The weekend after George Floyd was killed by police officers in Minneapolis, like in hundreds of other cities across the country, protests against police brutality swept Chicago. Thousands marched downtown and in neighborhoods across the city to demand justice not only for Floyd, but for the thousands of people, especially Black Americans harmed by police in every corner of the United States.
He added, “all of us arrested were Black.”
On the South Side, the police violence continued. “I was part of a group of protesters that were pretty publicly abused,” said Williams. “Police had attacked a man near a store and a group of us organizers were doing cop watching, know your rights work, and advocating for the man attacked when the police started beating three or four women with batons and shields. They slammed us to the ground, they brutally beat another activist and held him in a chokehold. As we were deploying strategy and demanding that they leave us alone and let people go, they attacked us further. My experience with the police is that anything beyond being submissive is seen as a threat, something that needs to be attacked.” A month later, Williams is still experiencing symptoms of the concussion he sustained when thrown to the ground by police that day.
“But a significant portion of arrests made over the weekend were municipal ordinance violations like disorderly conduct and violation of curfew,” said Foxx.
“All of this is a statistical reflection of the political reality of policing in Chicago, and in America, that it is both violent and racist,” explained Williams of policing practices that criminalize people of color’s presence in predominantly white neighborhoods and feel like a constant occupation in Chicago’s predominantly Black and Brown neighborhoods. “That is why we need to have the conversation of divesting from and defunding these systems and building new systems within the tradition of abolition.”
These racial disparities in arrests during protests come on the heels of similarly disparate enforcement by police of social distancing rules during the early days of the pandemic, despite repeated statements from Mayor Lori Lightfoot that Chicago police enforced social distancing ordinances equally across the city, “with an eye toward equity.” At a press conference on May 26, Lightfoot stated, “Based upon the statistics we’ve been keeping for weeks, those dispersal orders are happening all over the city—and yes, in white areas, in Latinx areas, in moneyed areas of the city.”
