From Harper’s Weekly Review, a reminder that the “carnage,” the “violence” in our streets over the past couple of weeks has been from the police, not the rest of us:
During last week’s protests across the United States, police officers arrested more than 10,000 people; assaulted at least 173 journalists; destroyed a medic tent in Asheville, North Carolina; used tear gas on protesters in Seattle after it had been banned by the city; pulled down a man’s face mask to pepper-spray him in Brooklyn; shoved a 75-year-old Buffalo activist onto the ground; groped, beat, and handcuffed a woman in Indianapolis; knee-choked a man for violating a curfew in Columbia, South Carolina; broke into a woman’s car and knee-choked her in Chicago; fractured the skulls of two students by firing “less-lethal” ammunition into a crowd in Austin, Texas; fatally teargassed Sarah Grossman, an environmentalist and recent Ohio State graduate, in Columbus, Ohio; and shot and killed David McAtee, a Rastafarian owner of a barbecue restaurant, while enforcing a curfew in Louisville, Kentucky. Body-camera footage was released showing that 22-year-old Bernardo Palacios-Carbajal was shot more than 20 times while running from the police in Salt Lake City. Police officers used assault weapons to fire more than 40 rounds at a stolen truck in Oakland, California, killing 23-year-old Erik Salgado and injuring his pregnant girlfriend less than a block from his mother’s house. An Edmonton, Alberta, police officer was called to conduct a wellness check on a 26-year-old Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation citizen, Chantal Moore, and shot her dead.
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The mayor of Cleveland refused to reallocate any of the $218 million budgeted for the city’s police department, then lamented that Cleveland is considered “the butthole of the world.” San Jose police officers shot a rubber bullet at a Black community activist who had led implicit-bias workshops with the city’s police department, rupturing his testicles; Chicago police officers clubbed the president of the Chicago Police Board five times; in a department-wide email, the Fargo deputy chief of Police apologized for saying, in “a casual, low voice, yah, fuck those police” while attempting to infiltrate a local protest. “I took actions that forever many within this department will call me stupid. That is probably just, I can’t argue that,” he wrote.
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The police charged a Massachusetts man with assault for throwing an object “later determined to be a large pickle” at a Vermont highway worker.