Riley Dowell, the 23-year-old daughter of House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), was arrested on Saturday night during anti-police protests on Boston Common. Dowell is accused of tagging the Parkman Bandstand Monument with “NO COP CITY” and “ACAB,” and was arraigned on multiple charges in municipal court on Monday.
Dowell was spray-painting the bandstand when police arrived, according to a Boston Police Department release that deadnamed Dowell, who is nonbinary. When the officers attempted to arrest Dowell, about 20 other protesters started to, well, protest. They screamed at cops through megaphones at the cops and stopped traffic. Police allege that a protester hit one of the officers so hard that they “could be seen bleeding from the nose and mouth.”
Dowell has been charged with vandalizing property, vandalizing a historic marker/monument, assault and battery on a police officer, and resisting arrest.
On Sunday, Clark acknowledged the arrest in what was, in my opinion, a rather funny tweet about a decidedly non-funny situation. “Last night, my daughter was arrested in Boston, Massachusetts. I love Riley, and this is a very difficult time in the cycle of joy and pain in parenting,” Clark tweeted on Sunday night. “This will be evaluated by the legal system, and I am confident in that process.”
While I myself cannot relate to the specific ups and downs of parenting, I can understand in my bones a “cycle of joy and pain.” But honestly, the best part of this saga has been all the media outlets that have to explain “ACAB”—which I’d wager nearly every Jezebel reader knows means “all cops are bastards.”
We’ve got Politico, we’ve got CNN, we’ve got Fox News. I can understand why Politico and CNN needed to do that: They’re mainstream news sources that cover protests but rarely the gritty details. But I’m genuinely surprised that, given the ferocity and aggression with which Fox News has covered anti-police protests after George Floyd’s murder, that its audience wouldn’t know what ACAB stands for.
For now, I wish Dowell a quick and speedy process through the legal system, and for more funny tweets (this time about actually funny things) from Clark.