Name: Opinion: It wasn’t all peaceful. What you didn’t know about Houston’s George Floyd protest
Brand: houstonchronicle.com
SKU: houstonchronicle-com-169
Availability: OnlineOnly

critic

Opinion: It wasn’t all peaceful. What you didn’t know about Houston’s George Floyd protest

preview

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigateOn June 2, to march in solidarity with the family of George Floyd in downtown Houston at Discovery Green. What lasted for hours as a peaceful protest suddenly turned into a night of confusion, aggression and maltreatment.While the Houston Police Department , hundreds of students, medics, community members and supporters were forced to spend the next 18 to 30-plus hours in the Harris County Jail just blocks from where they honored George Floyd’s life and legacy.After the Friday May 29 protest, I witnessed HPD deploy what appeared to me to be tear gas, intimidate protesters atop their high horses and incite the crowds by walking through the demonstrations. On the night of the Tuesday protest, I signed up for jail support through, just in case the demonstrations escalated.That evening, I watched truck after truck filled with officers take off from San Jacinto St. and rush into downtown.The media was near-silent about events at the protest after dark, releasing photos and focused on the peaceful events of the afternoon.But protesters’ dispatches on Twitter told a different story, one that deserves to be more widely known. Protesters who claimed to be peacefully exercising their rights accused police of surrounding crowds for no reason, the situation and targeting people who had no plans of criminal activity.I had stayed on-site until 10:30 pm and did not find out about the arrests until the next morning. I was only able to piece together a story of escalation through the footage and tweets of protesters who were able to make it home safe. One such person posted a where, in video footage, demonstrators seemed to be walking away from where the arrests had taken place, but HPD pointed them back toward the turmoil. The officer said, “You can go back around and join them, or there are some more over there you can join.” This inspired the phrase protesters coined, the “Houston protest trap,” which referred to the HPD corralling groups of protesters and arresting them en masse.It was not until the slow release of protesters in the early hours of June 4 that the sheer magnitude of escalation and intimidation enacted by the HPD was revealed online.Protesters took to Twitter with the hashtags to post photos and videos of what happened the night of the arrests. With the jail support of organizations like,and, protesters were met with an abundance of resources and references for legal aid. I returned to jail support through Mutual Aid Houston, and as protesters were released, we began to collect their testimonies which utterly contradicted the publicmade by government officials.An HPD officer was filmed to demonstrate “all day” if they stayed on the sidewalk, but protesters in explained that even after remaining on the sidewalk, they were arrested anyway. Protesters said there was without being . Many posted videos of themselves and being forced back by HPD.Footage emerged from protesters near Avenida de las Americas that showed police on the sidewalk. Protester Adriana Salazar described to me the moment she saw the other protesters being arrested. “We were standing along the sidewalk facing the glass [of a hotel],” Salazar said. “Another protester said, ‘Hey, I’m gonna go peacefully, OK?’ and yeah that’s when I knew it was all over.” When explaining the arrests that followed, Salazar noted several protesters complained that their ties were too tight. Some protesters said that when they asked officers to loosen them, the officers just made them tighter.City officials were not initially transparent about HPD’s aggression toward protesters. On June 2, Chief of Police Art Acevedo on Twitter claiming “HPD has not deployed tear gas” and Councilwoman Abbie Kamin claimed at the June 3 city budget hearing that instead , but a protester captured coughing and covering their mouths and eyes from some sort of harmful substance. “I was at a peaceful protest,” 24-year-old Martell Wallace recalled when I spoke with him. “It happened really fast, it was just a quick boom, everybody starting coughing, I just got out of the area as soon as I [could].”Acevedo celebrated his squadron via Twitter for their communication and , calmly interacting with the protesters, but multiple protesters said they were not told they were under arrest until after beatings with batons began. “I turn around, I see police batoning people to get them out of the way,” Jourdan Short recalled in a testimony to Mutual Aid Houston. “I heard swears and I saw them ripping off people’s shoes trying to drag people, like trying to drag them by their feet.”Protesters said they were detained on buses for hours, held in cages in a gym andin the holding facility well into the next day. Protesters detailed their experience with HPD, withholdingandall. Protester Acinagoth Mabor, 21, confirmed these conditions.In a recentHarris County District Attorney Kim Ogg wrote, “Out of a total of 654 individuals criminally charged as a result of the protests, only 51 adults and one juvenile now remain charged with active cases. We will always protect the First Amendment rights of peaceful protesters.”Rather than publicly pat themselves on the back for their restraint, Acevedo and others in his command staff should hold their officers accountable in the instances where they abused power and infringed on people’s collective right to assemble.Not only do the shameful actions and arrests by the HPD demean the protest on behalf of George Floyd, but they may stifle future demonstrations against injustice.The #HoustonProtestTrap taught us something, though. People of Houston can rally together anywhere, be it on the streets, behind a hashtag or behind bars. A trap is only a trap if there is no way out, and Houston folks have proven you can always make it out if you can make it through.Brown is a member of Mutual Aid Houston.

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigateOn June 2, to march in solidarity with the family of George Floyd in downtown Houston at Discovery Green. What lasted for hours as a peaceful protest suddenly turned into a night of confusion, aggression and maltreatment.While the Houston Police Department , hundreds of students, medics, community members and supporters were forced to spend the next 18 to 30-plus hours in the Harris County Jail just blocks from where they honored George Floyd’s life and legacy.After the Friday May 29 protest, I witnessed HPD deploy what appeared...

Opinion: It wasn’t all peaceful. What you didn’t know about Houston’s George Floyd protest

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS