Drivers Are Hitting Protesters as Memes of Car Attacks Spread - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/us/bloomington-car-attack-protesters.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes
In recent days, one person was killed in Seattle and two people were injured in Bloomington, Ind. Dozens of similar incidents have occurred across the United States.
“It is not just an extremist thing here, but there are social media circles online where people are sharing these and joking about them because they disagree with the protests and their methods,” said Ari E. Weil, the deputy research director at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats of the University of Chicago. “Sharing memes and joking about running over people can lead to real danger.”
There have been at least 66 car attacks nationwide since George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police on May 25, Mr. Weil said.
Seven of them have been by law enforcement officers, he said. That included two in New York which Dermot Shea, the police commissioner, defended as an appropriate use of force because he said the police vehicles were under attack.
Prosecutors have brought charges in about 24 of the cases so far, Mr. Weil said, including hate crimes, and have dismissed four as accidental.
Vehicular attacks have proliferated in recent weeks. Experts believe it is because of the combination of widespread protests across the country and the circulation of dangerous memes among extremist groups about running over pedestrians.
“There has been an increasing amount of propaganda online calling for vehicular attacks on protesters, targeting the Black Lives Matter movement in particular,” said Josh Lipowsky, a senior researcher at the Counter Extremism Project. “It is being used as a form of intimidation against them to get them to halt their protests.”
Attacks with vehicles are easy to conduct, he said, because they do not require a lot of planning or financial resources.