New York Police Department officers violently arrested several pro-Palestinian protesters at a rally in Bay Ridge on Saturday, throwing demonstrators to the ground and punching them. On Monday morning, New York Mayor Eric Adams applauded the NYPD’s response.
“I take my hat off to the police department for how they handled an unruly group of people,” Adams said on NY1. While Adams stated that the city is reviewing the “isolated incident” caught on-camera in which a police officer punches a protester, videos posted to social media showed multiple acts of police violence as they pushed to disperse the protest, which commemorated the displacement of Palestinians in 1948. Officers arrested 40 people overall.
In an appearance on Fox 5 later on Monday, Adams also said that many demonstrators were “from outside the city and outside the Bay Ridge area,” even though Bay Ridge has one of the largest populations of Palestinians in New York City. Blaming outsiders has become a familiar refrain for the NYPD: Leadership pointed the finger at out-of-towners amid chaotic protests in 2020 and repeated that line after arrests at Columbia and City College, though the NYPD later acknowledged that a large majority of those detained at the school were students.
