Ryan Grim on the attacks on journalists at protests around the country

Intercept D.C. bureau chief Ryan Grim addressed Amazon’s statement of support for protests in response to the death of George Floyd, saying there was a “real concern among Amazon executives that these uprisings are going to disrupt how they can conduct business.”

Grim, in a Hill.TV interview Monday, said the retail giant’s leadership had a “Fight Club mentality,” adding “Amazon executives don’t know precisely who is out protesting and how many of those protesters overlap with people who work for Amazon,” noting that the company had some of the most “draconian” employment policies and suggesting the company feared the spirit of the protests spreading to its own workers.

Grim also addressed attacks on journalists by police during the protests, including the detention of CNN’s Omar Jimenez and his crew.

Grim called these incidents the “culmination of an immunity that police have felt for the last 10 to 20 years connected to the militarization of policing where rather than protecting and serving the ethos of a police officer often is ‘what do I need to do to get myself and my partners home safely at night,’ and any means toward that end then becomes justified and the civil population becomes just that, an ‘other,’ civilians that the are just rolling through and that they look at as threats.”

As a result, in seemingly threatening situations, he said, police “stop relying on their training around crowd control and just turn into rioters.”