Looking back at the US Riots/Protests of 2020

[Xing]

This isn’t about debating the issues that sparked the protests and riots of 2020. This is about finding where in the US there was unrest, and how large. I’m asking mostly, because I was in a town that hugged Riverside California, and I was amazed at the time how widespread the unrest was.


I’m finding some maps, but the details are limited.

For example, in the area I was in, there were protests in Riverside, but no rioting. We had visited the protests out of curiosity, and observed the handling of the protest by the police. We also observed the crowd. Riverside was lucky, in that it was only protesting, but San Bernardino wasn’t so lucky. They definitely saw rioting. Long Beach, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, and even smaller satellite towns like Upland, saw some untested. It really seemed like the unrest was everywhere.

I haven’t seen much info on which places were hit hardest, and how far out the protests went.

There is this:

https://www.creosotemaps.com/blm2020/

[Steely Dan]

Just a note to the usual suspect axe-grinders:

Expect your posts to disappear if you don't follow the instructions in Xing's first sentence.

[iheartthed]

How is "riot" defined? Many people have conflated protesting with rioting. The 2020 rioting in NYC was mild by NY's historical standards, but the protests were massive.

[EastSideHBG]

I was inadvertently in the middle of it all here in Philly and saw the Starbucks kiosk go up in flames near City Hall and it escalated from there. City and State police vehicles were flipped over and some burned and there was a lot of damage and looting that spread out into some neighborhoods that lasted for about eight days (but protests did last for weeks and there were still some unfortunate incidents). It took a while for me to be able to get out of Center City on that day and with the pandemic still being felt and then seeing this it was all very surreal. Here's a breakdown of the timeline and some news from that time:

https://6abc.com/philadelphia-news-p...-fire/6221141/

https://billypenn.com/2021/05/28/phi...ests-timeline/









Even Philly Elmo got involved

[llamaorama]

I would be skeptical of that data, what counts as a riot?

If a couple people split off during a protest to break a storefront window is that now a riot? Also if this happens on the evening of day 1, and then in the morning of day 2 it happens, does it count as a second riot? The pictures of Philly are dramatic but at the end of the day the actual damage wouldn't be that profound? A few vehicles, building facades on a few streets, a starbucks kiosk?

I think looking back only a few cities had really massive property damage where large structures were destroyed and the city was shut down for an extended period of time resulting other disruptions, and even then it was still at a neighborhood scale. Seattle, Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, stand out.

For example, this shows there were riot incidents in Houston. However very little actually happened in Houston in 2020. I think a T-Mobile somewhere around downtown got vandalized. The George Floyd funeral happened in Pearland, which is a low density sprawl burb where there is nowhere for people to riot to begin with.

[The North One]

What counts as a battle/riot??

Detroit didn't even have a single storefront window broken during this time, there was zero rioting. So there shouldn't be any speck of orange there.

Obviously Minneapolis had it the worst. It was basically akin to LA's 1992 riots, maybe worse.

[pdxtex]

Portland should be its own case study simply for the duration and breadth of events. Id estimate events in earnest lasted all the way to Halloween of that year. All I will say is in this city, when you shut down society and schools, especially with summer approaching, expect terrible results. The apple store downtown still has a 20 ft high security perimeter surrounding it. The covid riots of 2020 is a more apt name as there were multiple topics being protested. People traveled here from across the country to protest and fight the cops.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by The North One

Obviously Minneapolis had it the worst. It was basically akin to LA's 1992 riots, maybe worse.

Based on media reports, I'd say it was either Seattle or Portland.

[The North One]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Based on media reports, I'd say it was either Seattle or Portland.

I'd put them a very close 2nd and 3rd. But not worse. Unless PNW riots had worse violence/deaths I'm unaware of. In terms of physical destruction, Minneapolis was definitely the king.

[tdawg]

It's so crazy because I was in Alabama most of the summer of 2020 dealing with the passing of my parents and was so tuned out of what was happening. I missed everything that happened in NYC but remember going into Midtown for the first time after I got back and being pretty shocked at how much was boarded up on Madison and Fifth, and of course we were still in lockdown so the empty streets added to the eeriness.

[pdxtex]

For the most part, there was no action in Portland that couldn't be cleaned up the next day. It was mostly violent melees but not permanent property destruction. The wildest sh!t that happened was on the separate indigenous day of rage. Protesters backed up a van and pulled down a giant statue of Teddy Roosevelt. There were at least 10 separate counter protests too which for the most part were ridiculous. One incident stands out and resulted in one of the Trump supporters getting murdered downtown. There were also protests and sit in at an ICE facility south of downtown but were not that disruptive.

[TWAK]

I think that "event type" separates it well enough, so as to make it that protest doesn't equal riot. People standing around chanting or having signs in no way should count as a riot.
I figure it would get tricky when people are engaged by the police or counter protesters when they aren't doing anything bad.
-there were counter protests up here, so the opposite to what the OG protests were about (can't tell if it's shown on the map).

[dave8721]

There were no "riots" in Miami but it has an Orange dot. No riots that I know of in Florida but lots of orange dots. Nothing like the destructive riots of 1980 or 1989 (or basically any random day in the 80's it seems).

[mhays]

Seattle's main thing was taking over some blocks on Capitol Hill. It wasn't destruction per se, though a lot of graffiti was involved.

[tablemtn]

Originally Posted by The North One

I'd put them a very close 2nd and 3rd. But not worse. Unless PNW riots had worse violence/deaths I'm unaware of. In terms of physical destruction, Minneapolis was definitely the king.

Seattle's protests were surprisingly violent. There were the two shooting deaths (and multiple other injuries) at the CHAZ site, along with the two girls run over while playing on the freeway, in addition to various other shootings near or at the margins of protests. Another city with a surprising amount of violence was Charlotte, where a single incident at a protest the (Beatties Ford Road shooting) killed 4 people and left more than a dozen others wounded. The last time I checked, the case was still unsolved.

The biggest legacy of the whole summer was probably the massive rise in the national murder rate relative to 2019, which continues today. It can't be described as a 'spike,' since spikes fall back down to where they began. It was more like a sharp uplift followed by a plateau which is sloping very gradually downwards. 2019 had around 16,500 criminal homicide cases; 2020 pushed that number close to 22,000, and it remains near that level. The US has around 17,000 additional homicides relative to 2019's murder rate so far.

Portland is actually a good example of this trend. It went from 14 homicide cases in 2016 to 101 cases in 2022. 2020 was the year that things got sharply worse for the city, and they simply haven't gotten better.

[craigs]

Originally Posted by The North One

Obviously Minneapolis had it the worst. It was basically akin to LA's 1992 riots, maybe worse.

While Minneapolis suffered the worst of the rioting in 2020, it was nowhere near as bad as the 1992 riots in Los Angeles.

According to Wikipedia entries for both riots, the riots in Minneapolis in 2020 resulted in two deaths; no total for injuries is given. The 1992 LA riots resulted in 63 deaths and 2,383 injuries. Some 604 people were arrested in Minneapolis in the 2020 riots, while more than 12,000 people were arrested in the 1992 LA riots. And in terms of property damage and destruction, the Wikipedia entry for the 2020 Minneapolis rioting states that was "the second-most destructive period of local unrest in United States history, after the 1992 Los Angeles riots."

[craigs]

Originally Posted by tablemtn

Seattle's protests were surprisingly violent. There were the two shooting deaths (and multiple other injuries) at the CHAZ site, along with the two girls run over while playing on the freeway, in addition to various other shootings near or at the margins of protests. Another city with a surprising amount of violence was Charlotte, where a single incident at a protest the (Beatties Ford Road shooting) killed 4 people and left more than a dozen others wounded. The last time I checked, the case was still unsolved.

The biggest legacy of the whole summer was probably the massive rise in the national murder rate relative to 2019, which continues today. It can't be described as a 'spike,' since spikes fall back down to where they began. It was more like a sharp uplift followed by a plateau which is sloping very gradually downwards. 2019 had around 16,500 criminal homicide cases; 2020 pushed that number close to 22,000, and it remains near that level. The US has around 17,000 additional homicides relative to 2019's murder rate so far.

Murder rates were higher in 2020 than in 2019 from the very start, and the spike in murders began months before the George Floyd killing, correlating almost perfectly with the onset of the pandemic and attendant restrictions. That said, murders definitely increased even more after the police killing of Floyd.

[UrbanImpact]

Originally Posted by dave8721

There were no "riots" in Miami but it has an Orange dot. No riots that I know of in Florida but lots of orange dots. Nothing like the destructive riots of 1980 or 1989 (or basically any random day in the 80's it seems).

There was in Fort Lauderdale:
• Video Link

[hauntedheadnc]

I did a photo thread of the aftermath in Asheville, and some of the things I noted in that thread are still what shake me when I think back. People were driving around downtown Asheville shooting at protestors and shooting out store windows. There were clashes in Pack Square that involved the police using tear gas, and there were photos in the paper of tendrils of tear gas snaking under the belly of the bronze pig in the square. There were photos of people attacking each other with a big banner advertising the spring flowers at Biltmore House. It was jarring -- Asheville adverstises itself as a happy tourist city where people's problems don't follow them and where, unlike someplace like Vegas or Myrtle Beach, it's hard to get into trouble that will follow you home.

This is bullshit, of course, but it's still shocking when even the ability to pretend is ripped away. It was like getting slapped by your spouse, who's never shown any tendency toward violence ever before.

[badrunner]

Originally Posted by Xing

For example, in the area I was in, there were protests in Riverside, but no rioting. We had visited the protests out of curiosity, and observed the handling of the protest by the police. We also observed the crowd. Riverside was lucky, in that it was only protesting, but San Bernardino wasn’t so lucky. They definitely saw rioting. Long Beach, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, and even smaller satellite towns like Upland, saw some untested. It really seemed like the unrest was everywhere.

SoCal experienced the most widespread rioting and looting in 2020. On the plus side, it wasn't as violent as it was in other cities (no loss of life) and the area seems to have bounced back pretty strong since then. Perhaps it wasn't as big of a shock to the system here due to the experience of the (much more violent and intense) riots in 1992.