4:10 p.m. in West Philadelphia, one minute after dispatch noted that pepper spray was going to be used on 52nd Street and Market. (Photo anonymously provided)

4:14 p.m.: Police declared the crowd at 52nd Street and Market an unlawful assembly, threatening to arrest anyone who remained. Civil affairs headed to 53rd Street with bullhorns to disperse the crowd, but the expressed goal remained unchanged: Secure the intersection of 52nd and Market Street and the fleet of vehicles parked along 52nd Street.

In effect, law enforcement consisting of PPD, University of Pennsylvania Police, Drexel Police, University of Science Police and Philadelphia Housing Authority Police, declared war on the neighborhood.

For the next several hours, officers terrorized residents in an alleged attempt to protect against looting. They protected nothing. They violently and indiscriminately assaulted whoever crossed their field of vision.

According to Resident A, police wantonly attacked residents several blocks south of Market Street, deploying tear gas and pepper spray gratuitously. Disoriented residents tried to return to their homes or flee from areas that had been drenched with gas, while police shot rubber bullets at people in the streets, on their door steps and front porches. Resident A helped an elderly woman who had been shot in that manner and stumbled onto her doorstep on Chancellor Street.

West Philadelphia Resident C arrived at 52nd and Arch around 6:30 p.m. The crowd had thinned but approximately 50 cops secured the area and turned this into an evening sport.

Cops allowed people to progress south toward Market Street and then in lined formation drove them north, chanting MOVE back, MOVE back, MOVE back. They repeated the charade over and over, not letting anyone through. A mother who was trying to return home with her four children, two of whom were infants, was refused passage.

Looting never concerned the police. The rallying cry of the protesters Whose streets? Our streets! guided their actions. The cops were taking back the streets that day.

Subsequently, Philadelphia leadership admitted their powerlessness, insisting that more boots on the ground would have preserved order. They failed to realize that their understanding of order was the cause for protest in the first place. On June 25, Mayor Kenney referred to the events in West Philadelphia as extremely violent. Kenney was not mistaken, but he got the perpetrators mixed up and empowered an already violent mob to deploy less than lethal munitions against the people he was elected to serve.

While much as been made his apology for tear-gassing protesters on I-676 the following day, no one seemed to take note of Commissioner Outlaws concession that the city was utterly unprepared for these protests and that the response was not adequate. Outlaw admitted she would have liked far more personnel than we had on that day.

West Philly Police were not prepared to wait for the National Guard to reverse their sense of disempowerment. Instead, retaliated against a predominantly Black community while media cameras were fixed on Center City.

The history of over-policing, Penntrification, and criminalization of West Phillys Black community is ongoing.

Last July, police rallied in the name of Justice for Daniel Faulkner, while the man wrongfully, as many claim convicted for murder, Mumia Abu Jamal, remains locked up. The cops who killed 11 members of the MOVE family returned to their lives.

As Angela Davis notes, race has always played a central role in constructing presumptions of criminality. Lately, cops buddied up with club-swinging vigilantes in South Philly and Fishtown and the Police Union partied with the Proud Boys. Blackness continues to be criminalized. In light of these continuities, the MOVE bombing, police violence, and gentrification have no chance of retreating to memory, let alone of becoming history.

The stories told about May 31, 2020, illustrate how noise shapes the facts we see.

Historians look for silences in the record and foreground what is not immediately visible. This article, then, is not a news report. It is a history of a day in May in a city that once fire-bombed its own people.

Anne Berg is an assistant professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Opinion How police tear gassed West Philly - WHYY