Here’s what you need to know:
- As protesters defied the curfew, police again surrounded and charged at crowds.
- Despite a threat of altercations, thousands showed up, energized to demand change.
- The mayor was criticized at a memorial where Mr. Floyd’s brother spoke.
- N.Y.P.D.’s Commissioner Shea: ‘I am sorry. Are you?’
- The mayor and governor defended the police’s actions against protesters.
As protesters defied the curfew, police again surrounded and charged at crowds.
A week has passed since protesters, upset, angry and energized by the killing in police custody of George Floyd in Minneapolis, first poured into New York City’s streets.
On Thursday, despite a citywide curfew that was aggressively enforced by police officers the night before, thousands of people were still on the streets in large gatherings in Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx.
Once more, the police moved swiftly in some areas to enforce the curfew. In the Bronx’s Mott Haven neighborhood, at 8 p.m., a row of officers on bikes stopped hundreds of people from advancing, shouting at them to move back. Another group of officers came up behind the demonstrators at the same time, fencing them in on East 136th Street near Brook Avenue.
Minutes later, the police charged and began arresting people in the crowd who had been demonstrating peacefully. Some officers with riot shields pushed protesters onto sidewalks with seemingly no provocation. Although many demonstrators tried to leave, with officers on all sides, there was no route for them to clear the area.
Then, around 8:30 p.m., officers charged again, swinging their batons and striking protesters. Dozens of people were arrested, forced to sit on the street with their hands cuffed; one person was taken away on a stretcher.
One man, who was pinned to the ground by the authorities, had his neck pressed against a helmet that he repeatedly asked an officer to move. The officer eventually did, telling him to relax and using an expletive in admonishing him to stop moving.
The tactics echoed those the police used on Wednesday against protesters, who, like those who were out past curfew on Thursday, were overwhelmingly peaceful.
Hours later, officers in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill section used a similar strategy, standing in lines and surrounding hundreds of demonstrators on Atlantic Avenue. The officers then opened up small gaps to allow small groups of people to leave the streets, essentially scattering the protest.
In Manhattan, the police stopped a group of protesters on the Upper East Side that was heading south from what was a peaceful rally near Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence, and began to make arrests. New York Times reporters at the scene observed at least 10 people with their hands tied behind their backs, sitting on a curb in police custody.
The police dispersed a second group of protesters near 59th Street and Fifth Avenue by moving in from several directions before effectively splitting the crowd in half.
Despite a threat of altercations, thousands showed up, energized to demand change.
Despite the prospect of more altercations with officers enforcing the curfew, which officials said was meant to curb looting but that effectively limited demonstrations, many protesters were undeterred in their desire to march and urge change in the criminal-justice system.
For some of them, the tensions of recent days had only fueled their commitment.
“I saw the videos and just had to come out myself and do something, anything, whatever I could,” Linda Shapford, 47, said at a memorial for Mr. Floyd that was held at Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn on Thursday. “It just wasn’t a question after what I saw from last night.”
Mayor Bill de Blasio and the police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea, had defended officers’ aggressive actions. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo also lent his support, though an aide later said he had asked the attorney general to review any possible misconduct.
To many of the protesters who assembled on Thursday, the officials’ defensiveness was just more justification for staying in the streets pushing for change.
“The response has been way too dramatic,” Anjali Jamin, 31, said at a rally at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. “Cities don’t have control over their police forces.”
Ms. Jamin, a medical student, marched with a group of about 60 health care workers and students from SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn. At a “die-in” earlier, medical residents gave speeches and lay in silence for 8 minutes and 46 seconds — the length of time that prosecutors said Mr. Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was pinned by the neck under a Minneapolis police officer’s knee before he died.
For Shakaa Chaiban, a 20-year-old from Brooklyn, the imposition of a curfew was both incomprehensible and unjustified.
“It’s a crazy double standard that as the epicenter of the coronavirus, a curfew wasn’t implemented,” said Mr. Chaiban, who was standing atop a planter near the Barclays Center, offering bags of snacks to protesters as he had for the past two days. “But when racial protests begin, New York is quick to create a curfew.”
Mr. Chaiban said he believed that anyone who looked at a teenager’s social media feed would come across a video showing police brutality. And the nature of the New York protests, he added, had been mischaracterized.
“Mainstream media coverage doesn’t do justice to how these protests actually are,” he said. “They’re not portraying the unity and the demands and whose responsibility the violence is.”
In Manhattan, hundreds of people protested peacefully again near Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence on the Upper East Side.
David J. Hamilton III, 35, addressed the crowd there, using his remarks to press Mr. de Blasio to urge the police to adjust their tactics and to refrain from using tear gas against protesters.
Mr. Hamilton said that he initially felt “a little mixture of exhaustion and anger” after hearing about the deaths of Mr. Floyd Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old African-American emergency room technician who was shot by police in Louisville, Ky.
After debating whether to join for the protests, he joined a rally for the first time on Thursday.
“Floyd and Taylor, they are showing us that tomorrow is not promised,” he said. “If we are treating each breath as a gift, then we are definitely not out here wasting it.”
The mayor was criticized at a memorial where Mr. Floyd’s brother spoke.
Mr. de Blasio was met with hostility on Thursday at a memorial for George Floyd in Brooklyn, the first time he had appeared in person before protesters who have been marching in New York City’s streets for a week.
The demonstrators chanted “I can’t breathe,” “resign” and “defund the police,” and used a profanity to decry the curfew Mr. de Blasio imposed after several days of rallies touched off by the killing in Minneapolis of Mr. Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who died after a white police officer pushed a knee into his neck for several minutes.
The mayor was introduced by his wife, Chirlane McCray, and the crowd immediately jeered him. A local pastor raised his hand in a peace sign, urging that the mayor be given a chance speak at the memorial, where Mr. Floyd’s brother Terrence spoke.
“For all of us who know white privilege, we need do more,” Mr. de Blasio said, “because we don’t even fully recognize the daily pain that the racism in this society causes.”
But after struggling to be heard above the crowd, the mayor quickly cut off his remarks. The scene unfolded at Cadman Plaza, where the police used aggressive tactics on Wednesday night against protesters who defied the curfew.
Terrence Floyd, wearing a face mask bearing an image of his brother and a Yankees cap, teared up for about two minutes before regaining his composure and addressing the crowd.
“I want to thank God,” he said, adding, “It wasn’t his fault. It was his will.”
“I thank God for you all showing love to my brother,” Mr. Floyd continued.
He also criticized some of the violence that has broken out at some protests.
“I’m proud of the protest, but I’m not proud of the destruction,” he said. “My brother wasn’t about that.”
After the memorial ended, thousands of those who had gathered left the plaza and marched across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan — a goal of rallies on previous nights that was thwarted by officers who would not let protesters travel between the boroughs.
The group on Thursday swarmed the bridge’s north-side lane and pedestrian walkway, pausing regularly to take a knee as they crossed. Drivers in the opposite lane honked horns and raised fists in shows of support.
N.Y.P.D.’s Commissioner Shea: ‘I am sorry. Are you?’
With another night of protests after an 8 p.m. curfew on the horizon, Dermot F. Shea, New York City’s police commissioner, apologized on Thursday for any instances of police misconduct over the past several days.
But, during a brief news conference at Police Headquarters, he also demanded that demonstrators stop insulting and attacking his officers, warning that anti-police rhetoric could lead to continued violence against the people he oversees.
“For there to be calm, there must also be contrition,” Commissioner Shea said. “So I am sorry. Sometimes even the best — and the N.Y.P.D. is the goddamned best police department in the country — but sometimes even the best fall down,”
“So for our part in the damage to civility, for our part in racial bias, in excessive force, unacceptable behavior, unacceptable language and many other mistakes, we are human,” he said. “I am sorry. Are you?”
The commissioner — who has condemned the killing in police custody of George Floyd, which touched off the protests — said he was aware of at least seven episodes of possible misconduct by New York officers in the course of the demonstrations. There would, he said, “probably be a couple of officers suspended” as a result of actions captured on video.
But he also argued that some videos of some incidents that had been shared online were presented out of context and that in many cases, officers’ use of force had been “completely justified.”
Overall, he said, the vast majority of New York officers had been professional and exercised “extreme restraint” in what he at one point called a “riot situation.”
On that point and others, the commissioner was defensive and defiant. He opened the briefing by playing several video clips of officers being attacked in what he called acts of “intentional violence” that he said “must stop.”
Specifically, he said people had run police officers over with vehicles, bashed them in the head with fire extinguishers and shot at them. He also highlighted episodes in the past 24 hours where, he said, attackers had tried to stab officers.
In the past several days, New York Times journalists embedded in protests have reported that police officers have charged at demonstrators with seemingly little provocation, shoved them onto sidewalks, struck them with batons and used other aggressive tactics.
Commissioner Shea also criticized elected officials who he said were “spewing complaint after complaint after complaint to help their careers.”
“Do not tell me that words don’t matter,” he said after recounting the stories and names of N.Y.P.D. police officers killed in recent years. “Don’t tell me that it doesn’t stir up hate.”
“If you don’t have something nice to say, keep your mouth closed,” he added.
He also argued that “demonstrators are not all on the same page,” and separated them into three camps: “anarchists,” “core protesters” and “looters.”
“I honestly can’t tell you a protester that was seriously injured,” he said, an assertion that reporting by The Times appeared to contradict.
By comparison, he added: “I’ve been to the hospital a number times this week for police officers.”
He also said he had decided to hold the briefing to call for civil discourse and dialogue.
“You have to have calm in this city,” he said. “We need healing.”
The mayor and governor defended the police’s actions against protesters.
After a day and night of mostly peaceful protests that culminated with officers aggressively arresting demonstrators who remained on the streets after the 8 p.m. curfew took effect, Mr. de Blasio on Thursday emphatically defended the Police Department’s actions.
The crowds in Brooklyn and Manhattan who continued to rally against police brutality and systemic racism after the clampdown took effect on Wednesday were bigger than they had been the night before.
And the police moved more swiftly to disperse demonstrators from the city’s rainy streets and to arrest those who failed to clear out.
“When people are instructed by the N.Y.P.D., especially after curfew, they must follow those instructions,” the mayor told reporters at a news briefing.
Referring to officers aggressively dispersing crowds, he added, “It’s not an unfair action to say, in the context of this crisis, in the context of curfew, there is a point where enough is enough.”
Mr. Cuomo lent his support to the police, saying they were doing “an impossible job.”
Mr. Cuomo bristled when asked about the police using batons to disperse peaceful protesters, despite reporting and widely seen videos that captured just that.
“That’s not a fact,” he told reporters at a briefing. “They don’t do that. Anyone who did do that would be obviously reprehensible, if not criminal.”
Later in the day, a top aide to Mr. Cuomo said that the governor had asked the attorney general, Letitia James, to review the police’s altercations with protesters in Brooklyn.
Mr. de Blasio said he had not seen videos or reports of the police using batons to hit peaceful protesters, but he promised investigations if they were warranted.
The mayor sought to strike a balance on how the nightly curfew would be enforced. He reiterated that peaceful protests would be allowed to continue even after curfew, but that the police would have the discretion to decide when to disperse crowds even if all was calm.
Mr. de Blasio, who campaigned on a promise to reform the city’s police force, the largest in the United States, has focused on defending the department while also vowing to investigate reports of misconduct.
The mayor said the police should apply as much restraint as possible.
“I want the absolute least use of force,” he said. “Ideally, no use of pepper spray or batons. There are certain situations where it’s necessary.”
There were few reports of looting or vandalism on Wednesday, the mayor said. He said he would set aside $500,000 to help small businesses that had been ransacked on previous nights.
Reporting was contributed by Anne Barnard, Gabriela Bhaskar, Julia Carmel, Jo Corona, Annie Correal, Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Alan Feuer, Michael Gold, Christina Goldbaum, Corey Kilgannon, Jeffery C. Mays, Andy Newman, Sharon Otterman, Azi Paybarah, Pia Peterson, Jan Ransom, Dana Rubinstein, Eliza Shapiro, Daniel E. Slotnik, Ashley Southall, Matt Stevens, Anjali Tsui and Ali Watkins.
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