Joel Rivera has been leading marches for Black trans liberation in New York City every Thursday for 21 consecutive weeks since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Rivera, who recently came out as trans, wore a dazzling baby blue ball gown for this week’s event. “When I see pictures of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, especially on the night of the Stonewall riot, they were dressed amazingly.”
Normally, the nights end peacefully, Rivera said. “Every single Thursday, even the Thursday when we had 15 people show up, was always a celebration,” she noted.
But this Thursday night, the event ended with arrests, including Rivera’s. As demonstrators marched through the streets of Lower Manhattan, they were followed by hundreds of heavily armored NYPD officers on bicycles, at times outnumbering the demonstrators. During one confrontation, an officer shoved New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams.
“I was tackled by, I don’t know how many officers. I had a bike on top of me...I was just in pain,” said Rivera, who is from the Bronx. “You’d think I killed somebody.”
Video of Rivera’s arrest on Broadway, taken by Instagram user @jastafanous, shows Rivera shouting at officers through a bullhorn, asking why they had arrested someone. An officer shoves away someone’s hand holding a phone, and someone else appears to slap the officer on the helmet. The officer then plunges into the crowd, and the scene turns violent and chaotic.
Rivera said she lost her heels in the scuffle and was barefoot for several hours. At One Police Plaza, she was offered manila envelopes to put on her feet, which she declined. Later, in the holding cell with other demonstrators, she realized her leg was bleeding, staining her ballgown.
She asked officers guarding the cell for a Band-Aid, which they denied her.
“Eleven billion dollars and I can’t get a Band-Aid,” she said, referring to the total number of city resources flowing to the NYPD.
Rivera said she was released at around 2 a.m. with a ticket for having a bullhorn.
“It’s so unfortunate that 50-plus years since the Stonewall Riots...It is very ironic how it’s the same situation, the same disease that’s still going on,” she said. “It is scary to have to do this, but it is very necessary. We go home and we cry, we feel so [many] emotions.”
Thursday night's protest.
According to NYPD spokesperson Detective Sophia Mason, 19 people were arrested on Thursday night, most of them charged with disorderly conduct or obstructing governmental administration.
In his weekly Ask The Mayor segment on Friday morning, WNYC’s Brian Lehrer asked Mayor Bill de Blasio if he acknowledged the instances of police violence captured on video on Thursday, and during the post-election protests on Wednesday, and if he understood that they were wrong.
"No, I don’t have information that tells me that,” de Blasio said, insisting that in every case, the NYPD is acting on information that shows that a protester has done something wrong.
Yet at the same time, the mayor said that kettling—the tactic frequently employed by the NYPD to trap large groups of people and arrest them—was wrong.
“Kettling is not an acceptable practice. It’s not a part of the NYPD tactics in the patrol guide, it’s not something I want to see,” the mayor said.
Asked by a caller why these small protests require hundreds, if not thousands of NYPD officers, helicopters, and untold amounts of taxpayer resources, de Blasio explained that “a new element came into the equation this year, all over the country.”
“A small group of people who aim to do violence, who bring tools of violence and it’s caused a different approach to be necessary,” the mayor said, without providing any evidence.
“If people are feeling there’s a kind of militarism going on, that’s not acceptable. That’s not what we want. If there’s too much presence, that’s not what we want,” the mayor added. “The police have to do a better job, I have to do a better job.”
NYPD officers wait outside Union Square, watching a small group of protesters.
On Wednesday night, the NYPD released photos of firecrackers, knives, and a stun gun they said they confiscated from some protesters, and on Thursday night, they arrested a man for allegedly strangling an NYPD officer with a chain. Levon Wheeler, 30, was charged with two counts of assault, resisting arrest, and criminal obstruction of breathing, among other charges.
The NYPD could not say whether Wheeler was marching with the protesters, or whether any other protesters were charged with assaulting an officer. The officer assaulted with the chain did not suffer any injuries, according to a City Hall source.
While many of the arrests happened during the march, some came towards the end of the night in Union Square, after many of the protesters had gone home. Hundreds of NYPD officers charged a handful of people who were standing in a pedestrian zone on the 14th Street busway.
The NYPD, using their bicycles, then continued to shove protesters further and further into Union Square, knocking some people into the steps leading into the park, and making a handful of arrests.
Minutes later, the NYPD returned to their spot across 14th Street, as if nothing had happened.
An NYPD spokesperson at the scene, Sergeant Carlos Nieves, said that the police charged into the park because “you have protesters who were throwing water bottles at the officers, it was then declared an unlawful assembly, that’s why they were forced to move back.”
Asked why the department sent hundreds of officers across the street in the first place, Nieves said, “They were asked to step onto the sidewalk.”
Soleil Sabalja, a protester who was standing in Union Square after the march, called the amount of NYPD resources allocated to the demonstrations “silly.”
Sabalja, 33, said she teaches special needs students in a high school on the Lower East Side.
“As a teacher, I look at the money being spent on this and I look at the money I get in my classroom and the fact that budgets in my classroom have been cut to directly impact the people that we’re fighting for,” she said.
“I did a clean-up in my neighborhood with my students the other day and we didn’t have the money to buy the supplies. I had to ask somebody if I could borrow their brooms and shovels and get donations for garbage bags, because the city doesn’t have money for our kids and to clean our streets. But we’re overspending on these officers that don’t need to be here right now.”
Sabalja said, “We’re doing absolutely nothing wrong besides using our First Amendment right.”
