Why Vehicle Attacks Against Protesters Are Rising

Drivers have repeatedly targeted George Floyd demonstrations with vehicle ramming attacks — a lethal terror tactic fueled in part by far-right memes.

Hundreds of protesters who occupied a highway in Minneapolis on Sunday faced a harrowing moment when a tanker truck came barreling toward them. In a widely shared video of the incident, the crowd of people on I-35 parts like the river as they realize that the truck wouldn’t be stopping.

On Tuesday afternoon, the driver of that truck was released from jail. A full investigation is still pending, but Minnesota authorities don’t believe that he was trying to actively terrorize the protesters — he just panicked.

Demonstrators who thought they were being targeted had a very good reason to fear the worst. Over the weekend, there were at least 12 incidents of drivers using their cars to ram into crowds of protesters. Drivers behind vehicle-ramming attacks were arrested at protests in Pasadena and San Jose in California and Portland in Maine. One driver was arrested in Detroit for using his car to target police officers. In four cities, law-enforcement officers themselves were behind the wheel, including one now-notorious incident in New York in which two police cruisers plowed through a crowd of demonstrators in Brooklyn.

These incidents suggest that ramming attacks could be a new feature of mass protests in the United States. Using cars and trucks as instruments of terror is already a technique that’s been used extensively globally. Lately, it’s been adopted and honed in the U.S. — particularly by white supremacists.

“This is a tactic that has been encouraged on the right as a response to street-blocking protests,” says Ari Weil, deputy research director at the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats. “In that sense, we should have been prepared for this with a mass protest here.”

Weil studied vehicle ramming attacks as part of his research for his master’s degree at the University of Chicago. Between 1999 and 2017, he says, there were three major waves of vehicle ramming attacks: Palestinian nationalists in the occupied Palestinian territories, as part of the “Knife Intifada,” from 2015 to 2017; jihadists in Western Europe and the U.S., in 2016 and 2017; and the far right, in Western Europe and North America, from 2016 on. Using data from the Global Terrorism Database, Weil identified 127 vehicle ramming attacks over this period — 83% of which were committed by lone operators acting independently of any organization.

Weil says waves of these attacks in different places have followed a pattern: There’s a first mover, then a flood of support online for the attacker, then a spike in copycat incidents. For the most part, the lone actors behind these attacks are responding to other attacks or to propaganda, Weil says. Among the U.S. far right, trolls and meme-lords on Twitter, Reddit, 4chan, and other message boards frequently encourage such attacks; Weil points to one meme in circulation that’s based on a State Farm TV ad. As protests against police violence escalated in the last week, right-wing conservative media figures Matt Walsh and Steven Crowder both shared posts on Twitter to note that their sympathies strongly lie with the driver in any hypothetical vehicle ramming scenario.

Most vehicle ramming attacks aren’t fatal, which means that when drivers do kill protesters or pedestrians, they gain even more prominence. The backdrop to the current wave of attacks is the 2017 murder of Heather Heyer, who was killed by a neo-Nazi driver when he smashed into protesters opposing a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Instead of distancing their cause from her murder, Walsh and Crowder and others in the movement fantasize openly about future vehicle ramming attacks. Famously, President Donald Trump looked on this scene of carnage and observed that there are “very fine people on both sides.”

It’s too soon to  say whether any of the vehicle ramming attacks happening now can be directly linked to white supremacist propaganda, in part because few assailants have been apprehended. Police in Denver are still searching for the driver who slammed into demonstrators last week, for example. New York City has opened an investigation into the police officers who tried to mow down protesters with their vehicles, but Mayor Bill de Blasio has already stepped forward to blame the protesters. This, even though a voice could be heard on the NYPD scanner saying “Run them over” — a mantra for the far right, according to Weil.

As chaotic scenes of violent unrest unfolded around the country, cops were the targets of assaults with vehicles as well. Three officers were injured in Buffalo on Monday when the driver of a Ford Explorer smashed through a law enforcement blockade. The driver, a woman who was apparently shot at some point in the evening, has been charged with multiple felonies; she is recovering in a hospital. Her motives remain unknown.    

There may be other factors that help to explain the uptick in vehicle ramming attacks. Over the first seven months of 2017, state legislators in six states — North Dakota, Tennessee, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and Rhode Island — introduced laws to shield drivers who hit protesters from civil suits. None of those laws passed, but that has done little to dissuade right-wing cheerleaders of vehicle attacks. For others, the act itself might hold a perverse attraction, according to researchers Vincent Miller and Keith J. Hayward.

“Vehicle ramming is a cheap but extremely effective way of inducing fear, promoting an ideological message, or just simply wreaking destruction for any number of personal reasons, suicide included,” they write in The British Journal of Criminology.

None of this is good news for demonstrators in cities across the country entering into a second week of protests over the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others killed by police. During these demonstrations, police are supposed to be the front lines to protect protesters against violent white terrorists (and other would-be vehicle rammers). But police are the subject of the protests; at best their resources are strained, and at worst they’re the ones ramming into protesters. In at least five incidents so far, police have used their vehicles to target protesters marching to oppose police brutality — in New York, Richmond, Los Angeles (twice), and Lakeland, Florida, according to observers.

There’s not an obvious policy answer at hand. Globally, open-air markets, street festivals, and pedestrianized promenades such as Las Ramblas in Barcelona have proven to be the most tempting targets of vehicle ramming attacks. Groups of people waiting at bus stops are another potential target, according to San José State University’s Brian Michael Jenkins and Bruce R. Butterworth; Israel has fortified bus stops and stations as a result. British authorities installed the so-called “Ring of Steel” around the City of London, a cordon of barriers and surveillance stations to prevent Irish Republican Army truck bombs from reaching the financial district.

Most solutions offered by city leaders after acts of vehicular terrorism involve installing physical barriers to better separate cars from other other road users. But in U.S. cities where automotive infrastructure is so dominant, any street space claimed for protest will be innately vulnerable to drivers intent on doing harm.

“There’s certainly discussion about online radicalization,” Weil says. “But about [vehicle ramming attacks] specifically, there’s not much talk about how to stop this.”