Photo and written narrative of injury sustained at May 30, 2020 Demonstration for George Floyd
On Saturday, May 30th my partner and I attended a demonstration on the North side of the Justice Center on Lakeside Ave. At approximately 5:45 we left the demonstration and proceeded to exit the vicinity by heading South on W. 3rd St. where the crowd was thinning, and few demonstrators remained. The further we walked the more sparse people became. We were in the middle of the road, Ryan was to my right. I documented the demonstration, including two police cars we passed on our right, and noticed there were broken windows in the Justice Center to our left. At this point, we observed no police, and no interactions between them and demonstrators. At 5:52 I put my phone up to take a picture of the damaged windows, and as I dropped my arm, a police officer emerged from behind the broken window, we made eye contact, and he shot at me. I saw the either rubber or wooden bullet coming for my head and managed to duck right, before it struck my left shoulder. Seconds later, Ryan took a step towards me, and was struck by a bullet in his left side. He was knocked to the ground, scraped his hand on the pavement, which began bleeding. With the assistance of several passersby, we quickly took refuge behind the nearest shelter on the street, a bail bondsman vehicle in the parking lot directly west of the Justice Center. Ryan was temporarily incapacitated for what we believe was between 5-10 minutes, after which we left, exiting the back of the parking lot on the west side. We committed no violent acts or acts of vandalism.This violent attack, came without warning or provocation, and could have resulted in serious injury.
We attended this demonstration to protest the violent murder of George Floyd, countless murders at the hands of police departments, and overall excessive police violence across the nation. Here in Cleveland we have seen among the most egregious assaults without justice, including the murder of a precious black child, Tamir Rice, who would have turned 18 this year. In addition to the outrage every American should feel over these murders, the loss of the right of a people to exercise its freedom to speech and assembly without fear of a violent reprisal is another great tragedy. What I observed first hand was no less than a State sanctioned military assault against an unarmed citizenry, evoking images of oppressive regimes and dictatorships in far off lands.
On Saturday, Mayor Frank Jackson and Police Chief Calvin Williams assured citizens that access to these rights would be preserved as long as demonstrations remained “peaceful.” At 2pm, thousands of demonstrators gathered downtown to voice their concern over state violence, and peacefully marched. Of these thousands, I personally observed a few dozen demonstrators compelled out of anger and frustration throw water bottles, pound on Justice Center windows and doors, and spray graffiti. While these actions could be categorized as non-peaceful, the disproportionate response was immense. By 3:40 the crowd was under a full out tactical assault; pepper spray and flash bangs were deployed regularly, and tear gas and pepper balls were fired into the crowd, often indiscriminately into areas where people were just standing. I was shot in the thigh directly with a tear gas canister, and observed many demonstrators get badly injured, including one woman who appeared unconscious and had to be carried away by volunteer medics. At no point in time did I observe directives given to the crowd to disperse. I observed no attempts to de-escalate. This disproportionate militarized response led to injury and chaos, and it is my opinion that this response was the direct catalyst to subsequent events of the day.
If you weren’t there, you viewed these events through the lens of news anchors as they walk through broken glass and talk about the devastation of local business. In subsequent days, local leadership has piled on with the theory that out-of-towners were responsible for “The Destruction.” All this is a distraction.
Hundreds of years of brutal racial genocide has evolved to survive; learned to soften its edges so that even “good” people can no longer see where it lurks. That it exists in our lending practices, hiring policies, in the incarceration ratio of young black men, and the mortality rates of black infants. That “All Lives Matter,” that good white people “see no color.” We soften the brutal narrative of our past until it is finally digestible for US, so WE can finally move past it. During the exact moments we “came together as real Clevelanders” to clean up the aftermath, that the OTHER perpetrated against OUR city, let’s remember what else was happening.
At the same time, the same Cleveland Police Department that incited violence against its largely peaceful citizens, was locking down the city, particularly in neighborhoods of color: downtown, East Cleveland, Cleveland Heights, multiple Westside neighborhoods, Central, and others. While we were mourning the loss of capital, portions of these communities had their voice taken again. Many had National Guard stationed on the very streets they lived on. These lock-downs served two purposes: to crush any uprisings organized within them, and to further entrench “good” white people in their implicit fear of “angry black looters.” Did it work on you?
White Americans can never atone for the racist creation we built, yet it is our duty to try. Now, as we come together to exercise our most sacred rights to speech and assembly, to stand together against murder by the State against our fellow Americans, we have come to the most terrifying of situations. The police, in perfect orchestration with local officials will, through acts of lock-downs and violent suppression of demonstrations, set the bill of rights aflame.
And what will you be doing, “good Clevelander? ” Sweeping up glass and bolstering the idyllic myth that we’ve achieved some level of equality that absolves us of culpability? Or will you stand, clear-eyed and help dismantle one of the gravest institutional threats to actual American Democracy?