Mass arrest of Black Lives Matter protesters in Omaha raises questions

Riley Wilson's reason for attending last Saturday's protest in Omaha, Neb., against police brutality was displayed in bold black letters across the front and back of his neon-yellow safety vest: "Legal Observer." As he has done at a handful of other demonstrations that have taken place in the Midwestern city over the last several weeks, Wilson arrived at the event around 7:30 p.m. with a pen and a legal pad on which he planned to take notes on any interactions he might have witnessed between police and protesters. Wilson said that when he arrived, there were "already well over 100 protesters present."

"I was only able to take a couple of notes before I was pushed to the ground, told not to move," Wilson told Yahoo News. Despite his vest, as well as multiple verbal attempts to identify himself to police as a legal observer, Wilson was one of 120 people who were arrested in an unexpected and violent end to what, by many accounts, started off as a peaceful protest.

Wilson, who is beginning his second year at Creighton Law School in Omaha, explained that that, as a legal observer, he's obligated to follow all laws during a protest. That means remaining on the sidewalk while the rest of the crowd marches in the street, and waiting for the light at a crosswalk before crossing a street, even if it means occasionally falling behind as the rest of the group proceeds through intersections. Wilson said he was asked to observe Saturday's gathering by its organizers, as he has for a number of recent protests in Omaha. He is not affiliated with any local advocacy groups, working pro bono as a legal observer for a civil rights attorney based in Scottsbluff, Neb.

" I was there following all the laws ... and they didn't care, they arrested me as well," said Wilson, noting that Saturday's clash is typical of the way police have indiscriminately rounded up protesters in cities nationwide.

The mass arrests in Omaha, which were followed by a chaotic, crowded and prolonged detention process that carried well into the next day, have prompted backlash from local officials and civil rights advocates.

In a statement posted on Monday to Facebook, the ACLU of Nebraska said it was exploring all legal options to hold the Omaha Police Department accountable for any civil rights violations that may have occurred at Saturday's protest. Saying the police "knew what they were doing," they also accused the OPD of defying state policy by detaining so many protesters en mass on Saturday rather than issuing citations.

Democratic State Sen. Megan Hunt of Omaha expressed her support for the protesters in a statement to Yahoo News, vowing to ensure that the "state is accountable for any and every civil rights violation that occurred this weekend."

"When Omaha Police chose to arrest 120 Omahans who were peacefully exercising their right to protest, they knew that they were putting these protestors in danger by risking them to exposure to COVID, and they knew they were sending dozens of people to a jail that wasn't prepared to handle the influx," said Hunt.

Like many other American cities, tensions between law enforcement and local activists in Omaha have been high since late May, when the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis, set off nationwide protests against what is widely viewed as a systemic problem of racism in law enforcement.

In Omaha, the outrage that sparked the initial protests has been further stoked by the death of James Scurlock, a 22-year-old unarmed Black protester who was shot and killed by a white bar owner on May 30 during unrest that followed the death of George Floyd.

Within 36 hours, the county prosecutor Don Kleine announced that the bar owner would not face any charges in connection to Scurlock's death. Amid a public backlash, Kleine ultimately agreed to allow a grand jury to review the case and a special prosecutor has since been appointed. In the meantime, protests have continued throughout Omaha, with Scurlock becoming a local symbol for the kind of ingrained racism of the criminal justice system.

According to numbers provided to Yahoo News on Monday, Omaha police have arrested a total 422 people in relation to protests and civil unrest since the first night of demonstrations on May 29.

The July 25 event, which was organized by the Omaha-based progressive activist group proBLAC, was billed on Facebook as a call to action to "march against the institution of policing" in solidarity with protesters in Portland, Ore., and those in other cities where President Trump had recently vowed to send in federal troops.

In a Facebook post, proBLAC organizer Alexander "Bear" Matthews said that time had come to not only defund Omaha's police force, but to abolish it altogether.

"We are calling on all abolitionists, youth or non-youth, to coordinate mass protests on July 25th to show the world that the fire of this uprising is still burning strong, and that flames will just keep getting bigger until the police state has been dismantled once and for all," Alexander wrote.

Despite the group's firmly antipolice stance and a heavy law enforcement presence at the demonstration, which started at a corner of Turner Park, in the Midtown area of Omaha, Wilson said that up until the very end, the protest was entirely peaceful.

"As a legal observer, I'm thinking, OK, they're keeping their distance, they're not interacting with the crowd,'" Wilson said of the police. At the same time, he recalled observing that "the crowd is being peaceful, they're not causing any damage, no vandalism, nothing like that."

As the protesters began marching toward downtown Omaha, Wilson described the police's role largely as escorts for the protesters, remaining roughly two blocks ahead of the group at most times and blocking traffic from interfering with the crowd.

Activist Jordan Corbin, who was among those arrested Saturday, told Yahoo News that while some protesters gave police the middle finger, or chanted things like "All cops are bastards," he felt like there was actually a sense of understanding between the protesters who were voicing their anger and frustration at the system and the officers who he perceived to be escorting the group along their route.

" There was no confrontation between us and the police," said Corbin. "There was no situation where we were trying to interact negatively with them. Everybody was cool. We were just marching and doing our thing."

The protesters then reached the Old Market section of Downtown Omaha, not far from where James Scurlock was killed. Corbin recalled that that was where the group circled back, retracing their route.

"I think everyone in their mind thought, OK, great, this was a successful rally. A lot of people saw it, there were no injuries, nobody got hurt. Everything's fine,'" Wilson said.

Exactly what happened next - and why - is in dispute. According to Wilson, Corbin and several others who posted similar accounts to social media, the protesters continued to march peacefully through the streets back toward where the demonstration began, in the Midtown section of Omaha. Wilson said that the police appeared to continue escorting the group, just as they had done on the way downtown, blocking oncoming traffic as the protesters marched through the streets.

However, once the group marched onto the Farnam Street bridge, a highway overpass with both vehicle and pedestrian lanes just blocks from where the protest began, that changed.

Once "everyone was in the middle of the bridge, the police came and cut off the protesters from behind and from the front," said Wilson, adding that "This is not just regular police. They brought Omaha SWAT and gang unit members."

A spokesperson for the Omaha Police Department did not answer a request from Yahoo News to verify whether and why SWAT and gang unit officers were present at the scene.

Wilson said the officers "got very aggressive very quickly," tackling protests and firing more pepper balls into the crowd. One of the first to get hit was Mark Vondrasek, a progressive candidate for the Nebraska state legislature, who was riding his bike at the front of the crowd. In a Facebook post on Sunday, Vondrasek, whose bio identifies him as a registered Democrat and progressive socialist, accused the OPD of forcing the protesters into an enclosed environment in order to arrest them en masse.

"OPD decided to start with me personally, and tackled me while I was on my bicycle - I was shot at point blank range with pepper bullets before three officers body slammed me to the ground," Vondrasek wrote in his Facebook post that included a photo of his bruised and bloodied face and torso. "My face was slammed onto the ground at least twice, and my nose bled profusely. The officers knew who I was and kept saying 'That's Vondrasek,' like I was a prize they had won."

According to police records obtained by Yahoo News, Vondrasek was charged with resisting arrest in addition to charges of obstructing traffic and unlawful assembly that most of the others also received.

Omaha Police Capt. Mark Matuza explained the rationale for the arrests, stating that while the event had started peacefully, it "leaned toward the potential of getting violent," according to a report published Sunday by the Omaha World-Herald.

A spokesperson for the Omaha Police Department told Yahoo News on Monday that the total number of people arrested in relation to the protest was 120. Per the spokesperson, "110 were charged with failure to disperse, one charged with negligent driving, six charged with obstructing officers, 112 charged with obstructing passage, four charged with resisting arrest and 11 charged with unlawful assembly."

Asked to clarify why Saturday's gathering had been deemed unlawful, the spokesperson cited a city ordinance defining unlawful assembly.

"It shall be unlawful for any two or more persons to assemble in this city with the intent to commit an unlawful act, or, being assembled, to mutually agree to act in concert to commit an unlawful act with force or violence against any public or private property or to the annoyance or injury of others," the text of the ordinance states.

Local ABC affiliate KETV reportedly received a similar explanation from OPD, but with a notable addition: "The protesters started walking in the street against the direction of traffic, then there were announcements made advising the crowd that they were unlawfully assembling before arrests were made."

According to a timeline of events released by Omaha Police late Wednesday, officers at the scene gave protesters "at least 10 clearly audible warnings" starting at 8:50 p.m., approximately 10 minutes after the group began leaving the park and started marching downtown. "Most of the group disregarded the warnings and continued to violate the law," OPD said.

Per the police timeline, protesters were seen "walking eastbound in the westbound one-way traffic on Farman Street at 29th Street and appear to be occupying all lanes" which, they noted, is a violation of the law. The police timeline states that once all of the protesters were on the highway overpass, they received additional warnings both verbally from a sergeant on scene. "This is an unlawful assembly, you are under arrest," OPD said the protesters were told over a public address system.

"On-scene command made the decision to book the involved parties into jail out of fear that disturbances and potential further criminal activity would continue in the downtown area if they were cited and released," the statement released by police Wednesday added.

Wilson, who witnessed the protest from the sidewalk, recalled first hearing an announcement about unlawful assembly from a parked police SUV that he passed in front of earlier in the evening, as the protesters were still making their way downtown.

"I have no way of knowing if those down on the street who were chanting and protesting could even hear the announcements," he said, noting that the police continued to escort the protesters through the streets for roughly an hour or so after that first announcement.

"Why would you allow us to walk all the way back to where our cars were and then trap us there?" Corbin asked. He said that if the police made any announcements to disperse before the group had reached the bridge, he did not hear them.

Using his cellphone, Corbin streamed the melee on the bridge live on Facebook. In the video, various armed officers, some in all black, others in camouflage pants and bulletproof vests, can be seen forcefully scuffling with protesters and firing pepper balls. Eventually, protesters and others (including Wilson and several people wearing press badges) were made to sit on the street, their hands zip-tied behind their backs, before they were arrested.

Like Wilson, Corbin said, the journalists' attempts to communicate to police their role as observers, not participants, fell on deaf ears.

According to the Omaha World-Herald, police stated that just "one pepper ball was deployed," a claim contradicted by the accounts of many of those who were present, including Corbin, who said that he was hit in the stomach with them several times.

After being forced to sit on the bridge with their hands bound for two hours, Wilson said police moved the group to the Douglas County Correctional Center.

"Once we got inside, conditions were not good," Wilson said, recalling the hours waiting to be processed that he spent in the jail's hot and overcrowded holding tanks. At one point, he was put in a cell for at least an hour with 43 other men that he estimates was designed for a capacity of less than half that number.

"As someone who is interning at the federal public defender's office, one thing I work on is compassionate release cases due to COVID," Wilson said, explaining that he was acutely aware of how much of "a tinderbox of illness prisons and jails are."

In a phone interview, Michael Myers, director of corrections for Douglas County, conceded that Douglas County Correctional Center was "just not built" to handle Saturday's influx.

"It's only been in 2020 where we've had mass arrests," said Myers, referring to the large numbers of protesters who've been hauled into jail following large demonstrations and civil unrest over the last few months. "Nobody working here, no matter how long, has ever seen a time like this."

Myers said that he and his staff received little warning about possible mass arrests on Saturday night, and when Omaha police began bringing people in close to midnight, the facility's computer system was about to begin a planned system outage that further slowed processing.

"I'll admit it was heartbreaking," Myers said of what turned out to be a 12-hour delay. "To have all these people wait outside for their loved ones and having very little immediate impact on that was very frustrating."

As for specific concerns about coronavirus exposure, Myers said that all inmates are typically provided with a clean mask upon arrival at the jail, and noted that, since April, the Department of Corrections has urged its criminal justice partners to help mitigate the spread of coronavirus within the jail by booking as few people as possible. Both Corbin and Wilson confirmed to Yahoo News that they were provided with a mask upon entering the jail. For the most part, Myers said, the Omaha Police Department has been pretty helpful with that effort, noting that they've been doing a lot more "citing and releasing" of people instead of bringing them straight to jail.

"I don't want to throw OPD under the bus, because they typically do the right thing," said Myers. "I don't know what happened Saturday night."

A spokesperson for the OPD did not respond to a question about why, given the pandemic, police did not simply issue citations to protesters on Saturday night instead of bringing them all to the jail. OPD also did not explain why the Department of Corrections was not given advance warning about the likely onslaught of arrests.

Inside the jail, Wilson said there was speculation among some of those who had been arrested that the police's aggressive response to Saturday's demonstration might be part of an effort to discourage further protest activity.

"We support peaceful, lawful protests, but if it is no longer peaceful or within the guidelines of the law, we may have to intervene," a spokesperson for the OPD told Yahoo News in an email.

Corbin and Wilson both told Yahoo News that the actions of the Omaha police on Saturday have only reinforced their respective reasons for being at the protest in the first place.

Wilson also said he hopes that the weekend's events might offer a new perspective for those who tend to dismiss participants of this particular movement as violent and destructive.

"So often it gets boiled down to, 'I don't disagree with what they're saying, I just wish they would be peaceful,'" he said, arguing that the aggressive police response to Saturday's peaceful demonstration is the perfect counterpoint to that argument. "This should outrage you to your core, because this is a prime example of that."