'It felt dangerous’: Destructive Brooklyn protest, with trash fires and broken windows, leaves local businesses shaken
A Brooklyn restaurant manager, hours after a violent borough protest marked by shattered glass, trash fires and 39 damaged businesses, suggested the demonstrators give peace a chance.
Mahmoud Alsafarini, 25, arrived at the Hadramout Restaurant for his Wednesday morning shift just a few doors down from the broken windows at an Urban Outfitters outlet. Several black-clad demonstrators also smashed windows at a Starbucks and a Bank of America branch on Court St., along with the windshield of a green taxi, in a demonstration over the Philadelphia police shooting of a knife-wielding Black man.
“These businesses don’t belong to them,” said Alsafarini in the aftermath of the wild Tuesday night march. “Say what you need to say without violence. I was worried initially because the employees were still here. They didn’t have anything to protect themselves.”
The NYPD reported 34 arrests as five officers were hospitalized with minor injuries during the protest, with three suspects nabbed in Manhattan and the rest in Brooklyn. The 200 marchers also damaged nine police vehicles and spray-painted a police van, several bus shelters, a Chase Bank and a statue of Christopher Columbus outside Brooklyn Supreme Court.
A local autism center was targeted as well for graffiti, cops said. And windows were smashed at a Nordstrom store.
A second event was occurring at the same time across the Brooklyn Bridge in Lower Manhattan, where protester Maria Valenzuela, 26, of Brooklyn, was charged with assault and resisting arrest. Cops charge that she jumped a police officer trying to arrest a graffiti-spraying demonstrator outside the Municipal Building.
Two other Brooklynites were also busted: One was the Manhattan graffiti sprayer, and the second suspect was busted with spray paint allegedly used to vandalize police vehicles in his home borough, authorities said.
Brooklyn resident Michelle Wagner, 52, said the feeling in the air during the Tuesday night march was different from the many local protests of recent months, dating back to the May 25 death of George Floyd beneath the knee of a Minneapolis police officer.
“This was the first time it felt dangerous in the neighborhood,” said Wagner, whose 12-year-old daughter began crying as they watched from the window of their Brooklyn Heights apartment. “More protests need to happen, but not this way. A lot of people in the Black Lives Matter movement are very upset today.”
Mayor de Blasio blasted the violent protest that included a dark-colored sedan plowing through a line of NYPD officers on bicycles, ignoring an officer who smashed his baton against one of the windows.
“No violence is acceptable,” the mayor said. “Of course those offenses should be prosecuted, and I absolutely want to see those prosecutions ... The bottom line is anyone who assaults an officer, that’s absolutely unacceptable. There must be consequences.”
Protester Mike Blaster, 45, responded that the group of Black activists planned to stay on the streets until the mayor “tells his goons” in the police department to back off.
“As my brother Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘Rioting and looting is the voice of the unheard,’” said Blaster. “We are at a point where we are tired of talking. We are demanding our freedom.”
Blaster also said he was no longer a member of Black Lives Matter, and that the Tuesday night protest was the work of a “collective” of activists.
An NYPD source described the protest as small but aggressive, with the marchers packed tightly in just one or two blocks. The majority of the arrests involved city residents, with two others from the northern suburbs arrested as well, and the cops echoed the mayor in denouncing the crowd’s destructiveness.
“The NYPD supports the right to peaceful protest,” said a police official. “It condemns the violence and destruction of property that marked this event.”
Five officers were injured when the blue 2001 Mercury Grand Marquis with New York plates disregarded orders to stop and drove into the cops before taking off, authorities said. The driver in the videotaped incident remains at large.
A security guard stood watch early Wednesday near an overturned trash can at the vandalized Bank of America branch. Police tape kept passersby from getting too close, though dozens stopped to snap photos of the scene.
The scene was similar at the Urban Outfitters, where two workers were putting up wood over the shattered windows on a rainy morning after the protest.
“Burn the precinct to the ground!” the marchers chanted hours earlier. “Every city, every town!”
Abraham Karkanni, owner of the Malko Brothers Co. wholesale grocery store, arrived Wednesday at his Brooklyn Heights business to see the broken glass a few doors down.
“I don’t know what’s happening,” the 86-year-old Syrian immigrant said. “I’ve been here 30 years. Very safe area over here.”
With Michael Gartland and Noah Goldberg
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