Drop the charges. City should be thanking protesters, not punishing them.

For nearly the entire summer of 2020, Lexington’s Black Lives Matter protests were a model for the country.

Night after night, protesters tirelessly and peacefully marched through downtown streets, demanding justice for all Black and brown victims of police brutality in general and for Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in particular. Police brutality against people of color is a crime that many white people did not acknowledge until the existence of cell phone videos that showed how prevalent it was all over the nation.

The BLM protesters further educated the Lexington community willing to listen about racism, income inequality, educational disparities and centuries of oppression. Mayor Linda Gorton gave them credit for the creation of the Commission on Racial Justice and Equality, which has since provided a blueprint for our city moving forward.

The Lexington Police Department also did a good job at staying calm in many volatile situations, until they apparently lost patience and decided to start arresting protesters.

Now, according to a story by Morgan Eads, six protesters will be in court on Thursday to face numerous charges, from inciting a riot to resisting arrest to disorderly conduct. They had tentative jury trial dates set for August.

As Lexington was a model for protests, it is now time for the city, the police and the County Attorney to follow the lead of other cities and drop all but the most severe charges against protesters. Inciting a riot, disorderly conduct? Unlike many, many other places, Lexington’s protesters kept their eyes on the prize and did not devolve into random violence or property damage.

The local chapter of the NAACP has called for charges to be dropped and a petition on Change.org calling for the charges to be dropped had been signed more than 4,300 times as of Wednesday afternoon.

As one protester, Sarah Williams, said: “They’ve targeted us and trumped up these charges because they don’t like that we’re demanding change.

“Our police force needs to be accountable to the public and transparent about what they do and why. Right now, they only answer to themselves. They’re trying to intimidate us into backing off.”

A lawyer for the defendants, Daniel Whitley, told Eads he could not understand why the city would want to waste the money prosecuting protesters.

“We have cases that involve real victims that are dismissed every day,” he said. “Their cases honestly only involve the police. It is truly unfortunate the judicial system is being used as a tool to punish individuals for exposing the inequalities in the business of policing.”

We know that our criminal justice system is deeply flawed and often punishes people of color when white people are let off for far more serious charges. Instead of prosecuting the protesters, we ought to thank them for their dedication to opening this community’s eyes. They fought against injustice, they should not be victims of it.

Drop the charges.

This story was originally published February 4, 2021 at 9:06 AM.