By: Jared Evan
NYC Mayor Bill deBlasio on Sunday called for two city representatives to conduct an independent review of actions on both sides of the protests that have violently erupted in the aftermath of the brutal slaying of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
This came after a video went viral showing NYPD ramming protestors in the streets of Brooklyn with an SUV, during the Floyd protests.
The two representatives are James “Jim” Johnson, the leader of the city Law Department, and Police Commissioner Margaret Garnett, according to SILive.
They will be looking into the entire way the protests were handled including investigations into the protestors who were disrupters of the peace. The mayor called for an entire separate investigation into the NYPD ramming of protestors.
Meanwhile, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s 25-year-old daughter was arrested for unlawful assembly Saturday night, according to the city’s Office of the Deputy Commissioner, Public Information. Chiara de Blasio was at a protest in downtown Manhattan, CBS news reported.
Chiara was arrested after refusing leave a Manhattan street that officers ordered cleared because people were throwing things. She was later given a court summons and released.
“I did not want to ever see something like that, and I don’t want to ever see it again,” he said of the “disturbing” video that showed the squad vehicles driving into demonstrators on Flatbush Avenue Saturday.
According to Police Commissioner Dermot Shea, about 350 protestors were arrested and more than 30 members of the NYPD were injured Saturday evening.
De Blasio commended police officers, stating that many showed “tremendous restraint.”
“Think about the countless different points around the city [and] the thousands and thousands of NYPD officers that were deployed,” the mayor explained. “When you add up how many things were happening … it says something about the NYPD that there was no loss of life, no major injuries.”
De Blasio seems to be more sympathetic of the officers who drove the SUV into the crowd of protestors, even though he is calling for the investigation.
That situation was created by a group of protesters blocking and surrounding a police vehicle,” he insisted at the press briefing, calling it a common tactic “that can be very very dangerous to everyone involved.”
“And we’ve seen direct attacks on police officers, including in their vehicles,” Hizzoner continued, saying it created a “backdrop where a police officer had been attacked before in the exact same situation.”
“The one thing they couldn’t do was stay there,” he insisted of the officers placed in an “extremely dangerous situation.
“Let’s not kid ourselves,” he said. “If anyone else was inside that police vehicle surrounded by people, you would have had a really tough decision to make,” he said, insisting of the officers, “You can’t stay there, you can’t get out of the vehicle.”
“It was an extremely dangerous, tense, complex situation. And the humanity of all people involved must be considered in the equation.”
The mayor to his credit seems to be very aware about the protest situation, and outside agitators frequently referred incorrectly as “anarchists”. The ANTIFA and similar groups are not ideological “anarchists” but instead communists by their own admission. Anarchists favor next to no government; the left-wing protestors are not aligned with the far right “anarchy movement” but instead a modern form of communism.
The confusion is understandable, however. “They were seeking to do violence. And someone seeking to do violence I do not have any sympathy for,” de Blasio told the press.
