My Boston. From [TheIntercept] “IT’S UNBELIEVABLE THAT this many police officers came here to protect them,” Ashley Lloyd said. “They’re not protecting us.”

Lloyd, a Boston resident, expressed her frustration with the police after officers clashed with antiracist demonstrators over the weekend. A “free speech” rally in the city — which was tied to the “alt-right,” a conservative faction that espouses far-right ideologies grounded in white supremacy — turned out what police estimated to be between 50 and 75 people. Lloyd was among the estimated 40,000 counterprotesters who showed up. The numbers were overwhelmingly in favor of the antiracist demonstrations, but as the day progressed, counterprotesters still had reason to question if their city — and, in particular, its institutions — was behind them or the right-wing demonstrators.

As the far-right rally came to a close, however, the attendees needed to exit the city’s downtown area, which was swamped with antiracist demonstrators. The result was a tense face-off between some mostly peaceful counter-demonstrators and Boston Police Department officers in full riot gear on Boylston Street, where sporadic scuffles broke out. Set against the backdrop of racial tensions in Boston between law enforcement and people of color, some of the counterprotesters wondered whose side the police were on.

The BPD has a long-held reputation as a racially intolerant public institution. The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts found, in a study first published in October 2014, that the department stops black citizens disproportionately. The commonwealth’s Supreme Judicial Court cited that report when it ruled in September 2016 that black men running from Boston police have a right to do so and that the action of flight is not suspicious.

For the city’s black residents, the ruling did not come as a surprise. “[T]he black community has been screaming about this forever and no one cares,” Roxbury organizer Jamarhl Crawford said in a 2012 interview with the Boston Phoenix. And a July 2016 poll found that 32 percent of black Bostonians believe the city’s police treat minorities unfairly.

THE DISTRUST THAT black counterprotesters held for police was evident throughout Saturday. At one point, Boston hip-hop artist Oompa confronted a man wearing a Republican Party T-shirt. She later recalled telling the man that wearing the shirt was “violent,” and that his presence was a threat to her community. Police intervened and got between the two, but with their back to the Trump supporter. Oompa told police that the positioning meant officers saw her as a threat and were protecting the right-wing activist.

“Your back is to him, because you’re protecting him,” Oompa said to a white officer. “If your back was to me, it would mean you have my back. Your back ain’t to me.”