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Anger has reignited in the United States at the end of a summer marked by the mobilizations against racism, its violent derivation and the political tension that it adds to a country in an electoral campaign. Police shooting a black man in the back on Sunday in Kenosha, Wisconsin, sparked three days of protests that left two dead on Tuesday night in the city. A 17-year-old has been arrested as a suspect. The president of the United States, Donald Trump, announced this Wednesday that he will send federal forces to stop the violence.
Wisconsin was called to be a global news center this summer because it hosted the Democratic Convention, the one that last week crowned Joe Biden as a candidate for president. The pandemic forced the cancellation of mass events, so all scheduled events - speeches, debates, concerts, the voting of thousands of delegates - in the city of Milwaukee were held virtually. Now, as if it were a somewhat sinister script quirk, this small state close to the Canadian border has been placed in the spotlight in a very different way than it was projected.
The event that has shaken the country again took place on Sunday shortly after five in the afternoon, when the police went to an address in Kenosha, a city of 100,000 inhabitants, after receiving the notice of a “domestic incident”. The next thing that is known is what millions of Americans have seen in a 20-second video shot by a passerby. In it, an African-American man named Jacob Blake, 29, is shown walking in the direction of a black car with two police officers yelling at him and one of them pointing a gun at him. Blake continues walking and stands on the passenger side of the vehicle, opens the door and half gets in while the officers, who have followed him, continue to yell. One of them grabs him by the shirt. The other ultimately draws his weapon as well. Within moments, multiple shots were heard and screams from other people present. Then a third agent is seen.
Blake is now admitted in serious condition to a Milwaukee hospital, the officers involved have been administratively discharged and the Wisconsin Department of Justice has opened an investigation. With the outrage over George Floyd's death in May in Minneapolis still fresh in the collective memory, the protests over the Blake case began on the Sunday of the shooting. On Tuesday night they escalated and ended in a serious confrontation between civilians that may include members of an urban militia.
The security forces had dispersed the concentrations of people who were defying the curfew imposed by the authorities to contain the riots in Kenosha and, according to the local press, it seemed that the day was almost dead when embers of protesters and some armed men they clashed at a gas station.
Some videos record what happened. In one of them, a man is seen falling to the ground and, from the road, firing several times with a rifle or shotgun, knocking down at least one person. Police were looking for a white male, Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth said. This Wednesday a 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse was arrested as a suspect in a nearby city in Illinois. Earlier, Trump announced on Twitter that he would send federal security forces to Wisconsin, where Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has activated 250 National Guard reservists.
As with the mobilizations in the wake of Floyd, peaceful demonstrations are then followed by violent groups looting businesses and setting fires. But this time, in Kenosha, a group self-identified as a local militia has warned that it is not going to sit idly by and intends to take over the work entrusted to the security forces.
The Kenosha Guard posted a message on their Facebook page - no longer available - warning authorities that they planned to be present on the streets. Later, in a later post picked up by Reuters, they referred to the events of the previous night: “We do not know if the armed citizen was responding to the call to arms of the Kenosha Militia Guard. As with the shooting of Jacob Blake, we need to know all the facts and evidence that arise before judging what happened. God protect Kenosha. "
The case adds gasoline in a country that has seen the largest wave of mobilizations against racism in 50 years following the death of African American George Floyd in a brutal detention on May 25 in Minneapolis. In Louisville (Kentucky) at least 64 people were arrested on Tuesday in another protest over the death at the hands of the Police of Breonna Taylo, a 26-year-old emergency technician who received eight bullets from three policemen who came to his apartment with a warrant register.
Cases of police brutality and the response of protesters in the streets have become one of the burning issues of this electoral campaign, just over two months after the appointment with the polls. It happened with Minneapolis, then Portland and now Wisconsin. Democrats accuse the president of ignoring structural problems of racism and Trump stands as a defender of "law and order" in the face of an opposition that, according to his speech, sympathizes with the violent.
Partisan ammunition
Wisconsin, one of the key states in the November elections, is the living example of the partisan division that has been unleashed as a result of the mobilizations against racism. The governor, a Democrat, called for an extraordinary session of the state legislature to address measures to strengthen transparency and accountability by the police, something he already raised in June, after the Floyd case. "We clearly know that you are not the first black man or person to be shot or injured or mercilessly shot at the hands of members of the forces of order in our state or our country," wrote Tony Evers on his Twitter account.
The state House, by contrast, has a Republican majority and has not welcomed Evers' proposal. "The Governor is doing politics again and dictating progressive policies that will deepen divisions in our State," responded Rep. Robin Vos.
Donald Trump, who faces a difficult election in November due to the serious coronavirus crisis, has made law and order one of the great messages of his campaign. Meanwhile, he points the finger at the mayors of boiling cities - mostly Democrats - as tolerant of violence. "We are not going to be on the side of the looters, the fires, the violence and the anarchy in the American streets," he wrote in his account. Governor Evers, he noted, has accepted federal aid.
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