NYPD removed ‘troublemakers’ from George Floyd protests in Manhattan

Police arrested 72 people — five for felony assaults on cops — during heated demonstrations in Lower Manhattan over the police-involved death of George Floyd in Minnesota, a top NYPD official said Friday morning.

The NYPD was out in force “to take the troublemakers out of the group” as dozens gathered Thursday at one of many nationwide demonstrations after Floyd, who was black, was killed by police while being arrested in Minneapolis Monday, Chief of Department Terence Monahan said in a WPIX interview.

The demonstrators first gathered in Union Square before heading down to the steps of City Hall and then to the World Trade Center site.

One cop was hurt when a garbage can was hurled at him, Monahan said in a WPIX interview. Malik Taylor, 26, busted in connection to that incident, according to police sources.

A sergeant and a deputy inspector were thrown to the ground — the former suffering a concussion and the latter with a shoulder and back injury, he said.

Another inspector was punched in the face, and someone tried to grab a gun from a captain, according to Monahan.

“This group last night was bent on confronting the police and fighting with the police,” Monahan said. “Unlike the 99.9 percent of demonstrations … which are peaceful and people go out there and try to express their opinions — which we 100 percent support — last night’s group was bent on confronting, throwing bottles at the police, throwing garbage cans, throwing highway cones, garbage through the streets, taking over the highway.”

The NYPD’s handling of the protest drew criticism from Patrick Gaspard, a long-term confidante of Mayor Bill de Blasio and the president of Open Society Foundations. He retweeted a video of cops grabbing hold of one man, as throngs of his fellow protesters try to intervene.

“Look at this video,” Gaspard wrote. “Why are these cops all focused on this one protester? Why are police deployed in this way in a damn pandemic? How could leadership have not managed for and anticipated this tension after Minneapolis??”

Another video shows an officer using his bike to hold back protesters.

During the deadly incident in Minneapolis on Monday, now-fired Officer Derek Chauvin, 44, who is white, is shown on video ignoring pleas from Floyd, 46, who was black, to let him breathe while he is handcuffed on the ground.

Floyd became unresponsive and was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

“This is an incident that happens in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a cop who’s basically caused 800,000 law enforcement officers across the country to have to pay the price for his actions,” Monahan said.

Additional reporting by Tina Moore