“I want to acknowledge that many of the people present at press conference were white and I think that's why we were not immediately arrested and brutalized,” James says, citing examples of the way homeless folks in the subway have been treated by police and the way Black and brown residents have been overpoliced and threatened with social distancing arrests . “But I think many of us believe they came down on this group that was clearly social distancing and engaged in a First Amendment protected activity so hard because we had been so successful at gathering press coverage and putting spotlight on this issue and we had become more of a problem for the state in that sense.”