Chicago Police Pepper Spray Mostly Peaceful Protesters without Warning (May 30th, 2020)

Raw, unedited footage from between 6 and 7 P.M. on Saturday, May 30th, 2020, at the intersection of State & Wacker (the foot of Trump Tower) in Chicago, Illinois.Show more

Nineteen seconds into this video, we see a police officer begin to pepper-spray protesters, without giving any advance voice warning that the crowd should disperse.

This is followed by the sound of the crowd screaming. Other members of the crowd were heard gasping and saying "what the fuck", after pepper spray rounds were launched, seemingly without cause.

The only "provocations" to which the police could have been responding, were the two activists who walked within 10 or 15 feet of the officer, and the various individual protesters whom had been lobbing full water bottles at the officers several minutes prior.

However, as we can see from this video, the last water bottle had been thrown at least NINETEEN SECONDS before the pepper spraying began (maybe longer; other people's footage of this same incident will have to be reviewed to make that determination). Moreover, police were dressed in full riot gear and were well-protected.

These "provocateurs" had MUCH less fire-power than the police, and were much more hesitant to use it. And if protesters did do something provocative before this video began (aside from throwing water bottles), then the police had at least nineteen seconds to respond and did nothing.

Comment on human rights and who started the fight:

The use of pepper spray, especially against one's own people - and at a mostly peaceful protest, and without warning, at that - is a serious human rights violation, because it is a form of chemical warfare. Pepper spraying is absolutely NOT the appropriate response to being hit with a few water bottles while fully dressed in protective riot gear.

Furthermore, those water bottles were arguably thrown defensively, because they were thrown after after police chased the crowd across the State Street Bridge (Bataan-Corregidor Memorial Bridge) and closed it, during which a woman was thrown off of the bridge. Two eyewitnesses I filmed on the scene stated that police threw a woman off of a bridge (although the footage of their statements was not included herein; they were two young African-American women who had been in the crowd that was chased off the bridge by police). Therefore the notion that the protesters initiated the conflict by throwing water bottles is false.

If the current U.S. government does not rejoin the United Nations Human Rights Council, then a new government must be formed in America which will respect human rights adequately (including the right of peaceable assembly for redress of grievances, and the right to be represented by a government deriving its just powers from the CONSENT of the governed).

Comment on events that took place prior to this video's starting point:

Police were not threatened, nor harmed, at any point during this video. Or at least, they weren't directly harmed, and weren't ever threatened BY PROTESTERS. HOWEVER, several minutes prior to this video's starting point, the police stopped on the State Street Bridge, and set off one or two small flash-bang grenades NEAR THEIR OWN OFFICERS.

That means it's likely that police are trying to fabricate attacks against themselves in order to justify violent crackdowns on activists. Police were filmed this weekend, in some American city (possibly Seattle), breaking shop windows. Considering this, and that looters in downtown Chicago were not chased by police, it's also likely that police WANT to encourage looting, because looting will encourage a crackdown (as Trump said, "when the looting starts, the shooting starts").

Please comment, especially if you have an eyewitness account (or, even better, original unedited raw video footage).

Video filmed on May 30th, 2020. Originally published in June 2020 under the title "Chicago Police Pepper-Spray Peaceful Protesters without Warning (May 30th, 2020)".