The New York Police Department appears to have looked at coverage of anonymous federal forces throwing protesters into unmarked vans in Portland, Oregon, and thought “Wow, how can we get in on that?” Multiple videos taken Tuesday in New York City show a group of officers in T-shirts and shorts dragging a protester into an unmarked Kia minivan.
The NYPD claims that 18-year-old Nikki Stone (or Nicki—reports vary) was “wanted for damaging police cameras during 5 separate criminal incidents in & around City Hall Park” and faces charges of criminal mischief. This appears to have been all NYPD, no federal officers involved, and yet, as New York City Council member Brad Lander tweeted, “[W]ith anxiety about what’s happening in Portland, the NYPD deploying unmarked vans with plainclothes cops to make street arrests of protestors feels more like provocation than public safety.”
The NYPD is basically saying this is business as usual, but is it really business as usual for a criminal mischief arrest to involve four or more plainclothes officers with back-up from at least a dozen uniformed officers? The NYPD also claimed that police were met with violence from protesters when they made the arrest, though multiple videos fail to back up that claim. Unless you count yelling and failing to immediately flee in the face of state intimidation as violence.
Lander wasn’t the only New York official concerned about the circumstances of the arrest. “Our civil liberties are on brink,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “This is not a drill. There is no excuse for snatching women off the street and throwing them into unmarked vans. To not protect our rights is to give them away. It is our responsibility to resist authoritarianism.”
Council member Carlina Rivera called for an independent review and “an immediate explanation for why an unmarked van full of officers was anywhere near a peaceful protest.” City Council Speaker Corey Johnson called the incident “Incredibly disturbing” and similarly said “We need answers.” Realistically, the NYPD never faces any consequences for its violent behavior and abuses, and tellingly, Mayor Bill de Blasio, who obviously lives in fear of angering the police after some conflicts with them early in his time as mayor, had not commented as of Wednesday morning.
The similarities to Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr’s calculated use of federal troops to terrorize cities and make violent examples of protesters are inescapable, and the fact that that model—being used by Trump and Barr as a campaign tactic—is spreading to local police departments should terrify us all. The NYPD did not need any encouragement to be violent toward peaceful protesters, of course, and to try to provoke them into a violent response, but the fact that the specific fear tactic of protesters being suddenly grabbed and dragged into unmarked vans was replicated here is a very bad sign for the freedom to legally and peacefully protest.