Fact Check: Did Boston Police damage their own car to blame on George Floyd protesters?
By Aiswarya Sriram Published on 2 Jun 2020 6:31 PM GMT
Hyderabad: Continuously for the sixth day violence in the United States is at peak due to the death of a black American George Floyd. A video went viral where a Minneapolis police officer is seen kneeling over Floyd and Floyd ultimately dying due to breathlessness.
Amid these protests a video is being virally shared on social media saying that in Boston, the Boston police damaged their own car to blame it on protestors. One of the posts shared by a twitter user Aisha read, "boston cops breaking their own car windows. What's the excuse for this one?
You can view the archived tweet here. The video was shared by many twitter users with different captions blaming the cops for injecting violence.
The tweet has been archived.
Fact Check
Extracting certain key frames from the video we did a reverse image search on Google, with keywords Boston cops destroying their own car. We found a video on Youtube, where it claims that the car was first destroyed by protestors and to drive it back the police broke the windshield. In the full video it can be seen that after breaking the windshield, the police drive it back.
The initial part of the YouTube video where the protests are seen breaking the police car was also shared by different people on Twitter. You can view the archived tweet here.
According to a report by news website wcvb.com, the Boston cops didn't destroy their own car and the video is misleading. The report quotes a police officer saying, "The officer wasn't able to drive it safely because they could not see out of the window. Their vision was impaired," said Boyle (Boston Police SGT). "The decision was made to remove a portion of the windshield so the officer could remove the vehicle without striking anybody."
The article also said, "5 Investigates obtained another video that shows the protesters had already caused heavy damage to the vehicle. They jumped on the vehicle and smashed the windshield."
Hence the claim that the Boston police broke their own car to blame it on protestors is FALSE. The car was already damaged by some protestors and the police just broke part of a windshield to drive it back.
