BLM Protesters Are However Grappling With Their Arrests Months Later

The men and women combating to finish systemic inequality have been speaking to VICE for decades. Now we’re catching up with them to uncover out what is actually changed.

V. Matthew King-Yarde was in the center of a Black Lives Make a difference protest in New York final summer season, seeking to doc a motor vehicle on fire, when he suggests three NYPD officers tackled him and pinned him to the ground. He feared for his lifestyle, and the psychological trauma is still with him now, 8 months afterwards. 

“The officers were being on my back, and I was not focusing on everything other than, is this when I’m going to die—for no specific reason other than just covering the protests?” he explained to VICE News. Then, in the center of a pandemic, he was positioned in a tiny holding cell with at the very least 20 other adult males. 

King-Yarde was just a single of about 2,000 individuals arrested in New York in the course of the BLM protests in excess of the police killing of George Floyd, with many nevertheless grappling with the affect of their arrests. 

Rigodis Appling, a general public defender with the Authorized Aid Society, said protesters shouldn’t be arrested in the first spot. “Just just being arrested now—actually going by means of what people go by in detention—that’s some thing that people in all probability really don’t grasp how traumatic that is.”

Angelica, a protester who was arrested for the duration of the summer time protests, told VICE News that she applied to check out to perspective law enforcement neutrally, but viewing cops arrest protesters “made me entirely shift my check out on them in a adverse gentle.”

Now, the city is experiencing a wave of lawsuits in excess of its handling of the protests, most similar to police arrests. There are at the very least 6 energetic lawsuits versus New York City and the NYPD, and another 400 are expected to be filed.

King-Yarde reported he joined a civil rights lawsuit to hold law enforcement accountable. “They require to know that selected matters are just not Okay — certain behaviors simply cannot be tolerated.”

We initial spoke to King-Yarde, Appling, and Angelica during the protests. Enjoy the unique interviews here.