After a large pro-Palestine motion yielded dozens of arrests on the Brooklyn Museum final Friday, Could 31, activists are decrying what they are saying was a disproportionate police response on the demonstration.
Eyewitnesses together with each protesters and Hyperallergic reporters famous the numerous presence of riot police and members of the New York Police Division’s (NYPD) Strategic Response Group onsite and documented aggressive ways and extreme pressure.
In response to Hyperallergic’s request for remark, a spokesperson for the Brooklyn Museum acknowledged that “the police brutality that came about right here on Friday is devastating” and famous that the museum didn’t name the police, however that NYPD doesn’t want its authorization to enter as a result of its constructing is metropolis property on city-owned land.
The spokesperson added that the museum is not going to press fees towards those that have been arrested and that it has “reached out to the group affairs management at NYPD to debate their actions on Friday and the way we will concentrate on de-escalation going ahead.”
Cultural Entrance, the autonomous group behind Friday’s motion, launched a assertion final week lambasting the NYPD response as “an unprecedented present of pressure and violence.”
The group additionally alleged that the museum’s personal safety “behaved like deputized police, and several other made racist feedback and gestures,” offering Hyperallergic with video proof of personnel telling protesters to “go to fucking Gaza” and calling them “Hamas.”
Hyperallergic documented a museum safety workforce member violently pushing a protester out of the constructing. When introduced with this footage, the Brooklyn Museum spokesperson stated that the safety employees had been “verbally and bodily harassed” by protesters and “responded as finest they may to the overwhelming crowds and heightened tensions.”
In line with NYPD’s Workplace of the Deputy Commissioner, Public Info (DCPI), 29 individuals have been arrested on the motion, although the Related Press reported 34 arrests. Although the Brooklyn Museum has been accused of enabling extreme pressure to take away activists up to now, the size of police pressure deployed on Could 31 far surpassed that of different pro-Palestine museum actions throughout New York Metropolis within the final eight months coated by Hyperallergic. Notably, banner unfurlings, sit-ins, and different such interventions managed to proceed on the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, and the Whitney Museum of American Artwork with none arrests regardless of heavy police presence.
The motion got here to a head at 4:30pm on Friday, when over 100 demonstrators occupied the museum foyer with banners, flags, and chants urging the museum to divest from associates tied to Zionist entities benefiting from the siege on Gaza. Led by the group Inside Our Lifetime (WOL), a whole lot extra protesters marched from the Barclays Middle and congregated on the Brooklyn Museum plaza. As a gaggle of demonstrators unfurled an enormous banner from the rooftop that learn “Free Palestine/Divest from Genocide” over the museum façade, others have been chased off the constructing’s glass cover by police armed in riot gear.
Upon the museum’s early closure at 5:15pm, riot police entered the constructing and aggressively arrested a minimum of 9 individuals, together with WOL co-founder and chair Nerdeen Kiswani, who was tackled and had her hijab eliminated within the course of, as additionally documented by Democracy Now. Police started pushing and shoving each protesters and members of the press, together with Hyperallergic, towards and finally by the foyer’s again exit.
An artist and organizer residing in Brooklyn who declined to be named informed Hyperallergic that the museum “turned a army host” that night, including that she had “by no means witnessed an establishment unleash such violence on its group.”
“Cops swarming the within, exterior, on the roof, and behind the museum whereas assaulting our comrades, tearing off one girl’s hijab, and punching individuals,” she stated. “They have been particularly concentrating on Brown and Muslim protesters, even those that have been dispersing and leaving the museum as instructed. We have been collectively brutalized by the identical establishment that prides itself on being a ‘Folks’s Museum’ and claims to uplift our work.”
MJ, a Brooklyn-based organizer who was additionally indoors, informed Hyperallergic that as individuals have been following orders to disperse, “it really turned a madhouse as we have been cornered by police, and apparently, museum safety guards.”
A number of individuals tagged Deborah Kass’s yellow “OY/YO” (2015) sculpture and the show textual content for Nico Williams’s museum stoop set up that had simply been unveiled that day. The museum famous in an e mail to Hyperallergic that repainting Kass’s sculpture will value an estimated $48,000 to $140,000 and will take as much as two months, however no different works sustained lasting damages.
In an e mail to Hyperallergic, a WOL spokesperson identified that “the museum declared itself a “secure haven” for Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020,” permitting them to recharge their telephones, replenish their water, and use the Wi-Fi and restrooms all whereas sustaining social distancing protocols.
“As an alternative of doing the identical for Palestine now, [the museum] determined to double down on supporting genocide by mobilizing the identical racist police forces they spoke out towards to brutalize and arrest group members,” the WOL consultant concluded.
