By the middle of June, two of the city’s most controversial public monuments - that of Christopher Columbus in Columbus Circle, and of Theodore Roosevelt in front of the American Museum of Natural History - were blocked off completely to pedestrian access, and guarded by multiple police vehicles and corresponding numbers of officers. The statue outside of my window is not alone in attracting a new, 24/7 police detail this summer. New York’s Finest protecting George Washington from the Queer Liberation March, J(the pedestal was previously tagged FUCK 12 / SINCE / 1492) Six weeks and counting of 1–2 vehicles and 2–4 officers at all times - doubtless the expense of guarding the statue is several times the cost of replacing the statue, should it be destroyed by these mysteriously invisible “protestors.” This is not a matter of misplaced priorities: they know why they’re doing this. In a city whose budgetary strain from the coronavirus threatens the safety of children in schools, and cuts countless essential programs for those who are hardest hit by the virus, we must interrogate the importance that the police are placing on defending statues of generic 19th-century white men. They said they’d done this because protestors were threatening to take the statue down. ![]() ![]() In the midst of the pandemic, this cop car is there to protect a statue of a white man who, quite frankly, even I did not know the story of until the cops surrounded the statue with crash barriers and started hanging out there. This is a parked cop car - it has been flashing its lights in place, day and night, for about a month and a half, now. Power Structures: White Columns, White Marble, White SupremacyĪs I write these words on the fire escape of my Manhattan apartment, in early September, 2020, the flashing lights of a cop car blink in my peripheral vision.
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