NORTHAMPTON — A state trooper and two Northampton officers, including the police chief, took a knee shortly before 6 p.m. Monday after protesters had been occupying the alleyway adjacent to the police station for well over an hour, shouting “take a knee, take a knee!” and “Kneel with us — we will respect you, if you respect us.”
Shortly after State Trooper Mike Habel, Police Chief Jody Kasper and Northampton Police Lt. Alan Borowski kneeled, protesters left the alley and dispersed. “I think they want to know that what they saw, we saw,” said Northampton Police Chief Jody Kasper, “and that we don’t stand for that, either.”
Earlier in the day, protesters took down an American flag in front of the Northampton Police Station as a crowd of people clapped and drums beat in the background. A barefoot man from the crowd then climbed up the flagpole, raising a Black Lives Matters flag in its place.
The action was part of a rally that drew over 1,000 people to the city streets in response to the killing of George Floyd, a black man from Minneapolis who died after a white police officer pinned him to the ground by kneeling on his neck for nearly 9 minutes last Monday.
“I’ve been worried about police brutality since I was a kid,” Angelina Miller, one of the march’s organizers, told her fellow protesters while they rallied outside the station. “The color of my skin is not a weapon.”
Miller, a tenth grader at LightHouse Holyoke who lives in Northampton, wasn’t able to go to the protest in Boston Sunday, so she and a group of friends decided to organize their own. “I’m a person of color — this could have happened to my family,” she said, speaking to the Gazette about police brutality. “Racism is everywhere … It’s in Northampton.”
Video by reporter @greta_h_jochem at the scene of the Northampton Police station. pic.twitter.com/Es2yAI51R3
— Daily Hampshire Gazette (@DailyHampGaz) June 1, 2020
Protesters filled the streets wearing masks and shouting refrains like, “No justice, no peace,” during the march, which began at 2 p.m. with participants gathering at Sheldon Field. Cars honked as the crowd made its way down Main Street in downtown Northampton.
“George Floyd — say his name,” they chanted. “No Trump, no KKK, no fascists USA,” they shouted. People carried signs like “Racism is a public health emergency” and “White silence = violence.”
Organizers asked fellow protesters in their online flyer promoting the event to “please bring signs, masks, hand sanitizer, and gloves. Please stay six feet apart.” Most wore face coverings — some wrote “Black Lives Matter” and “I can’t breathe” on their masks — but it was difficult to maintain social distance in the large crowd.
The crowd gathered outside the police department and filled Center Street, where several student organizers spoke. “Stop killing us,” Maya Williams, one of the young organizers, a tenth grader at Northampton High School, told the crowd. “Black Lives Matter.”
“We need to use our white privilege to be allies,” Amelia Rothenbach, a classmate of Williams, told the crowd. “We can’t sit by any longer.”
The police department is expecting a nearly $200,000 increase in funding in Mayor David Narkewicz’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year, noted protester Andrea Schmid. “We need to defund the Northampton Police Department,” she said into the microphone, prompting cheers from the crowd. “Now is the time to redistribute those funds for PPE and for housing.” She encouraged protesters to participate in hearings about the proposed budget.
After speeches, chanting and several minutes of silence, Miller told the crowd the formal protest was over, though people were free to stay, she said. “This is a peaceful gathering.”
The crowd stayed in the streets, shouting chants like “Not one more.”
Some people climbed on top of a wall outside the police station. Other marchers wrote messages of protest on the brick exterior of the station — some in chalk and at least one in spray paint — such as “F the police” and “No tyrants.”
As the day wore on, police came out and used pepper spray to hold off the crowd so they could reenter the station.
The Northampton protest came on the heels of a rally Sunday on the Amherst Town Common, one of dozens of such gatherings across the country following Floyd’s death. Derek Chauvin, the white police officer who killed him, was charged with third-degree murder Friday.
“Another unarmed black man was murdered by the police. His name is George Floyd,” the teen organizers wrote in a flyer for the Monday march. “It is time to speak out and for our voices to be heard. Police brutality is not new and it’s time to change how people of color are being treated by the law.”
Greta Jochem can be reached at gjochem@gazettenet.com.