Here’s what you need to know:
- Many protesters defied the curfew, and the police made dozens of arrests.
- Riot police descend on a crowd in Brooklyn.
- There are numerous protests scheduled for today in New York City.
- The police brought a peaceful march from Gracie Mansion to an abrupt halt.
- “This is love”: New Yorkers found solace and solidarity in Wednesday gatherings.
Many protesters defied the curfew, and the police made dozens of arrests.
As a citywide curfew fell on New York Wednesday for a third night, large numbers of protesters flouted the requirement that they clear the streets by 8 p.m. And the police responded aggressively against the protesters.
Defiance of the curfew had increased since Tuesday, when several large groups continued to demonstrate long past the deadline.
The crowds in Brooklyn and Manhattan who were demonstrating against police brutality and systemic racism on Wednesday were bigger. And the police were quicker to enforce the clampdown than they had been before, moving swiftly to disperse demonstrators from rainy city streets and to arrest those who failed to clear out.
In Downtown Brooklyn, officers hemmed in demonstrators on Cadman Plaza, then charged at them with seemingly little provocation, according to New York Times reporters at the scene.
In Manhattan’s East Midtown area, officers shoved protesters onto sidewalks and arrested those who would not disperse.
Terence A. Monahan, the Police Department’s chief of department, explained the tough approach while speaking to reporters in Midtown.
“When we have these big crowds, especially in this area, especially where we’ve had the looting, no more tolerance,” he said. “They have to be off the street. An 8 o’clock curfew — we gave them to 9 o’clock. And there was no indication that they were going to leave these streets.”
Mayor Bill de Blasio, in a radio interview on WBLS just after 8:30 p.m. as the police were beginning to make dozens of arrests, said the curfew appeared to be having “a calming impact” and was “allowing things to get back to a better place.”
“There is protest out there,” he said, “but it is consistently peaceful.”
A police spokesman said that officers had made an unspecified number of arrests after the curfew began but declined to provide further details.
The police’s approach appeared to be even more aggressive than the one that officers employed on Tuesday, when they managed to tamp down on the kind of looting and vandalism that broke out in Manhattan and parts of the Bronx on Sunday and Monday.
As of 9:30 p.m., Chief Monahan said, no looting had been reported in the city.
Not all of the protesters were met with the same show of force. Two large groups marched in largely residential neighborhoods of Brooklyn until about 11 p.m. The police broke up the bigger group soon after that, making several arrests.
On Thursday, a memorial service for George Floyd is scheduled for at 1 p.m. at Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn. Mr. Floyd’s brother, Terrence Floyd, is scheduled to attend.
Riot police descend on a crowd in Brooklyn.
For more than two hours on Wednesday night, hundreds of protesters marched through Downtown Brooklyn peacefully, with cyclists helping to direct traffic and organizers calming anyone who tried to confront the police.
The group stopped at courthouses and chanted for justice, altering their path to avoid a direct confrontations with officers who could be seen in the distance blocking access to the Manhattan Bridge.
It was 8:45 p.m., almost an hour past curfew, when the group marched to Cadman Plaza.
A single line of riot police confronted the crowd, which numbered in the hundreds, at Cadman and Tillary Street. The protesters stood peacefully, their hands up, chanting for justice.
Behind them, police cars swarmed in and hundreds of officers in riot gear poured onto the plaza. By the time organizers tried to turn the protesters around to leave, they were surrounded.
At around 9 p.m., officers holding shields and batons moved in from all sides. The protesters, tense but composed, held up their hands. “Don’t shoot,” they chanted.
The standoff quickly devolved into chaos as officers began to pushing the crowd backward out of the plaza and into another line of police. Swinging their batons, they struck one woman on the knee. A young man’s head bled profusely after he was hit. His hands shook as he reached for the back of his skull, and saw how bloody it was.
Two nurses and a medic tugged the injured people to the edges of the crowd, seeking shelter in a small groove of a concrete building as the police advanced. One woman began to lose consciousness, and her friends called desperately for an ambulance.
Then the police surged again.
The protesters screamed that people were bleeding and needed help, but the officers did not acknowledge them and began to swinging their batons again. They struck protesters and shoved them around, sending the young man with the bleeding head to the ground.
The police continued to push through the plaza, and scuffles broke out as protesters fell backward. A downpour started, and the protesters who were left cleared out in seconds.
By 9:20 p.m., the plaza was empty.
Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, posted a video that showed the police moving protesters off the plaza forcefully, with some officers doing so with shoves and batons.
“I can’t believe what I just witnessed & experienced,” he wrote on Twitter. “The force used on nonviolent protesters was disgusting. No looting/no fires. Chants of ‘peaceful protest.’”
There are numerous protests scheduled for today in New York City.
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1:00 — Brooklyn: Memorial service and march at Cadman Plaza (led by Terrence Floyd)
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1:00 — Queens: Queens Boulevard and 46th Street
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1:00 — Queens: Astoria Park
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2:30 — Manhattan, Gracie Mansion
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3:00 — Brooklyn: Rally at Grand Army plaza
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3:00 — Manhattan: Rally at 163 West 125th Street (State office building)
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5:30 — Brooklyn: Rally at 86th Street, between 4th and 5th Avenues (Bay Ridge)
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7:00 — Brooklyn: Rally at McCarren Park
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7:00 — Manhattan: Vigil at Carl Schurz Park
The police brought a peaceful march from Gracie Mansion to an abrupt halt.
A march that began after a peaceful vigil on Wednesday night near Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, ended two hours later with dozens of protesters corralled into a van after they refused to get off the streets.
Hundreds of people had gathered outside Carl Schurz Park at 7 p.m. for a rally that opened with nearly 30 minutes of silence.
A young man began the vigil with brief remarks and quoted the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; protesters remained quiet throughout as the authorities, barely visible, stayed at a distance.
“We are all just fed up,” the man said, words the crowd repeated.
Seva Galant, 19, was among those who addressed the group, which had been forced away from the mansion by police officers who had surrounded the area with metal barricades.
“I don’t want to die. Life is good. I want to live,” Mr. Galant said. “Stop letting them kill us. I am not property — I am a man. Don’t let them kill me.”
Around 7:30 p.m., the silence was broken when the crowd erupted in cheers. Soon afterward, the crowd began to disperse, with hundreds of demonstrators making their way downtown, chanting protest slogans as the curfew fell.
As they moved south, pausing occasionally to take a knee, a number of police officers followed behind and a helicopter traced their path overhead.
By 9 p.m., the rally filled several blocks of Third Avenue near 50th Street. Protesters linked arms and then raised their hands over their heads, chanting “hands up, don’t shoot” as officers wearing riot helmets and batons trailed them on the sidewalk.
The group paused again to take a knee. Then the police pushed into the crowd, shoving protesters out of the street and onto the sidewalk. With tension high and rain falling, many people raised their hands again and began to leave. Officers surrounded the remaining protesters, and about 60 people were arrested, Chief Monahan said.
“This is love”: New Yorkers found solace and solidarity in Wednesday gatherings.
Rallies across the city during the afternoon and early evening were once again mostly by calm gatherings of New Yorkers clamoring for change.
Demonstrators in Long Island City, Queens; on Roosevelt Island; in Crown Heights, Brooklyn; and on Staten Island preached peace, used silence to drive home the depths of their pain and brought along young family members in tow to hear the calls for justice.
Roughly 200 people assembled in Queensbridge Park, forming ragged concentric circles for a 7 p.m. vigil. The protesters took a knee and chanted the names of black people who had died in police custody, including George Floyd, whose killing in police custody in Minneapolis touched off the protests in New York and elsewhere.
Then, much like at Gracie Mansion miles away, the Queens group fell silent.
“If you are hurting, say, ‘Yeah!’” a woman shouted after the silence ended. The crowd roared in response.
On Roosevelt Island about a half-hour earlier, a diverse crowd of several hundred people gathered on the Cornell Tech campus.
Celia Oliver, 30, a nurse practitioner, brought her 9-month-old son Elliot to the rally. He peered out, wide-eyed, from under his stroller’s clear rain cover.
As the crowd began to walk north, under the span of the Queensboro Bridge, most people wore masks and tried to keep social distance between one another.
“I think it’s important to show that all of us — and every person who has been killed — started out as babies,” Ms. Oliver said, referring to why she and her husband had brought their son along. “It’s his first lesson in anti-racism.”
In Brooklyn, an organized and diverse group of hundreds of protesters spent Wednesday afternoon marching across a large swath of the borough, from Crown Heights up Bedford Avenue to Greenpoint and Williamsburg.
Sarah Edwards, 54, brought her grandson along. She said that she had been to several protests against police brutality in the past but that the recent ones felt different.
Reporting was contributed by Anne Barnard, Julia Carmel, Jo Corona, Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Alan Feuer, Michael Gold, Christina Goldbaum, Corey Kilgannon, Jeffery C. Mays, Andy Newman, Sharon Otterman, Azi Paybarah, Jan Ransom, Dana Rubinstein, Daniel E. Slotnik, Ashley Southall, Matt Stevens, Anjali Tsui and Ali Watkins.
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Protester Defy Curfew, and Police Don’t Wait Long to Enforce It: Live Updates - The New York Times
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