Though Carnival is celebrated across the Caribbean diaspora, in Brooklyn, it has exploded into a multi-day celebration of French- and English-speaking Caribbean music, food, and culture, culminating in a Labor Day parade on Eastern Parkway that's preceded by a party called J'ouvert until dawn. But because Brooklyn's Carnival is often "marred by violence," as the cliché goes, NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch promised "the largest police deployment of the year" at a Saturday press conference alongside Mayor Eric Adams, who has made a heavy NYPD presence at the parade and accompanying festivities one of his signature policies. Despite all those cops, police said that four shootings and one stabbing left seven people injured on the Parkway after the festival ended.
As the Carnival festivities began, I went out in Flatbush to see what celebrants thought about the increased NYPD presence and whether it's affected the vibe of the parade, where Caribbean Brooklyners celebrate the long weekend and the end of summer with flamboyant traditional costumes, face-paint, and children's steel pan (on the more wholesome end of the spectrum), and raunchy dancing and binging on alcohol (on the other).
I spent the weekend walking up and down Flatbush Avenue—I guess I spend a lot of weekends like that, but this time I was interviewing people. That's where I saw Marlon, who works at Blink Fitness, and who told me Friday that the heavy NYPD presence is just a fact of attending J'ouvert now—but that he was still looking forward to going. "It's definitely very different from when, like, my mom was going," Marlon said. "The way she talks about it, it was all night partying outside." Now, he said, people mainly go to house parties all night and then spill out into the street at dawn, heading towards the designated parade route on Nostrand Avenue, which is guarded by police barricades where NYPD officers conduct searches before entry.
I ran into Marlon again as I was walking down Flatbush Avenue on Sunday evening. Large speakers playing soca music had been put out in front of Caribbean American businesses, but I noticed that none of the advertised, ticketed parties on Labor Day weekend involved partying in the neighborhood in preparation for the parade; one was all the way in Maspeth. Since Marlon was too young to remember, I turned to slightly older Flatbush resident Melissa, who I met outside of IYKYK Gaming, her gaming café on Flatbush. She said she's always called Brooklyn home, so I asked her if she's noticed that these days J'ouvert is very…
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