On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “The Story,” NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Operations Kaz Daughtry stated that the Columbia demonstrators “are kids” and “we are handling them with kid gloves, as you will say,” because they don’t want things to turn into a situation like in 2020, but “if they try to pull this rhetoric on the street or setting up encampments” that won’t happen.
Host Trace Gallagher stated, [relevant exchange begins around 5:15] “[I]t’s kind of one of those things where you have to walk a very fine line, because we remember back to the Black Lives Matter protests and the arrests that were made and then the lawsuits that were filed against the New York Police Department and the millions of dollars that NYPD had to pay out, and that’s why it seems like, sometimes, police officers are reticent to shut things down now like they used to five years ago.”
Daughtry responded, “You’re a thousand percent right. But we’ve got to take into consideration also, these are students, these are kids. And this is the — what we saw with George Floyd was totally different than what we’re seeing now. We don’t want it to get like how it [was] George Floyd, that’s why we are handling them with kid gloves, as you will say, but like Chief Chell says, if they try to pull this rhetoric on the street or setting up encampments, that is not going to happen, not as long as we are in a leadership position here in this city.”
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