The Cincinnati police chief says viral videos of a downtown brawl involving several people have been taken out of context on social media, where they spread like wildfire among right-wing accounts and became a flashpoint for racial rhetoric.
The fight that took place in the early morning hours of July 26, shortly after a Cincinnati Reds baseball game and a music festival that drew more than 150,000 people to the downtown area.
Police were called to the scene at 3:06 a.m. and arrived at 3:12 a.m. to find the violence had ended and most of the participants had cleared out of the area, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported.
The now-viral cellphone footage that captured the fight showed several people repeatedly punching, kicking, and stomping a man.
In the moments before the violence erupted, one clip shows a man slapping another man, who is Black, in the face, setting off the altercation in which some people began swarming the man who threw the first blow.
In another video, a woman is seen trying to intervene and break up the fight, but she’s knocked unconscious to the ground, and blood is seen spilling from her mouth.
Other videos show the altercation initially taking place between two men. When bystanders intervene to separate them, one man is seen slapping the other, setting off the brawl.
It’s unclear what the parties involved were arguing about before the altercation escalated to a full-blown fight.
However, right-wing groups and elected officials have shared and politicized clips and images of the fight, attributing the violence to race, according to reports.
In the videos, the man seen landing the first hit is white, and the person he struck is Black, and most of the people involved in the brawl are also Black.
The video first made waves on the Signal99 Facebook page, an anonymous account that focuses on law enforcement in Cincinnati. A couple of hours later, Cincinnati mayoral candidate Cory Bowman, who is also Vice President JD Vance’s half-brother, shared the video and blamed the “incompetence” in the city’s leadership for the increase in violence in the city.
Soon after, several right-wing social media pages and politicians started labeling the Black individuals as a “mob” of “thugs” who beat up a white couple.
End Wokeness, a right-wing X account, shared the video with the caption, “A white couple was brutally beaten at a jazz festival by a black ‘teen mob’ in Cincinnati yesterday.”
Libs of TikTok, another conservative X account, also wrote: “HORRIFIC: White couple brutally beaten by black mob in Cincinnati with the woman being slammed to the concrete ground.”
Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist and the founder of Turning Point USA, wrote to his 5 million followers, “Arrest all the thugs who attacked whites for federal hate crimes.”
His post included a video clip of Vice President Vance’s remarks on the fight in which he said that he saw a “mob of lawless thugs beating up on an innocent person.”
Even tech magnate Elon Musk, the owner of X, posted the video on his profile, although he did not mention race. He wrote, “That guy almost killed this woman. Aggravated assault.”
Cincinnati Police Chief Theresa Theetge weighed in on the social media rhetoric, stating that the narratives that have surfaced lack context and have made it more complicated for her department to investigate the matter.
“Social media, the posts that we’ve seen, does not depict the entire incident. That is one version of what occurred,” Theetge said, adding that the commentaries that have emerged are misrepresentations of the circumstances. “What that does, that causes us some difficulty in thoroughly investigating the activity and enforcing the law. Because what happens, that social media post and your coverage of it distorts the content of what actually happened and it makes our job more difficult.”
She continued: “I think the irresponsibility with social media is that it just shows one side of the equation quite frequently, without context, without factual context, and then people run with that, and then it grows legs and it becomes something bigger that we then have to try to manage as part of the investigation.”
Police have charged five people so far and anticipate further arrests. The identities of the individuals taken into custody have not yet been released.
Theetge said that out of roughly 100 people who witnessed the fight, only one person called police. She said the fight was “a sudden dispute between individuals following a verbal altercation,” but did not say what exactly caused the altercation.
Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval also clarified that the fight wasn’t connected to any of the events happening in the downtown area over the weekend.
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