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As Barclays Center becomes locus for angry protests and harsh response, arena's boosterish bluster has new valance

Last night, the centrally-located Barclays Center, with its privately managed, publicly accessible plaza, became the locus of protests against police brutality and the painful-to-watch, seemingly white officer-caused death of black arrestee George Floyd in Minneapolis. (The officer has been charged with third-degree murder.)
Some people climbed on top of the transit entrance.
It was hard not to look at the mothballed arena--used a few times as a distribution point for food--and see its slogans and sponsorships as inadequate to the moment, as I wrote. As Gothamist reported, things got ugly.

Densely backed into the plaza and surrounded by police, protesters milled about uneventfully for the rest of the afternoon.
By early evening, though, the tenor changed. Someone tossed water bottles towards police, and officers responded by charging into the plaza, shoving protesters to the ground, shooting pepper spray at their faces, and beating them with batons. More police forays into the crowd followed, as police waded in, wielding pepper spray and batons, to arrest teenage skateboarders who had climbed the artificial hill atop the Barclays Center subway entrance.
Then it got worse, with vandalism and counter violence.

There were more than 3,000 protestors and some 200 arrests, with a molotov cocktail thrown into a police vehicle, and a police van torched. A union bus driver refused to transport arrestees; protestors chanted "NYPD suck my d***."

The vandalism was worse in other cities, where some protestors may have been agents provacateurs. A federal officer killed in Oakland, and a Detroit protestor was killed, both in drive-by shootings, and reporters have been both arrested in Minneapolis and shot at with rubber bullets in Louisville, on camera. A reporter in Brooklyn, Gothamist reported, was thrown to the ground.

"Shit is getting real"

Consider the "BLM" (Black Lives Matter) defacing of a Barclays Center directional sign on "street furniture," plus, as the video below shows, another object--apparently a panel from the other side of the sign--being set aflame.
But videos and reports showed an aggressive response by some cops, with several on-camera examples of unprovoked violence, which surely will be part of the review (by Attorney General Letitia James) announced today by Mayor Bill de Blasio.


The meaning of Barclays

 Some, remembering the years of controversy over the arena, suggested it had a larger meaning. I think it's mostly geography though, as noted, the arena's commercialism has a different valence now.
The "essence of Brooklyn"?

Wrote Jesse Spector in Deadspin, Brutality at the Barclays Center — The Heart Of Brooklyn:
Barclays Center represents a lot of what there’s been to be angry about in Brooklyn. But it’s also a central location to stage a community gathering that the borough of my youth didn’t have. It’s not something I ever thought about as part of the return of sports to Brooklyn, but it’s there now, even with the Nets not there for the foreseeable future.

It’s the essence of Brooklyn, and neither coronavirus nor the NYPD can take that away.
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