Scores arrested in US protests at police shootings
Print Edition
POLICE arrested scores of people in demonstrations over the weekend in several US cities, as racial tensions simmer over the killing of black men by police.
Protesters led by the Black Lives Matter movement are demanding justice for two African-American men shot dead by police, their dying moments captured in videos that went viral online.
The protests also come after 25-year-old black army veteran Micah Johnson used a high-power rifle to kill five police officers and wound seven others in a sniper attack at a protest in Dallas, Texas, on Thursday.
Johnson told negotiators before police killed him that he wanted to murder white cops in revenge for the black deaths.
Following an anonymous threat, SWAT teams swarmed police headquarters in Dallas on Saturday while officers investigated reports of a suspicious person — finally giving the all-clear around two hours later.
The nationwide wave of protests was triggered by the shooting deaths of Alton Sterling in the southern state of Louisiana, and Philando Castile in the midwestern state of Minnesota.
Protesters held peaceful marches in several major US cities, including New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
However protests were unruly in Baton Rouge, where Sterling was killed, and St Paul, where Castile died.
A hundred protesters in St Paul blocked a highway intersection for several hours on Saturday and hurled firecrackers, rocks and bottles at police.
The officers, equipped with clubs and gas masks, used smoke grenades and pepper spray to break up the crowd.
St Paul police said on Facebook that protesters also threw a molotov cocktail, and someone “dropped a large chunk of concrete onto an officer’s head from a bridge.” Five officers were injured, but not seriously.
A jailer at a detention center in St Paul estimated that between 60 to 80 people had been detained.
In Baton Rouge, local media reported several dozen arrests in at least two demos, including one where members of the New Black Panther activist group confronted police.
One of the arrested reportedly included DeRay McKesson, a prominent activist in the peaceful Black Lives Matter movement.
“Police have been provocateurs all night,” McKesson says as he walks on the side of a road, livestreaming the demonstration. “We aren’t blocking the street or anything.”
Then suddenly the video is interrupted. “City Police. You’re under arrest, don’t fight me,” a voice says.
An activist told The Washington Post that McKesson was “clearly targeted.”
Hundreds marched peacefully in Los Angeles on Saturday, including in South Central, the epicenter of violent 1992 riots following the acquittal of white police officers in the beating of black motorist Rodney King.
There were nasty scenes on Friday in Phoenix, Arizona, where police used pepper spray to disperse stone-throwing protesters. And in Rochester, New York, 74 people were arrested over a sit-in protest.
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