Thousands of demonstrators in Madison, Wisconsin, came out this weekend to protest the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, at the hands of Minneapolis, Minnesota, police, in solidarity with similar demonstrations in cities across the world.
Riot police launched a can of tear gas at the crowd of teenagers who were marching with their hands in the air, literally chanting “don’t shoot.”
On Saturday, the protest started at the Wisconsin State Capitol and eventually moved down Williamson Street to the house where Madison Police Department officer Matt Kenny shot and killed nineteen-year-old Tony Robinson in 2015. In the evening, police and protesters clashed on State Street, downtown Madison’s main artery, where things got destructive and ugly.
Officers from the Madison Police Department, Wisconsin State Patrol, and UW-Madison Police Department lined up in riot gear, using property damage as an excuse to indiscriminately blast crowds with pepper spray and tear gas.
On Sunday, Madison’s Mayor, Satya Rhodes-Conway, imposed a curfew for 9:30 p.m., and Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, authorized the use of the National Guard to quell any unrest. By 8:30 p.m., a group of about 150 protesters, led by black youth, converged at the capitol, where they spoke to the crowd about civil disobedience, allyship, and the precedent for peaceful protest set by the civil rights movement.
“We are peacefully protesting against the murders of black people across this country and in Madison,” said one activist, perched on the top of the capitol steps.
Within hours, in a stunning and profoundly unnecessary show of force, riot police launched a can of tear gas at the crowd of teenagers who were marching with their hands in the air, literally chanting “don’t shoot.”
In cities around the country, police engaged in similar displays of violence.
On both Saturday and Sunday in Madison, largely nonviolent protesters were repeatedly met with clouds of tear gas, setting off panicked stampedes, the most frightening and dangerous moments of each day.
Under the Geneva Accords, the use of tear gas—which can cause lasting medical problems, including blindness and lung damage—is banned in warfare.
The emerging narratives, peddled mostly by public officials, suggest that the vandalism of businesses was spurred by a handful of opportunistic passersby. There are elements of truth to this; in one of the first instances of looting, a clique of young white women, who were not associated with the protest, kicked and body slammed the window of a board game store.
It is evident that the formal organizations that coordinated the march on Saturday—Freedom Inc., Urban Triage, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation’s Madison chapter—left following the planned march, while smaller bands of protesters took to State Street.
The remaining protesters on State Street represented a multiracial and overwhelmingly youthful collection of people, advancing a more tactically radical anti-police front, trailed by a discordant crowd looting businesses.
Freedom Inc., Urban Triage, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation later issued a statement rejecting the narrative that held their organizations as exemplars of peaceful protest in order to condemn more violent acts of protest.
“Do not use us to perpetuate white liberal agendas and narratives around peace,” the statement declared. “All actions against racist state violence are justified, and we will not minimize these contributions to liberation.”
According to Al Jazeera, between 2013 and 2019, U.S. police officers killed 7,666 people, disproportionately black civilians. In Madison, Robinson, who was black and unarmed, was shot seven times by Madison police officer Matt Kenny in an apartment stairwell. In the years since, witnesses have filmed Madison police officers beating unarmed black youth on multiple occasions.
Kenny, who was not criminally charged for killing Robinson, remains on the force as a trainer; his duties include leading meditation sessions. Former Chief of Police Mike Koval has refused to discipline Kenny, once calling Robinson’s grandmother a “raging lunatic.”
Amid the social crisis ignited by the coronavirus pandemic, the lack of funding for public services has been thrown into stark relief, while the cold-blooded murder of George Floyd has drawn attention to the prioritization of militarized law enforcement around the country.
At Madison’s Saturday protest, police spared no effort attacking crowds in the name of preventing “violence” and property destruction, but seemed nonchalant about protecting demonstrators from the potential violence of others.
As in Minneapolis, some Madisonians have suggested that far-right agitators came in to make the protests more violent and destructive, and to provoke a brutal response from police. But the presence of violent alt-right forces wasn’t widespread in Madison.
Rumors circulated throughout Saturday about far-right counter-protesters and instigators from groups including Three Percenters and Proud Boys, but no coordinated rightwing effort was apparent during the 2,000-person-strong march. A group of three or four young men with military-style rifles, helmets, and vests showed up near the capitol, and around 2 p.m., a much larger group of protesters surrounded and argued with them.
Several downtown business owners posted messages of support for the protesters, saying they don’t condone property destruction but would accept it in the interest of social change.
The armed men claimed they were there to protect the protesters from the cops, and one of the armed young men was wearing a shirt with a palm-tree print under his vest, the symbol of a bizarre corner of the very online far-right—the so-called “Boogaloo Movement,” which grew from fringe discussions about a coming civil war.
Local news coverage is already heavy with images of smashed store windows along State Street, especially Goodman’s Jewelers, which was nearly cleaned out late Saturday afternoon.
Police have said that seventy-five businesses were damaged, although most of the people we saw on State Street on Saturday afternoon and evening were not indiscriminately targeting small businesses. And when someone smashed a big window at PowerNine Games, it prompted an immediate pushback from protesters, with one black woman tweeting, “This is not an effective protest, this [is] not solidarity with the #blacklivesmatter movement. This is stupid, immature instigation.”
Nada Elmikashfi, a candidate for Wisconsin’s Twenty-Sixth District state senate seat, attributed the looting to “misguided white allies and possibly undercover instigators.”
Meanwhile, several downtown business owners posted messages of support for the protesters, saying they don’t condone property destruction but would accept it in the interest of social change.
“If burning everything to ground brings proper attention to the disgusting injustice in our country . . . so be it,” State Street mainstay Hawk’s Bar and Grill stated on Facebook. “Our property is replaceable. Black lives aren’t.” A Room of One’s Own bookstore, just off State Street, put it this way: “The looting & rioting last night, on any night, in any city, could never cause the same kind of damage the police have caused Black communities for centuries.”
By Saturday evening, former Madison alderperson and mayoral candidate Scott Resnick had already organized a cleanup effort for damaged businesses on State Street. As of early Sunday morning, a crowdfunding campaign for downtown business relief has raised more than $100,000, and hundreds of volunteers came out on Sunday morning to help with the cleanup.
Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway, acting Police Chief Victor Wahl, state Representative Chris Taylor, and members of the Madison Common Council, including Alders Sheri Carter and Samba Baldeh held a press conference on Saturday evening.
All of the elected officials who spoke condemned the property damage on State Street, while acknowledging the injustice of George Floyd’s death and the systemic racism that surrounds it.
But there was no concrete talk about renewed efforts to hold police accountable or address the growing demands to defund or outright abolish policing as we know it. (Taylor has sponsored some police accountability measures, including a bill requiring cops to retain body camera footage for at least 120 days and an earlier one requiring outside agencies to investigate when cops kill people.)
Saturday’s press conference became an absolute farce when Police Chief Wahl took to the podium. He condemned the Minneapolis police’s killing of George Floyd: “What we saw in that video was completely at odds with what our culture and values and philosophy are at [the Madison Police Department].”
But it is not at odds with Madison Police Department’s own history of gratuitous violence and resistance to change. Wahl then tried to put a friendly, administrative face on the things his own officers were doing on State Street.
“Even a fully robust, fully staffed, police response to a protest or a crowd, the officers are always gonna be greatly outnumbered by the crowd and we have to make sure that we make smart decisions . . . .Even when we get to a high level where we’re taking rocks and bottles and are in a clearly unsafe situation, we want to avoid escalating it even further.”
The statement is jaw-droppingly dissonant. The very presence of squads of cops in riot gear, with tear gas, batons, and pepper spray at the ready, clearly escalated the situation on State Street, over and over again—preventing none of the property damage, and brutalizing protesters. Along with their counterparts in cities around the United States, the Madison police spent Saturday and Sunday demonstrating once again why so many Americans are fed up with cops.
Rhodes-Conway’s curfew order gave Madison police free reign to assault young people for the crime of being in their own streets.
Over the past few days, Mayor Rhodes-Conway has also voiced her sympathy for people protesting Floyd’s death, while condemning those who’ve damaged property and looted businesses. In a press conference Sunday morning, Rhodes-Conway also spoke out for racial justice and police accountability.
According to Wisconsin Public Radio’s Laurel White, Rhodes-Conway said: “If you are angry because you want those who broke windows and trashed sidewalk cafes . . . to face consequences, be more angry that the people who kill black people all too often walk free.”
Nevertheless, Rhodes-Conway’s curfew order gave Madison police (with help from the National Guard and other local police agencies including the Fitchburg Police Department and the Dane County Sheriff's Office) free reign to assault young people for the crime of being in their own streets.
On Sunday night, police in Madison also joined the nationwide trend of openly assaulting journalists covering the protests. NBC 15 reporter George Balekji was interviewing a protest medic on live TV when riot cops threw a tear gas canister that hit Balekji in the shoulder as it detonated.
“Protest was peaceful at this point, no warning was given to stop walking. Why use the tear gas in this scenario?” Balekji asked in a follow-up tweet.
Throughout Sunday night, the military and police routed civilian protesters around the capitol, on State Street, and along Langdon Street’s fraternity row, deploying tear gas and later—according to live reporting by Isthmus journalist Dylan Brogan—rubber bullets.
At around 12 a.m., about seventy-five National Guard members marched up Wisconsin Avenue toward a residential neighborhood, cornering and macing a group of what appeared to be no more than fifteen protesters.
As the night wore on, demonstrators lit dumpsters on fire and lootings, possibly unrelated, were reported around the downtown area. At least fifteen people were arrested.
This article was originally published in Tone Madison.