The Room Where It Happened

Derrick Ingramam is still shut inside the hell’s kitchen apartment the police tried to invade.

- By Adrienne Green

On August 7, 2020, NYPD officers surrounded the home of Derrick Ingram, a co-founder of the activist group Warriors in the Garden, who had been accused of yelling into an officer’s ear with a megaphone at a June protest. After a five-hour standoff, which Ingram live-streamed on Instagram, the officers left without arresting him. The next day, Ingram turned himself into the police, who would charge him with third-degree assault (later reduced to a misdemeanor). Ingram denied that any assault took place; the charges against him were dismissed this month.

On what led to the standoff:

Last summer, we were at a protest in Bayside, Queens. My organization, Warriors in the Garden, had been requested by BLM Bayside, which is a small group of majority-white suburban soccer moms, and there were a lot of police. Across from us was a Blue Lives Matter counterprotest. There were racial slurs being thrown at us. I was spit on and kicked. Some of us decided to file complaints because of the cops’ refusal to address those assaults. A couple of weeks later, I led another protest in Manhattan with thousands of people. As officers attempted to barricade us, I began to chant on my megaphone. I didn’t think anything of it because within five minutes they let us continue through Times Square.