Sherialyn Byrdsong stood in the parking lot of the Wendy’s drive-through where Rayshard Brooks was killed four nights ago and listened to a woman addressing the crowd passionately.
“It’s getting dark and I need to get my baby home,” the speaker said. “But I need y’all to listen for a minute. I need y’all to understand that we outnumber them. The police, the national guard, the army, the navy — whoever comes down here. I need y’all to exercise your second amendment right, because the civil war never ended. They’re immune to us singing We Shall Overcome. It’s time to fight back.”
It was an impassioned plea at a peaceful protest, one of the many that have rocked Atlanta since Brooks’ death.
Protesters are demanding that Garrett Rolfe, the officer who killed the 27-year-old, be arrested. In an intense news conference on Monday, Brooks’ family called for murder charges against Rolfe, as well as a radical overhaul of Atlanta’s police department. “There’s no justice that can ever make me feel happy about what’s been done. I can never get my husband and best friend back,” said Brooks’ wife, Tomika Miller.
“The only way to heal some of these wounds is through a conviction and the drastic change of the police department,” said Brooks’ cousin, Tiara Brooks.
An announcement on Rolfe’s arrest may come on Wednesday, CNN reported. The decision will be up to Paul Howard, the local district attorney for Fulton county and an African-American native of Georgia who has served as the city’s top prosecutor for more than two decades.
“They’re not going to accept it just because he’s a Black Georgian,” Byrsong said of protesters reaction to the possibility Rolfe won’t be charged.
Brooks’ death has sparked a flood of demonstrations across the city, with myriad goals and tactics. Some are “just sick and tired of being sick and tired”, Byrdsong said. Others want to confront police officers outside police precincts and other government buildings. Then there are those who are already working on the policy plank of what has become a national movement, just as it did for two years following the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, for police and criminal justice reform.
Atlanta had already been mobilizing for weeks, after video surfaced of two white men chasing and killing Ahmaud Arbery in the small coastal town of Brunswick, Georgia.
The death of George Floyd in Minneapolis kicked things into overdrive.
“I’ve been here every day since the Saturday after George Floyd was killed,” said Hannah Joy, standing at a table where she was collecting email addresses to inform people about voting locations, upcoming legislative initiatives and protests themselves.
She’s also sharing with anyone who will listen the findings of the Task Force on 21st Century Policing, a marquee document of the Obama administration that made scores of recommendations for how police could improve relations with communities of color and reduce fatal interactions following police killings in Ferguson, Baltimore, Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, and elsewhere.
It’s the same report that Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance-Bottoms said is guiding reforms that are expected to be introduced in the coming days.
“We do not have another minute, another day, another hour to waste,” Lance-Bottoms said at a news conference Monday afternoon.
Among the reforms are a “duty to intercede”, in which officers witnessing aggressive behavior or excessive force on the part of their peers would be required by department policy to try to stop the conflict. Calls for similar measures came following the killing of Floyd, where at least three officers watched Derek Chauvin hold Floyd down with his knee on his neck for almost nine minutes.
Lance-Bottoms also said she would put an end to the practice of cash bail. Additionally, Lance-Bottoms said she would direct city funds away from the police department and toward community programs – a move that is at the center of national calls to “defund” police departments across the country.
“We understand in Atlanta and across the nation that this is the beginning of a great challenge ahead of us,” she said, noting the city’s “strong civil rights legacy” in its role in the national police reform movement.
As the sun began to set Monday, Byrdsong said she understood why the woman on the corner, calling for Black residents to “fight back” was so angry.
“People feel that someone has to pay for Rayshard’s death,” she said.
Byrdsong knows that feeling well: her husband, Ricky, was killed by a white supremacist on a shooting spree outside their former home in Illinois in 1999. She still wears the wedding ring he gave her.
