A Few Quick Notes on Tonight’s NYC Montreal Solidarity March and the NYPD
I’ve just returned home from a trip to downtown for tonight’s march in solidarity with the students of Montreal, and I want to say a couple of things.
For background, it was a march of about three hundred people, give or take. Ebullient, given today’s events to the north, but not raucous. We started at Union Square, meandered around for about an hour and a half, and ended where we began. Pretty standard stuff.
I arrived at US about 8:30, and headed south looking for the march. Within a couple of blocks I caught it heading toward me, and joined up. Folks were walking on the sidewalks and in the streets, without incident — on the side streets we were mostly facing traffic, and parting when lights turned green. On the avenues we were mostly hugging the parked cars, taking part of a lane when there was traffic, a little more when there wasn’t.
Cops occasionally herded us back onto the sidewalks, and we uniformly complied when they did. (I never saw a
For background, it was a march of about three hundred people, give or take. Ebullient, given today’s events to the north, but not raucous. We started at Union Square, meandered around for about an hour and a half, and ended where we began. Pretty standard stuff.
I arrived at US about 8:30, and headed south looking for the march. Within a couple of blocks I caught it heading toward me, and joined up. Folks were walking on the sidewalks and in the streets, without incident — on the side streets we were mostly facing traffic, and parting when lights turned green. On the avenues we were mostly hugging the parked cars, taking part of a lane when there was traffic, a little more when there wasn’t.
Cops occasionally herded us back onto the sidewalks, and we uniformly complied when they did. (I never saw a