The best side of everyone here
Erm…what?
I’m as baffled as the people who jump up shouting “What are you doing?!”
The Post and Courier talked to him afterwards:
“I am not your enemy,” Givionne “Gee” Jordan Jr. told the officers. “All of you are my family.”
Emotion caught his voice. Other protesters crouched over him, their hands on his shoulders as he spoke. “I love each and every one of you. I want to understand all of you. I want to. I would love to see the best side of everyone here.”
So, naturally, they arrested him.
In an interview with The Post and Courier, Jordan, a 23-year-old Charleston resident, said he spent the night in the county jail. He was charged with disobeying a lawful order, according to a police report.
The police chief says yes but we had told them to disperse. We told them many times. We said they’d be arrested if they didn’t.
Ok but then that takes the question back a step: why did the police tell them to disperse?
Reynolds did not say why officers seemed to single Jordan out from the crowd. Jordan said he was arrested around 5 p.m., well before Charleston’s 6 p.m. curfew.
Reynolds stressed that officers were also on high alert Sunday after a night of unrest Saturday, which included fires and looting.
Ok but does a guy kneeling and talking passionately about love and understanding suggest a guy bent on fires and looting?
Jordan was among a crew who volunteered to clean up downtown Sunday morning. He swept the streets and carried plywood to help business owners board up their storefronts. In the afternoon he headed to Marion Square, near King Street.
A crowd of about 200 gathered. At some point, Jordan, a black man, knelt on the ground.
“My plan was to get all the people beside me, kneeling behind me, kneeling with me,” he said in an interview. “Showing the cops that we are no threat. We are no threat at all. We just want to make the world better.”
In the video, several white protesters can be seen crouching around him, placing their hands on him.
They started doing that when his voice started breaking.
“I would love to see the best side of everybody here,” Jordan told police. “This is not the best side of everybody here.”
So they uttered not a word, and arrested him.
Dictators and tyrants are nothing without an armed mob willing to enforce their words. They are necessarily as bad as he is.
It’s possible that Jordon was arrested because there was a credible threat that some of the police officers might have joined him in some way — knelt, or call back that “no, we are not enemies.” It’s apparently happened in other places. I’d like to think it was a possibility in Charleston. The police seemed confused, talking to each other, and then several officers from the back took charge.
As soon as the crowd is not seen as a monolithic block, law enforcement could break the same way.
Yes that sounds plausible.
Of course…Charleston is the city – famous in the past for its busy slave market – where Dylan Roof shot all those people in their church, after they had welcomed him and urged him to come up front and join them.
Terry Gross did a really interesting talk on Fresh Air yesterday with a guy who became a cop because he experienced racist violence from the Brooklyn police and wanted to improve them from within. He rose to captain, then retired and went into Congress, and is now Borough Something of Brooklyn. I needa do a post on it.
He was arrested because he did not fit the dominant narrative of “violent protestors”.
He was arrested because we cannot be seen to allow peaceful protest in case it leads to football players kneeling and disrespecting the military.
He was arrested because he was wearing a red cap without MAGA on it.
He was arrested because 50 armed police staring down unarmed, peaceful protestors is far easier than staring down violent, looting thugs, who have hijacked a shameful situation for criminal gain.
Oh, and did you notice he was also, sort of, “black”?
Question in need of an answer: Why hasn’t anyone written a song: Fuck The Fire Department?
Maybe the police saw all those peopleand said to themselves “Shit! It’s a threat! They’re going to choke us out by kneeling on our necks!” /s
He was arrested for not being cowed by their show of force, and for making it obvious that the police do not have any moral authority lately.
Holms, some police can still have moral authority; they need to choose that route. Our BLM protests in Kearney, NE, have been and remain peaceful. The police are protecting the protestors, and have done what they can to prevent trouble with passing motorists. They chose the route of moral authority over the route of police state.