Police have arrested scores of people in cities around the United States who were protesting against a Missouri grand jury’s decision not to indict a white police officer for killing an unarmed black teenager, authorities have said, but the town where the shooting took place was a little calmer.
Protests in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and elsewhere came on a second night of street violence in the St Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, where policeman Darren Wilson shot to death 18-year-old Michael Brown on August 9th. The shooting has highlighted the often-tense nature of US race relations and the strains between black communities and police.
There was less violence on the streets of Ferguson than on the previous night, as the deployment of some 2,000 National Guard troops to the area helped police prevent the rioting, looting and arson that erupted on Monday night.
Police made 45 arrests in Ferguson from Tuesday night into early Wednesday for offences ranging from a couple of dozen misdemeanours for unlawful assembly to five for assaulting law enforcement officers. Thirty of the arrested listed Missouri addresses and one was from Berlin, Germany, police said.
Scuffles
In other cities, demonstrators marched through city streets, sometimes blocking traffic and scuffling with police. Police in Boston said 45 people were arrested in protests overnight that drew more than 1,000 demonstrators.
Mr Wilson said he was acting in self-defence and his conscience was clear. He told ABC News that there was nothing he could have done differently that would have prevented Brown's death. But the parents of the slain teenager said they did not accept the officer's version of the events. "I don't believe a word of it," Mr Brown's mother Lesley McSpadden told CBS This Morning.
The crowds in Ferguson were smaller and more controlled than on Monday, when about a dozen businesses were torched and others were looted amid rock-throwing and sporadic gunfire from protesters and volleys of tear gas fired by police. More than 60 people were arrested then.
In New York, where police used pepper spray to control the crowd after protesters tried to block the Lincoln Tunnel and Triborough Bridge, 10 demonstrators were arrested, police said.
Protesters in Los Angeles threw water bottles and other objects at officers outside city police headquarters and later obstructed both sides of a downtown freeway with makeshift roadblocks and debris, authorities said.
As the first black president, Barack Obama has come under pressure from some in the black community to speak out more on racial issues and to assume a more visible role over the Ferguson shooting.
Mr Obama remained cautious in his comments in its immediate aftermath, but has been more expansive in recent days including remarks at the White House after the grand jury’s decision.
He said deep distrust exists between police and minorities in part due to America’s “legacy of racial discrimination,” and that “communities of colour aren’t just making these problems up”.
The US justice department is considering bringing federal civil rights charges against the officer.– (Reuters)