CHIEF TOOK KNEE WITH BLACK LIVES MATTER PROTESTERS IN 2020.

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Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters descended on Rockefeller Center to disrupt the annual Christmas Tree lighting. They were stopped by the NYPD—but not without forcing a two-star NYPD chief to flee.

"Baby Killer!" and "Murderer!" angry protesters shouted at the chief as they chased him across 39th Street.

Stung by recent episodes where the NYPD was caught flat-footed responding to large public assemblies, the NYPD was on high alert for the protesters Wednesday night—who announced plans to "flood" the tree-lighting on the Internet on Monday. The protest  coincided with the UN-recognized International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.

Police have for years restricted public access to the public streets intersecting NBC's sprawling Rockefeller Center broadcast center for the now 91-year-old tree-lighting. Members of the public are only admitted if they submit to security screening. Once inside, they are forced by police and private security to stand in barricaded areas for the lighting.

On Wednesday evening, pro-Palestinian protesters gathered in midtown Manhattan beginning at 6pm. Police blocked off Sixth Avenue outside Rockefeller Center at 48th Street, creating a space for protesters to demonstrate.  Police closed down different streets at various times, blocking some people from getting to Rockefeller Center.

Curiously, the space the NYPD created for protesters was directly in front of News Corp world headquarters. The building, housing the right-wing New York Post and FOX News, is a favorite target of protesters.

Chanting “Free, free Palestine!,” demonstrators condemned as "genocide" Israel's military response to the Oct. 7 attack on its territory launched by Palestinian militia from the Gaza Strip. One protester held up a hand-painted sign with a Swastika equating the "Israeli Military" with the Nazi army. The Post published it on its front-page on Thursday.

While the NYPD allowed the protest, it kept protesters out of sight and sound of the tree-lighting itself. In other words, the NYPD kept them far enough away so that they would not be seen or heard by the NBC cameras capturing the festivities. To viewers of the live broadcast, it was as if the protest never happened.

Pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrate against Israel outside the 91st annual Rockefeller Center tree-lighting. Photo Credit: JB Nicholas.

Meanwhile, around the 80 foot-tall Norway Spruce inside Rockefeller Center, tree-watchers from all across New York, the Nation and even the world gradually filled the open-air plaza around the tree. A woman in a traditional Islamic head-covering stood defiantly at the front of one of the barricaded pens holding a small Palestinian flag aloft. Her daughters stood behind her. 

Two young men were removed from the secured zone inside the Center for shouting pro-Palestinian protest slogans. They were arrested and briefly placed in a police paddy wagon then released. 

Private NBC security guards also forcibly removed a Palestinian flag, a banner and a traditional Arab headdress called a Keffiyeh from audience members, Reuters news agency photographs show.

Back on the streets outside Rockefeller Center, protesters attempted to breach barricades blocking off the Jewish Diamond District block on 47th Street between 6th and 5th Avenues around 8pm. NYPD officers pushed the surging crowd back with metal police barricades and blasts of pepper spray. Several protesters were arrested.

The protest went mobile after that. It pinballed through midtown Manhattan for the next three-or-so hours. It went across 57th Street, down the gilded Fifth Avenue luxury shopping mile, through Times Square, around Grand Central Station on the elevated Park Avenue Viaduct then back to Rockefeller Center. 

Protesters burned an Israel flag at one point, while one man, alone, bearing an American flag confronted the protesters, he said, to "speak the truth" to them.

NYPD Assistant Chief James N. McCarthy found himself surrounded by a breakaway group of dozens of angry protesters with only two other police officers on 39th Street. And one of them was from the Department's Legal Bureau—not exactly known for its muscle.

One protester even slapped a sticker on the back of the legal officer without drawing a police response.

"Every time media lies a neighborhood in Gaza dies," the sticker read.

Protesters sensed the officers’ panic. It seemed to fuel their aggression.

A lieutenant from the NYPD’s Crowd Management Unit was the third officer present. He grabbed the chief by his jacket and led him out of danger.

Once the besieged NYPD officers reached 5th Avenue, they were met by a handful of bicycle-mounted officers from the NYPD's Strategic Response Group and the immediate danger seemed to pass. The chief attempted to engage the breakaway group in dialogue, but they continued to shout slogans making him responsible for Israel's killing of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip on the other side of the world.

That’s when an ACLU protest monitor appeared and yelled at the breakaway group to leave the officers alone and return to the main march.

“PULL IT BACK! PLEASE! JOIN THE PROTEST!,” she yelled. “YOU WANNA GET FUCKING HURT?!”

All the while, the NYPD field-tested its new drone fleet against the protesters. Not only is it testing the technology itself, it appears to be experimenting with and refining its drone tactics: how best to deploy them to cover roving protests.

The NYPD said "a total of 7 individuals were taken into custody, 5 misdemeanors, 1 felony, and 1 juvenile report. No summonses issued."

Assistant Chief McCarthy took a knee with NYPD Chief Terrance Monaghan during Black Lives Matter protests against the Minnesota police killing of George Floyd in 2020.

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