That’s how a group of parents and their children’s ordinary interactions become criminalized, that’s how these things begin.  

Three NYPD officers arrived and began arguing with the woman playing the music on her stereo and demanding she give her stereo to them. When she wouldn’t turn over her stereo, the officers began aggressively trying to arrest her, so Guerra told the officers they were doing too much. The price for asking grown men to stop using force on a woman who’d been playing Baby Shark on the radio for the children, was that 5 officers pushed Guerra and his son who was in arms into a metal grate, before kicking him, arresting him, and slapping him with criminal charges when no criminal action was committed on his part.

The officers then made the choice to take his son, who could’ve been left there with friends and neighbors, in a separate police car from his father, all the way to the 70^th precinct, where they held the crying child for more than 10 hours, then they chose to turn the child over to ACS, which initiated a custody battle between Guerra and the child’s mother who lives in Texas. Because Guerra could not attend the custody hearing in Texas due to the criminal case, the mother was granted full custody and he was stripped entirely of visitation rights.

When this story hit twitter, people focused on the brutality of the police hitting a man who was holding a child. The Gothamist article that broke the story was titled “Video of NYPD officer pushing father with toddler raises questions about police use-of-force when a child is in harm’s way” but the core of this story is and should be that a man and his son were listening to Baby Shark with their neighbors and one call to NYPD destroyed their family and this happens every single day, all day, and you do not hear the stories. And even when you do hear the stories, it doesn’t change what’s happened. Just like you now know what John Guerra is going through at this exact moment, you know it’s unjust, and it doesn’t matter that the criminal case will likely go nowhere, he no longer has custody of his child or the ability to see him.

That is what we mean when we say we are criminalized and over-policed. That’s what we mean when we say the police destroy families and terrorize our communities. And that’s important because just like the American government avoids addressing the root causes of crime because that wouldn’t fuel mass incarceration, so too does American media avoid the heart of the problem, because being solution-oriented doesn’t feed news cycles. Which is why we often get coverage that focuses on criticizing police brutality but not the over-policing that facilitates it.

I think it’s time to start getting to the heart of the problem. Over-policing Black and brown communities is what leads to police brutality, it’s what ends lives, it’s what destroys families. We can’t talk about police brutality without discussing the role over-policing plays. It doesn’t mean anything that you protested the police who killed George Floyd if you too would’ve made the 911 call that put the police on his neck.