The George Floyd protests are on my doorstep – and I’m joining in

Unless you’re living under a rock, you’ll be aware that last week a police officer called Derek Chauvin in the state of Minnesota was charged with murder after kneeling on a man’s neck until he killed him. George Floyd was a 46-year-old father, and he died not long after the owner of a corner deli called 911 because he suspected Floyd of paying for cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 (£16) bill. According to a meticulously constructed timeline in The New York Times, Chauvin continued to kneel on Floyd’s neck after he lost consciousness and even for a substantial amount of time after paramedics arrived to try to revive him.

It is a shocking story, but not a surprising one for anyone who is aware of how the American police interact with black people. Far too many have been sentenced to death on the streets by cops for crimes as minor as possessing counterfeit bills, or even just for jogging in their local area. A few days before Floyd died, a white woman named Amy Cooper called 911 on video when a black man named Christian Cooper (no relation) asked her to leash her dog in Central Park. Floyd’s treatment at the hands of Minneapolis officers should underline why Christian Cooper had reason to be scared when she did that.

My neighbourhood in Brooklyn has become the epicentre of the borough’s protests, as I found out a couple of days ago when I started getting texts from friends asking if I was all right. “I’m fine,” I replied, “why?” and was, in turn, sent videos of police cars driving into protesters and people screaming that they’d had mace or tear gas sprayed into their eyes. As I zoomed in on the videos, I realised they had been taken two streets away from my apartment – and about twenty minutes earlier.

Like all good journalists – and much to the chagrin of my fiance – I immediately decided to go down and have a look at the protests for myself. Armed with my phone and my American press card (in case of being stopped by police), I left my building and immediately found myself trapped in a maze of barricaded streets and routes blocked off by NYPD vans and lines of armed officers. When I eventually reached the Barclays Centre, I was shocked I hadn’t been able to hear the chaos from my apartment. Hundreds of people in face masks had lined Flatbush Avenue, chanting “Black lives matter” and some less savoury things about the NYPD. The traffic on this large avenue through Brooklyn had come to a standstill. Twenty or so police officers had commandeered a bus and were trying to jam arrested protesters inside while telling the driver to transport them. Protesters were shouting, “Don’t drive the bus!” and someone had tagged the back with “BLM” graffiti. The driver, put in a seemingly impossible position, eventually decided that he would join the protesters and walk away from the police, to much cheering and applause.

The atmosphere was electric, but the situation was also clearly dangerous. American police are always heavily armed and notoriously trigger-happy. Images of bleeding bystanders hit by rubber bullets in other cities were appearing on social media minute by minute. I tried to stay on the fringe of the protests in case anything suddenly took a turn for the worse.

Over the weekend, a Black Lives Matter rally was held at my local park and people marched down my street holding signs aloft. On Monday night, police helicopters hovered directly over our apartment building – which is on the same street as a police station – for hours, eventually cutting out around 5am. The lights and sirens of cop vehicles continued to barrel up and down the road long after it seemed most protesters had dissipated. We went to meet a moped driver with our takeaway burgers at the end of a barricade on Monday night and noticed each officer was carrying a stack of plastic handcuffs, clearly preparing to arrest vast numbers of people. We made plans for how we might leave our flat quickly with all the necessities (cat, two laptops, shoes) if the nearby police station was set on fire.

What’s been strangest over the past few days has been watching our previously quiet streets, deserted because of Covid-19 and the ongoing lockdown, become loud again with the activity of thousands of protesters. We’d become used to the area – which usually would be bustling with open bars and restaurants – being uncharacteristically tranquil. Now it sounds like the world has started up again, but when you strain your ears you realise you aren’t hearing normal summer chatter but instead megaphones, cheering and the chants of people demanding retribution from a system that lets black people down. As they say on the marches: no justice, no peace.