Shadowy protestors inflame, muddle George Floyd debate

The shadowy identity of the violent agitators trashing cities across the country has muddled the national debate over racial justice, inflaming partisan tensions, triggering finger-pointing from all sides and threatening to sap the power of those seeking reforms after the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police.

Mass protests have erupted in scores of cities across the country since last Monday, when Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man, was killed in police custody — a death captured on a grisly video that flew across the internet.

While a majority of those demonstrators have marched peacefully, violence has flared from Seattle and Santa Monica, Calif., to Atlanta and Miami, where vandals have smashed police cars, looted shops and torched vehicles and businesses with seeming indiscrimination. In Washington, D.C., on Sunday night, some sought to burn a historic church.

The violence has consumed much of the media coverage, as images of burning streets and masked demonstrators clashing fiercely with law enforcers have dominated cable news. And it’s prompted plenty of speculation that outside groups — left and right — have seized on a tragedy to push a political agenda largely divorced from the issues of racial inequality and police brutality that Floyd’s death has thrust into the national spotlight.

“If you look at these protests when they begin, they are always non-violent. Then there comes a moment ... when all of a sudden there comes a new element, which clearly could not have come from these non-violent protestors. It has to have come from somewhere else,” Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) said Monday by phone.

“I don't even know what the violent forces are after. Are they simply out to make mischief? Do they have an agenda?” she continued. “The best evidence that we're going to have is the identity of those who have been arrested. … At the moment, each side can say the other side is responsible, because we don't have enough information.”