Here’s what you need to know:
- Sunday’s protests began with a feeling of accomplishment and ended without major incident.
- Protesters — and even the mayor — ask why police officers are often unmasked at demonstrations.
- Two roaming protest groups had a common cause: to find the other.
- The mayor said he would divert some of the police department’s budget to social services.
- Roman Catholic leaders addressed the protests during Sunday Mass.
Sunday’s protests began with a feeling of accomplishment and ended without major incident.
The 11th day of protests in New York City set off in several locations with sunny skies and two significant accomplishments already won.
Mayor Bill de Blasio lifted the citywide curfew he had ordered last week after a spree of looting and other violence. And he pledged for the first time to cut the city’s police funding and redirect some of the money to social services, a major concession to the protesters’ demands.
On Sunday, the eve of New York City’s first phase of reopening after more than two months of lockdown because of the coronavirus, the marches were largely jubilant, with the police taking a more passive role with protesters, and protesters in turn avoiding clashes with the police. By 11 p.m., with most of the demonstrations over, there had been no reports of major confrontations or mass arrests.
As thousands of protesters marched near Columbus Circle in the afternoon, the police kept a distance and did not trail the march with vehicles, as they had for numerous marches in previous days.
But several police officers in riot gear were stationed across the street from Trump International Hotel and Tower, where protesters stopped and cursed President Trump and chanted, “Vote him out!”
The racially diverse group collectively took a knee and raised their fists, observing a minute of silence. They continued to chant: “Black lives matter!”
Protests and marches in Brooklyn took place in McCarren Park, Grand Army Plaza, Crown Heights and Dumbo, among other locations. In Manhattan, a group that began marching from Bryant Park reached the West Side Highway in the West Village and blocked parts of it.
As has happened every night, a demonstration that began in one location would sometimes end miles away, often combining with another protest, which itself would then divide into separate marches, forcing the police to constantly redeploy forces.
Thousands of protesters who began the day in Union Square moved up to Central Park and then cut across using the 79th Street Transverse. The crowd cheered and chanted as they marched, occupying both traffic lanes.
At one point, they took a knee and chanted: “Let’s make history! Let’s make history! Let’s make history!”
The crowd moved on to Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s residence on East End Avenue, where protesters have gathered on several nights. Some then joined a nearby protest at Carl Schurz Park, which soon grew thanks to a group of around 100 people arriving from the north.
“We came all the way from the Bronx,” said a member of that group, which promptly invited everyone else to join them.
“March with us!” they yelled, and soon, a group made up of Bronx and Manhattan marchers splintered off and headed south on York Avenue.
Around 9:15 p.m., the group received a jolt as it passed through Midtown Manhattan. An ice pack launched from a high-rise at Fifth Avenue and 32nd Street crashed to the asphalt and shattered with a loud bang.
Luckily, no one was injured. The nearest police officers were a block away and apparently did not see precisely where the ice came from.
“If that would have hit one of the protesters, we could have died,” said Rebecca Milrich, 40, a jewelry designer trailing the group on her bike. “That was a direct assault on New Yorkers peacefully protesting.”
In Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a crowd of several hundred marchers took to the streets and chanted, “Black lives matter” and “Black is beautiful.”
From windows and balconies, residents applauded and banged pots and pans; one blew a trumpet. Motorists honked their support; passers-by whistled and held fists in the air.
The air smelled of burning sage. A woman handed out free soup and bread. A group of men danced around a car blasting the rap song “Changes,” by Tupac Shakur.
Marchers began chanting against Mr. de Blasio as they passed a group of police officers at Washington Avenue and Park Place.
“Hey-hey, ho-ho,” they chanted. “De Blasio has got to go!”
The officers cheered.
Protesters — and even the mayor — ask why police officers are often unmasked at demonstrations.
A confounding scene has played out again and again during 11 days of largely peaceful protests in New York City. The protesters marching across bridges and down avenues are mostly wearing masks. But many of the police are not, according to numerous reports from journalists on the ground — and even the mayor.
Mask compliance has “not been happening consistently,” Mr. de Blasio said during a radio appearance on Friday. “I have had this conversation with Commissioner Shea multiple times,” he added, referring to the chief of the New York Police Department. “It has to be fixed and that bothers me.”
The lack of face coverings among police officers has created yet another urgent problem for Mr. de Blasio, who has been sharply criticized for his handling of both the local coronavirus crisis and the police response to massive protests over police brutality.
Mr. de Blasio has warned that the coronavirus could easily spread at the protests, which have swelled to tens of thousands of demonstrators over the last week, and he encouraged protesters to wear masks and try to practice social distancing. And Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has required every New Yorker to wear a mask when they cannot maintain six feet of separation.
Protesters have said officers’ lack of masks and handling of arrests have made them feel unsafe.
Kiarah Brown, 20, said an officer refused to help her adjust her mask after she was arrested and put in handcuffs last week in Brooklyn. She noted that many of the officers who escorted her and others into a stuffy police van were unmasked.
Another protester, Chi Ossé, 22, said he found it ironic that before the protests began, the police had issued summonses to people who were not following guidelines and had even occasionally used force against them.
“And here they are, day after day, with no masks,” he said. “If they are there to protect us they should be protecting us against Covid, too.”
One unmasked officer stationed in Downtown Brooklyn on Saturday said he kept his mask in his pocket if he ever felt he needed it. The officer, who declined to be named, said, “If I have to engage with people I don’t know, I’m going to wear my mask.” He added, “If I go in, I’m putting my mask on.”
In Union Square over the weekend, one demonstrator held up a sign that read, “Crowded cells, no masks, tear gas: NYPD Bio Warfare.”
In a march across the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday evening, Justina Heckard chastised police officers who stood unmasked outside the pathway.
“Wear your masks,” she shouted. “You’re not keeping the peace!” Ms. Heckard, a music manager, said that she had been protesting for eight days and was reporting the lack of face coverings among officers to the New York attorney general’s office.
“I had an experience where I asked a group of officers why they weren’t wearing masks,” Ms. Heckard said. “And they told me it was because they couldn’t breathe. And I thought that was the most ironic thing.”
Two roaming protest groups had a common cause: to find the other.
With the curfew lifted and the police largely hands-off, Sunday may well have been the day of least resistance for the George Floyd protests in New York City.
Even so, for part of Sunday night, two groups of protesters circled a section of Manhattan with a problem.
They could not find each other.
“We’ve been chasing this group for the last two hours,” said Nick Andry, 23, who was with a group of about 100 that had struck out from Union Square around 10 p.m. to search for another group that had marched over the Manhattan Bridge from Brooklyn.
Even in an era when almost everyone carries a GPS-enabled device, the two groups of youthful marchers could not seem to locate each other. Each group knew the other was nearby, but since they did not personally know anyone in the other group, they could not directly communicate.
It was the police, unwittingly, who came to their aid.
Each group had tuned into police radio scanners to pick up reports that tracked the other group. Mr. Andry listened to a scanner as his group approached Washington Square Park around 10:50 p.m., not realizing that the other group had passed the location 15 minutes earlier.
“We’re hearing that they just turned,” Mr. Andry said. “We’re trying to catch up.”
His group marched east along Saint Marks Place and turned downtown at Tompkins Square Park. They hooked up with a band of musicians and sang their way down Avenue A, then turned west on Delancey Street and marched through SoHo.
Meanwhile, the other group, after leaving the Manhattan Bridge, had headed west on Canal Street, with a light police presence. They were 200 strong, mostly in their late teens or early 20s, and they began a serpentine path toward the West Village.
They seemed uncertain whether to go home or continue into the night.
“I’m so tired,” sighed one of the organizers, who combined scanner reports with a map to track the Union Square group.
On Sixth Avenue, a Chrysler Sebring convertible joined the Manhattan Bridge group, whose marchers clambered onto it and blasted amplified music and segments of speeches by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Just as Mr. Andry of the Union Square group began feeling defeated, a cyclist riding down Sixth Avenue delivered good news.
“There’s a big group at 12th Street!” he said.
Finally, the two groups united at Sixth Avenue and 13th Street.
“How’s it going family?” said a passenger in the convertible through the loudspeaker. “Let’s go!”
The mayor said he would divert some of the police department’s budget to social services.
Mayor Bill de Blasio on Sunday pledged for the first time to cut the city’s police funding, following 10 nights of mass protests against police violence and mounting demands that he overhaul a department whose tactics have caused widespread consternation.
The mayor declined to say precisely how much funding he planned to divert to social services from the New York Police Department, which has an annual budget of $6 billion, representing more than 6 percent of Mr. de Blasio’s proposed $90 billion budget.
Mr. de Blasio said the details would be worked out with the City Council in advance of the July 1 budget deadline.
“We’re committed to seeing a shift of funding to youth services, to social services, that will happen literally in the course of the next three weeks, but I’m not going to go into detail because it is subject to negotiation and we want to figure out what makes sense,” Mr. de Blasio said.
As recently as Friday, Mr. de Blasio had expressed skepticism about cutting police funding, even as he noted that all city agencies might face cuts, absent more financial assistance from the federal government.
Mr. de Blasio is facing a possible $9 billion budget gap and significant unrest within his own administration over his handling of both the coronavirus crisis and the mass demonstrations following the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd.
Mr. de Blasio’s assertion on Sunday that he would redirect some police funding was met with skepticism from both protesters and police leaders.
The Brooklyn district attorney’s office said on Sunday that it was investigating two police officers over their actions during the demonstrations.
One officer was seen on video shoving a female protester, who fell on the street and hit her head. The other officer was seen on video removing a protester’s mask and pepper spraying him.
Roman Catholic leaders addressed the protests during Sunday Mass.
At Mass on Sunday, Roman Catholic leaders in New York City appealed for calm and expressed their support for peaceful protest as the demonstrations continued for an 11th day.
Celebrating Mass at the Co-Cathedral of St. Joseph in Prospect Heights, not far from where thousands of protesters have gathered every night, Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of the Diocese of Brooklyn compared the unrest in the United States to 19th-century France as depicted in the Broadway musical “Les Misérables.”
The protests may have been sparked by the death of George Floyd, he said, but they were fueled by “the anguish that comes from a deeper understanding of the inequality that still exists in our society and the burden that people of color must bear.”
And while the bishop condemned the violence and looting that marred some demonstrations last week, he said parishioners must focus on “what is truly at stake.”
“We must understand that societal change of the evil of racism must happen perhaps more rapidly than we thought in the past,” the bishop said. “Any incident today can spark these types of demonstrations because they underline the feelings of discrimination that so many people of color feel.”
And he praised the diverse, multiracial character of the protest moment, saying the demonstrations “certainly are not attended only by people of color.”
“Many other young people of different races are there,” the bishop said. “Perhaps the tide has already turned, and our young people do not see things the way people saw them in the past.”
The unrest was also addressed on Sunday, in less direct terms, by Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, the archbishop of New York, during Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, whose exterior was defaced by spray-painted protest slogans earlier in the week.
If we believe that God lives within each of us, the cardinal asked, then “how could I ever hit him by crushing his neck with my knee or by throwing a firebomb into his car or his home or his business?”
“If God thinks so highly of us that he makes his home within us, well, then literally for God’s sake, we should only treat ourselves and one another with immense dignity and respect,” he said.
“I am convinced that Jesus is inviting us to a spiritual and moral renewal through the trauma of the virus and the tensions on our streets these days,” he said. “Let that renewal begin.”
Reporting was contributed by Jo Corona, Annie Correal, Sheri Fink, Matthew Haag, Corey Kilgannon, Nate Schweber, Matthew Sedacca, Eliza Shapiro, Liam Stack, Anjali Tsui and Alex Traub.
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