I
haven’t been much able to participate in protests over the police killing of
George Floyd because of my second shift job, and also, because of the curfew
imposed by the City of Indianapolis. But
I was finally able to participate in one on Sunday, June 7, a nonviolent
symbolic action at the City-County Building at noon, where we 25-30 participants,
all observing social distancing, knelt for nine minutes of silence, the amount
of time George Floyd’s neck was held under the knee of the Minneapolis cop,
causing him to asphyxiate and die. My
friend and fellow trade unionist John Jett (he of IATSE, the stagehands’ union;
I’m in the UFCW) invited me, and I was glad to join. And, of course, glad I did. The organizer of the event, a black man,
spoke briefly afterwards, and pointedly noted that Floyd’s killing wasn’t just
a racial thing, it was a class thing, because being mistreated by the police happened
also to poor whites considered criminals. (I've since found out he's Chris Shelton of the Indiana AFL-CIO, and now a Facebook Friend of mine.)
When he finished, I spoke to this point briefly, “Being treated
professionally and respectfully by the police is not a ‘privilege,’ it’s a right!”
and received applause for it from the multiracial crowd.
As I
had walked along Delaware St. to the City-County Building from my car and back,
I noticed the boarded-up windows that had been shattered by earlier protests,
and felt the poetic justice involved in just whom got trashed. For one, the windows and doors of the bail
bond parasites had been trashed, as had been the front of the Wheeler “Rescue” Mission,
where homeless, desperate men could “get” a cheap meal and a bed for one night
only, after standing in line for hours, by being “offered salvation” through
mandatory attendance at a fundamentalist Protestant fire-and-brimstone
religious service and sermon. Two most
deserving targets, in my opinion!
In
sharp contrast to many other cities and states, the Indianapolis police, the Indianapolis
Democratic Mayor Joe Hogsett’s office, and the office of Indiana Republican
Governor Eric Holcomb have been quite cool toward the unfolding protests. While I hadn’t been able to attend other
protests, I did receive information on them from friends and media. At one such, when the police asked the crowd
to disperse because of curfew, and the crowd protested it wanted to march on
the Governor’s mansion, a Deputy Mayor addressed the crowd, and the
demonstrators and police hugged afterward and marched off to the Governor’s
house. Only one ugly police incident here
on the part of the police has been documented:
A May 31, 2020 incident in downtown Indianapolis where two women were
hit on the legs by police batons, evidently for walking while curfew was
called. This was reported by the Washington
Post, the incident filmed by a cameraman with local WISH TV, and can be
seen here: (https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/05/indianapolis-police-arrest/) The officers involved were removed from beat
duty, and both Mayor Hogsett and the Chief of Police said the matter would be
investigated. Donald Trump has decidedly
not attacked Indianapolis or Indiana for being allegedly “soft of protestors,”
so we’ve been spared that; nor have the police here responded badly, aside from
the above incident, as far as I can tell. (I've since learned that lazy members of the Indianapolis police dispersed protestors at curfew time by unnecessarily tear-gassing them, which is now, thankfully, the cause of a lawsuit filed by the Indiana ACLU and others.)
Perhaps it’s because Indiana is a small state, with only about half the
population of neighboring Ohio, Illinois and Michigan, and perhaps it’s also
because Indianapolis is not considered a “major city” on par with Minneapolis,
Seattle, and elsewhere that have drawn Trump’s wrath, but it is indeed a
blessing when such does occur. So, kudos
to the police and the pols for having uncommon good sense in this time of
travail, concern and fear. And let us
all remember our Constitutionally guaranteed right to “peaceably assemble,”
which can be taken from us only if we don’t use it.
