This is an outrage. Trump’s Brownshirts harass the Biden campaign, engage in voter intimidation, block major thoroughfares—without penalty.
GRAHAM, N.C. — The voters came in black sweatshirts emblazoned with the mantra of the late Georgia congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis, who celebrated “good trouble.”
Fists and iPhones raised, they chanted “Black lives matter” and promised “power to the people,” as they made their way from a Black church to the base of a monument to a Confederate soldier. In its shadow, they paused for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, honoring George Floyd, the Black man killed by a Minneapolis police officer who knelt on his neck for what was later determined to be 7 minutes and 46 seconds.
The participants in Saturday’s “I Am Change” march had intended to conclude at an early-voting site to emphasize turnout in the final days of the presidential campaign.
Those plans were thrown into disarray when law-enforcement officers in riot gear and gas masks insisted demonstrators move off the street and clear county property, despite a permit authorizing their presence.
As tensions escalated, officers deployed pepper spray and began making arrests. Among those caught in clouds of the irritant were children as young as 3 years old, as well as elderly residents and a disabled woman, said participants in the march.
The episode, which was live-streamed on Facebook by the march’s organizer, the Rev. Greg Drumwright of nearby Greensboro, unfolded three days before an election that feels to many Americans like the edge of an abyss. It capped nearly a half-year of protests after the killing of Floyd. And it reflected efforts to channel indignation on the street into power at the ballot box in North Carolina, a critical battleground state, and other places deciding the country’s direction. “
The world wants to know what’s going on in Alamance County,” Drumwright said, invoking the rallying cry of anti-Vietnam War activists. His outrage was echoed by state and national leaders, including North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D), who called the incident “unacceptable.”
The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law described the police response as a form of voter suppression. In a statement, the Graham Police Department said its officers had made eight arrests, arguing that force had been justified by the refusal of demonstrators to disperse after the gathering had “reached a level of conduct that led to the rally being deemed unsafe and unlawful by unified command.”
The department also defended the deployment of what it called a “pepper-based vapor,” saying its officers did not “directly spray any participant in the march” — an account at odds with the statements of numerous participants.
The Alamance County Sheriff’s Office issued a one-line tweet, saying, “Unfortunately the rally in Graham ended due to concerns for the safety of all.” The office has previously faced scrutiny for what the Justice Department in 2012 called “discriminatory policing,” leading to a civil rights lawsuit against Terry S. Johnson, the county sheriff.
After a Republican-appointed federal judge dismissed the suit, federal prosecutors agreed to drop the case in exchange for revisions. Since then, Johnson has twice won reelection, both times running unopposed.
In August, a U.S. district judge in the Middle District of North Carolina blocked county officials, including Johnson, from prohibiting protests in certain areas around the county courthouse in response to a lawsuit brought by the Lawyers’ Committee and the state branch of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
They are not brownshirts, they are blue shirts–police officers who are engaging in a campaign of reactionary violence. The truck that was filmed ramming a car in Austin had a “blue lives matter” flag attached its bag. This is what happens when we populate our police forces with uneducated, unprofessional thugs. How many will they kill and maim in the next few days?
I will keep calling them Brownshirts because of the historical connection to the originals.
I get it. There is definitely a direct lineage. It is odd how we fear the police here, something I never once felt in any of my time living or traveling in Europe (except behind the Iron Curtain).
“The department also defended the deployment of what it called a “pepper-based vapor,” saying its officers did not “directly spray any participant in the march” —
A “pepper-based vapor”?
Is that like a “manure-based rationale”?
Hard to believe this stuff is still happening.
In some ways, nothing has changed in over half a century in the US.
I think I am correct when I recount a family tale. Just north of Graham, there lived a beautiful African-American lady named Clyde Turrentine. Worried that her family graveyard was about to fall to a new road, she walked 15 miles into Graham back in the 1950s to try to get something done about it. Her action not only saved the graveyard, but found the two original Turrentine brothers’ resting place. This united the Balck and White Turrentines forever. She is memorialized with the statement “She brought people together.”
We are better than what is happening to our country right now. There are our Clyde Turrentines out there. Let us listen to them. Let us come together rather than be pushed apart by the baser voices in our country.
Look, I don’t want to wear out this rhetorical procedure, but I find I must once again use a character from “The Wire”: Clark Johnson plays Gus Haynes, an editor at The Baltimore Sun. When he encounters two colleagues watching (from the distance of a comfortably appointed conference room at the Sun building) a building burn in one of Baltimore’s poor neighborhoods, he asks them if they called the fire department. When they say they have not, he makes for a phone while saying to them:
“This? This is some shameful s**t right here.”
Sorry again Diane for the epithet, even in elided form. And to the police officers who assaulted these protesters, get the message, will you?
I wish I could. What this displays is the disparity in treatment of blacks and whites. If the protestors were white, the police would have protected them instead of teargassing them.
I lived in Harlem for seven years during stop-and-frisk–I saw a lot of young black men harassed by the NYPD, and on a couple of occasions (I can still, in my minds eye, see this event at the corner of 133rd Street and St. Nicholas Avenue while I was walking my dog in St. Nicholas Park) the cops beat up on guys whose only crime was walking while Black. Do you think they ever stopped me–even when I had my dog off the leash in the park?
Even as a kid, I had some inkling of what white privilege looked like. But living in New York, in a neighborhood like Harlem, or Bronxdale, where I later lived? You cannot miss it even if you try to.
Mark, I see it all the time in the community in which I live. For some reason, the police here in Ohio make traffic stops in the middle of the road, not allowing people to pull off the side (if you do, you get quite a stern lecture). I causes traffic backups. I’ve noticed that easily, in 95% of the cases of cars that are pulled over, they have black drivers and passengers. I’ve been behind them twice when they pulled over a car and there was not evidence of speeding or reckless driving.
If police are so rattled by a crowd of peaceful black protesters, they are in the wrong line of work. If I allowed the color of my students to impair my ability to do my job, I never would have had successful teaching career where I was a white teacher that taught mostly black and brown students. The police need more training in less violent tactics and how to diffuse tension and anger. Police departments should actively recruit police officers that look like the communities they serve, and they should seek out people that speak more than one language and understand more than one culture. We need more protecting and serving and less inappropriate controlling and subduing. We must refer the mentally ill to appropriate services and work to reduce the number of times lethal force is used in policing.
The people in many police departments today (particularly in large cities) are treated more like military troops than as neighborhood cops.
They even get military vehicles , armaments and other hardware from the Federal government to carry out their “directive”.
When police use “aerosolized pepper vapor” and tear gas on peaceful demonstrators, you know they are acting as troops.
There are undoubtedly a large number of police officers who would much prefer to serve the role of neighborhood cop than military troop, but are not really given the choice.
We had a retired police officer teaching in my school. He had gone to school to become a legitimate teacher. He had served as a police officer successfully in the South Bronx for twenty years. He said the people there were fantastic, and he never had to fire his weapon there. He was an enlightened police officer and teacher who did well in both careers.
Yes and they have the model offered up by Bill Barr and Donald Trump at the infamous Lafayette Square attacks on peaceful demonstrators cleared so Trump could appear in a photo op holding a Bible.
People made losers invariably figure out how to become winners, if in their eyes only, even if that means becoming a blue-shirted “kill and maim” winner.
Who really believes that a march/rally that included elderly and young children was “getting out of hand”?
Republicans.
Does anyone want to take a “shot-in-the-dark” at who Terry S. Johnson will vote for?