Member-only story
Investigations Reveal ‘Damning’ Evidence of Police Mishandling in Black Lives Matter Protests
In the wake of January’s Trump-incited mob breach of the U.S. Capitol, versions of the same grim question began to emerge: Would the police have been so haphazard if the rioters had been Black instead of white?
The question was not purely speculative. Last summer, in cities across the nation, protesters took to the streets to denounce the systemic police brutalization of Black people. Many of these protesters were met with physical intimidation and, in some instances, brute force — not by lone vigilantes, but by the same law enforcement officers purportedly trained to “serve and protect” them.
Now, the New York Times reports that police action inquiries from nine U.S. cities have “almost uniformly” called out law enforcement’s mishandling of the protests:
The mistakes transcended geography, staffing levels and financial resources. From midsize departments like the one in Indianapolis to big-city forces like New York City’s, from top commanders to officers on the beat, police officers nationwide were unprepared to calm the summer’s unrest, and their approaches consistently did the opposite. In many ways, the problems highlighted in the reports are fundamental to modern American policing, a demonstration of the aggressive tactics that had infuriated many of the protesters to begin with.
You can read the full story here.
