Special News Series: Rising Up For Justice! – Cars have hit BLM demonstrators 104 times since George Floyd protests began

Introduction To This Series:

This post is one installment in an ongoing news series: a “living history” of the current national and international uprising for justice.

Today’s movement descends directly from the many earlier civil rights struggles against repeated injustices and race-based violence, including the killing of unarmed Black people. The posts in this series serve as a timeline of the uprising that began on May 26, 2020, the day after a Minneapolis police officer killed an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, by kneeling on his neck. The viral video of Floyd’s torturous suffocation brought unprecedented national awareness to the ongoing demand to truly make Black Lives Matter in this country.

The posts in this series focus on stories of the particular killings that have spurred the current uprising and on the protests taking place around the USA and across the globe. Sadly, thousands of people have lost their lives to systemic racial, gender, sexuality, judicial, and economic injustice. The few whose names are listed here represent the countless others lost before and since. Likewise, we can report but a few of the countless demonstrations for justice now taking place in our major cities, small towns, and suburbs.

Cars have hit Black Lives Matter demonstrators 104 times since George Floyd protests began

By Grace Hauck, USA Today

September 27, 2020

Dozens of people had gathered in Albuquerque for a third night of protests demanding justice for Breonna Taylor when a car barreled through the crowd, hitting several protesters.

“It just went straight into the middle of the crowd and veered off toward the left,” said Samantha Colombo, 25, an Albuquerque resident who said they’ve been protesting with dozens of other people for three nights at the same intersection. No one appeared to be injured, Colombo said. Video of the incident began to circulate on Twitter on Friday…

Amid thousands of protests nationwide this summer against police brutality, dozens of drivers have plowed into crowds of protesters marching in roadways, raising questions about the drivers’ motivations.

Witnesses, law enforcement and terrorism experts said some of the vehicle incidents appear to be targeted and politically motivated; others appear to be situations in which the driver became frightened or enraged by protesters surrounding their vehicle…

There have been at least 104 incidents of people driving vehicles into protests from May 27 through Sept. 5, including 96 by civilians and eight by police, according to Ari Weil, a terrorism researcher at the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Threats who spoke with USA TODAY earlier this summer. Weil began tracking the incidents as protests sprung up in the wake of George Floyd’s death in police custody.

There have been at least two fatalities, in Seattle and in Bakersfield, California.

Read the full article here.

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