Nate Monroe: The Dollar General killings didn't happen in a vacuum. Two protests show why
The recent shooting at a Jacksonville Dollar General, in which a racist gunman killed three Black residents and himself, did not happen in a vacuum. Two protests and the way local police approached them reveal a fraught relationship between law enforcement and different communities in Jacksonville that pre-date this past Saturday's violence. That dissonance contributed to an environment in which some minority groups no longer felt safe within their own city long before Saturday's killer walked into the store.
I. The protesters
The Duval County Courthouse is an imperious structure at the western end of downtown Jacksonville, and at the right time of day its long windows reflect the sun's light onto an expansive, almost shadeless lawn, where even the very landscaping evokes a kind of penal orderliness. By 2 p.m. on May 31, 2020, the sun had pierced the morning cloud canopy and would have radiated off those large windows onto the protesters far below. It was the steamiest day of what had been a hot-blooded week marked by national outrage over the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.
For the second day in a row, protesters had gathered in front of the county courthouse while a phalanx of more than 50 Jacksonville Sheriff's Office officers and Florida state troopers, many in riot gear, formed what a federal lawsuit later called a "skirmish line" around the protesters. The prior day's protest, although mostly peaceful, had seen a few clashes between some protesters and police later in the day, including an altercation in which a JSO officer was cut in the neck. But the gathering on May 31, a Sunday, was unmistakably peaceful and relatively small; the full group of protesters didn't fill up the sidewalk leading up to the courthouse.
JSO, however, was apprehensive, and at some point that afternoon, the officers had seen enough. For reasons that have never been made clear, officers decided the protesters needed to "disperse the area," even though video footage from numerous witnesses at the time, both referenced in federal litigation and reviewed by a Times-Union reporter, showed the crowd standing along the courthouse sidewalk and not blocking traffic — which, on a Sunday in downtown, would have been almost non-existent anyway.
That dispersal order led to chaos.
JSO officers, according to a lawsuit later filed by some of the people arrested that day, blocked all three streets surrounding the courthouse, presenting a dilemma for the protesters attempting to comply with the dispersal order: walk toward police or walk back toward the courthouse. Either option presented peril. One protester, Elizabeth Mulroney, asked an officer for directions to help her find her car, prompting the officer to call for his colleagues to arrest her — in doing so, the officers twisted her arm so roughly she had to be taken to the hospital before later getting booked in the jail.
Another woman, Delaine Smith, a pastor, was attempting to help the police disperse the crowd when an officer arrested her.
The police repeated this pattern of baseless arrests dozens of times throughout the afternoon — 54 times total. In five arrest reports, according to the lawsuit, the police noted they made arrests even though the protesters were walking away, meaning it was self-evident they were attempting to disperse. Elsewhere in downtown, video footage captured JSO officers indiscriminately deploying pepper spray, beating protesters and using tactics like chokeholds. Consistently, the videos showed it was the police, and not protesters, who had disrupted a sense of calm, and there was no evidence on display, or ever presented, that the protesters that day posed any threat to public safety.
That these arrests were, at best, faulty is nearly beyond dispute: The State Attorney's Office ultimately dropped charges against 48 of the 54 people who had been arrested that day, and JSO reached a settlement in the federal lawsuit, which included submitting itself to a court-enforced list of rules on how it could police protests and make arrests going forward. Those were remarkable developments in a city in which defense attorneys rarely see the police or prosecutors back down from even flimsy cases. The settlement also included small payments to the plaintiffs who filed suit.
But that relief didn't come until later.
That day, JSO waited to process the dozens of people it had arrested until after an evening curfew had gone into effect, meaning no one would be able to post bond and thus would be forced to spend the night in jail. For many, their problems only worsened when they finally were able to see a judge.
Judge Michael Bateh, for reasons that were unclear, increased the bonds for the arrested protesters and sought jail time for most of them without prosecutors even asking him to do so.
JSO has never explicitly acknowledged wrongdoing that day, much less apologized for the behavior of its officers, all of which seemed aimed at maximizing the punishment suffered by people who were protesting the death of George Floyd and thus were also protesting police brutality — perhaps an implied slight of JSO itself.
In fact, then-Sheriff Mike Williams continued defending his officers' conduct even after the cases fell apart, though he never offered a compelling, detailed explanation. "The arrests made were not illegal. We took the necessary steps to keep the city safe," he told the Times-Union the following month.
II. The Nazis
Oct. 28, 2022, was a very different kind of day with a very different kind of protester — and it saw a very different kind of reaction from JSO.
It was the Friday before the Florida-Georgia game, which is supposed to be one of the city's most high-profile weekends in the national spotlight. Instead, as events transpired between Friday and Saturday night, it became only the beginning of what turned out to be a national embarrassment.
Police were called to the I-10 overpass on Chaffee Road that Friday evening as a group of eight or nine protesters, who identified themselves as members of an organization called National Socialist Florida — which the Anti-Defamation League has called a neo-Nazi group — displayed grossly antisemitic banners that said things like "End Jewish supremacy in America" and "Honk if you know it's the Jews." The police also noticed someone operating a drone that was hovering above the group, an apparent violation of Federal Aviation Administration rules, a police report later noted.
The man who identified himself as the leader of the group, 36-year-old Josh Nunes, was "polite and cooperative," the responding JSO officer wrote in his report of the interaction. Nunes insisted he had organized a peaceful protest and that "they would leave if requested to do so by the police," a request there is no indication the JSO officer on scene made.
The man operating the drone in apparent violation of FAA rules turned out to be a 39-year-old man from California named Jon Minadeo, who introduced himself, according to the police report, by noting he was "the most famous anti-Semite in America on the Internet" and had once been "arrested as an adult in Poland at Auschwitz (the WWII Nazi death camp located in southern Poland)."
Minadeo was, a JSO officer observed, "polite but evasive." He did not have a copy of his driver's license with him and said he was staying at an AirBnB whose address he could not recall. The police report said Minadeo walked to his rental car, a Tesla rented from Hertz, to grab his phone so a friend could send him a picture of his driver's license, presumably meaning he'd been driving the rental car without it — something the officer made no mention of in his report.
At some point, though not at the officer's request, the rest of the group left the overpass and walked over to a Winn-Dixie parking lot where their cars were parked.
And that was that.
" ... I thanked the group for their cooperation and apologized for taking up so much time of Mr. Nunes and Mr. Minadeo," the officer wrote.
III. More Nazis
Friday, it turned out, was simply the opening salvo of a larger and clearly coordinated effort to terrorize the city's Jewish community. The next night, during the Florida-Georgia game, another group of Nazis projected antisemitic messages onto TIAA Bank Field's videoboard and on the side of the CSX building in downtown; other hate messages were hung across the Arlington Expressway during the weekend.
Condemnations from the city's elected officials poured in, albeit somewhat slowly and in pro forma language. JSO, however, was notably silent until about noon the following Monday, when, in clinical terms, the department simply concluded the hate messages "do not include any type of threat and are protected by the First Amendment."
Then-interim Sheriff Pat Ivey had no words of outrage and made no public gestures to ease the fears that were being loudly expressed by Jacksonville's Jewish community. And later, when reporters noticed the officer had thanked and apologized to the Nazis hanging out on the overpass, JSO displayed shocking tone-deafness. "The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office has a legal duty to protect the rights of both those who utilize their Constitutional Right to peacefully gather/protest as well as every other citizen within our County," a spokesperson told First Coast News.
" ... officers are expected to be respectful of another whether they agree with the individual or not. From the report, it appears the officer did just that; remained professional while performing his duties and responsibilities."
There was no recognition by the agency that displaying an image like a swastika or calling for the end of "Jewish supremacy" are, by their very nature, threats, even if they don't amount to arrestable offenses.
When addressing Jacksonville's high annual murder rate, JSO officials have previously reassured the public they know who is committing the vast majority of the violence, keep tabs on them and stage "call-ins" among gang members, police and community groups in efforts to head off further violence. In the past, JSO has also used specialized software to monitor the social media pages of people protesting local law enforcement — interactions during which, notably, even state prosecutors have found arrests to have violated the protesters' First Amendment rights. But JSO gave no indication last fall it was deploying those tools, strategies or zero-tolerance approach to track the neo-Nazi groups that had descended on the city and terrorized Jacksonville's Jewish community. And to this day, there has been no indication JSO has ever re-assessed its handling of the interaction with the Nazi protesters.
The thrust of City Hall's response was to pass an ordinance banning light projections on buildings without permission, although even that devolved into a food fight over which City Council member deserved credit for coming up with the idea and a more substantive debate about a still-standing Confederate monument in Springfield Park.
Not every Florida law-enforcement leader has taken such a hands-off approach with Nazi demonstrators: When Nazi goons showed up in Volusia County, Sheriff Mike Chitwood publicly called them "scumbags." When the scumbags demanded he pay them $100,000 in gold and apologize for the offense, he offered them pacifiers. When the scumbags threatened to kill him, he had them arrested.
IV. Normalizing hate
Considered on its own — less than a week after a racist gunman carrying an AR-15 style rifle with swastikas on it walked into a Dollar General in Jacksonville's New Town neighborhood and killed three Black people — the October 2022 episode serves as a chilling prelude.
Viewed in its larger context — as a story about JSO's reflexive approach to different groups of people — it offers both outrage and a reason to more deeply consider the city's culpability in fostering an environment in which many Black residents feel disrespected and unsafe. Nazism, the same kind that has brought fear to local Jewish and Black communities, has festered in this city. As often happens, the outrage from the fall antisemitic displays came and went. Police security at some synagogues is now, crushingly, a fact of life apparently now considered routine. "Yesterday, I took my son to the temple for Sunday school orientation. As usual, there was a JSO officer outside to let us in — she was wearing a bulletproof vest," Sunny Gettinger, a former City Council candidate and well-known member of Jacksonville's Jewish community, tweeted after Saturday's killings. "I'm grateful, but my place of worship is locked and guarded for our safety."
"Don't tell me we haven't normalized hate."
The George Floyd protesters were, to police, suspect by their very nature and then brutally discarded. Even a woman, a pastor, who was trying to help the police disperse the crowd did not escape this wrath. The Nazis were "polite" and to be thanked, in JSO's telling, even as the police report highlighted pressure points — evasive behavior, a missing ID, unlawfully flying a drone — that in a different context it's easy to imagine an officer aggressively running with. A reckoning over this kind of disparity has never happened, in large part because JSO itself has never acknowledged fault.
Perhaps, one might argue, JSO was right to regard the George Floyd protesters with some apprehension given the handful of incidents the prior day, even if the police might have overplayed their hand in the end. Fine — grant that questionable premise for a moment. And yet: Is there nothing in our history that would suggest a gang of Nazis ought to be approached with even more pronounced suspicion?
"With the George Floyd protests, any kind of message that is critical of police is met with a very iron-fisted response, (even as) it's a well-founded discussion about policing in America," said Matt Kachergus, a well-known Jacksonville defense attorney who represented the George Floyd protesters who settled the federal lawsuit with the Sheriff's Office.
"But something that's unquestionably reprehensible and disgusting like neo-Nazis is treated with kid gloves."
This is the sort of introspection needed from Jacksonville's public institutions, especially JSO, in the wake of the Dollar General killings. Set aside for a moment the troubled national and state contexts in which tragedies like Saturday's are taking place: Jacksonville itself has work to do. The bungling of the George Floyd arrests is hardly the extent of the troubling interactions between JSO and Black residents in recent years. One episode that came up in my recent conversations was the 2020 story of Brittany Chrishawn Williams, who called 911 for help after an officer inexplicably parked in her driveway and refused to leave until he was finished checking emails and wrapping up a call. The JSO officer in her driveway told his colleague who responded to the 911 callout that Williams had assaulted him by throwing a spoon covered in an "unknown green substance" at him. The interaction, which was partially captured on video, ended with Williams arrested and her teeth broken. Unlike the George Floyd protesters, state prosecutors took this one to the wall. Yet a jury acquitted Williams of the felony charge of assaulting the officer with violence; it convicted her only on a misdemeanor of resisting without violence.
The day of the shooting at Dollar General, Sheriff T.K. Waters spoke forcefully and painfully about what had transpired, garnering some well-earned plaudits for meeting the moment and contrasting sharply with the awkward, pro forma way Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Waters' political ally, denounced the racist and violent act. "Portions of these manifestos detailed the shooter's disgusting ideology of hate. Plainly put, this shooting was racially motivated and he hated Black people. He wanted to kill [the N-word] and that is the one and only time I will use that word," said Waters, who is Black.
Waters has also, however, made some curious statements in the hours and days after the shooting. In one news conference, he deployed a standard right-wing talking point about guns: that it's not their wide — and, really, ludicrous — availability to blame but the people who use them. "The story's always about the guns," he lamented. "It's the people (who are) bad." Waters suggested police simply have to stop people with bad intentions before they act, even when nothing prevents them from legally purchasing guns — an obviously impossible task. It's as if gun laws can't be questioned or altered, as if they are some fundamental aspect of nature or a religious tenet. That is truly a despairing and almost fatalistic view of the world: Some of us are simply going to die because bad people can and will acquire weapons. Leaders in other cities, including police chiefs, often loudly advocate for greater gun control measures. Not in Jacksonville.
Waters has confidently asserted that the shooting does not represent a larger problem within the community. "This is not Jacksonville," he said. The Dollar General shooting was, in this telling, a kind of one-off tragedy, and a lesson he told reporters he took away from it all was how important it was for residents to notify police when they see something amiss — an indication Waters has not at all considered the experiences of someone like Williams, whose call to police did not, to put it mildly, go as intended.
"I don't think there's a racial divide in our city," Waters said in a news conference the day after the shooting.
Perhaps tellingly, Waters endorsed Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan's opponent in the spring mayoral elections. That candidate, Daniel Davis, ran an attack ad attempting to associate Deegan with the relatively minor dustups between the George Floyd protesters and police on the first Saturday of demonstrations. Among several reasons the ad was misleading? It entirely omitted the larger story of the weekend: the widespread brutality by JSO, the mass dropping of charges against the protesters and the settlement.
Some of Waters' recent comments about the Dollar General killings have not gone unnoticed by other Black residents.
"It's wrong because that is not many of my constituents' and even my lived experience as an organizer, as a Black woman," said state Rep. Angie Nixon of Waters' assertion the killings did not represent what Jacksonville is about. "I have witnessed, firsthand, how members of my community are treated as it relates to law enforcement, as it relates to how our communities look, how we're resourced, or under-resourced, really," said Nixon, whose district includes the neighborhood where the killings took place.
"Clearly we have some race relations issues that need to be worked on."
Nate Monroe is a metro columnist whose work regularly appears every Thursday and Sunday. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Nate Monroe: How two protests reveal Jacksonville's racial divide
