Right-wing news outlets packaged the fieriest images as evidence of ruinous policies in Democratic-run cities, and criticized the mainstream media’s refusal to acknowledge the violence. At a Papa John’s, a man stood behind a shattered window and yelled, “Are they trying to get Trump reëlected?” A demonstrator replied, “These people don’t represent our movement!” But, at another moment, when a man told protesters, “What y’all don’t fucking understand is that people have their lives in these businesses,” a woman screamed back, “So what?” President Donald Trump had been highlighting the destructive aspects of such protests in order to malign the Black Lives Matter movement. When an older man with a fire extinguisher confronted rioters, someone struck him with a hard object, splitting his nose and breaking his jaw. Looters smashed shopwindows, and a Department of Corrections building was burned down. But, that night and the next, rioters hurled bricks and fireworks at law-enforcement officers. Many people marched peacefully and held signs.
The protesters gathered outside the Kenosha County Courthouse, a limestone building facing Civic Center Park, an area surrounded by businesses and residences. His sons witnessed the shooting from the back seat. Blake returned, but when the police arrived he was leaving again-this time with the children. “Me and my sisters just saw him skirt off in it,” Booker told a 911 dispatcher. Blake left in the S.U.V.-Booker’s rental car. Blake had decorated the apartment for a party, and was cooking hot dogs when he and Booker started quarrelling. They had several sons, and the shooting had occurred on the eighth birthday of the oldest, Izreal.
Hundreds of people now assembled for Blake, a lanky twenty-nine-year-old who had been staying at the fourplex with his fiancée, Laquisha Booker. The comedian Kevin Hart tweeted, “What’s the justification for 7 shots?”Īfter Floyd’s death, Kenosha was among the scores of American cities where citizens marched in protest. The victim, Jacob Blake, survived, but the incident was instantly seen as another grim example of an urgent problem: according to a recent Harvard study, Black people are more than three times as likely as white people to be killed during a police encounter. Kenosha did not equip officers with body cameras, and so the neighbor’s footage was the primary visual documentation of the shooting. Update: On Friday, Rittenhouse was acquitted of homicide and other charges. The Outsized Meaning of the Rittenhouse Verdict