Police Brutality at the Black Lives Matter Protests
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the United States grew out of the long struggle of the African American civil rights movement against racial segregation and discrimination. BLM emerged in 2013 after the acquittal of a Latino neighbourhood watch volunteer for the killing of Black teenager Trayvon Martin. The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter swept across social media. In 2020, widely shared footage of George Floyd’s slow suffocation under the knee of a white police officer sparked a wave of protests and galvanised international support for BLM.
Police Brutality at the Black Lives Matter Protests by Forensic Architecture (FA) draws on the many online videos showing police violence against BLM protesters following George Floyd’s killing. Together with the investigative journalism collective Bellingcat, FA geolocated, verified, analysed and categorised thousands of such recordings, applying the same process to footage of far-right demonstrations. The material was then compiled on an interactive cartographic platform and edited into this video.
The footage reveals how demonstrations by far-right protesters were tolerated, even supported, by the police, whereas the BLM protests were violently suppressed. It is both evident and deeply concerning that the largest uprisings against systemic racism in
US policing were themselves met with widespread and visible police violence.