Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren (D), speaking at a news conference, appealed for calm while acknowledging that city officials had failed in their duty to protect Prude, 41, a Black man who died of asphyxiation a week after police placed a hood over his head and pinned him to the pavement during his arrest on March 23.
“We had a human being in a need of help, in need of compassion,” Warren said. “In that moment, we had an opportunity to protect him, to keep him warm, to bring him to safety, to begin the process of healing him and lifting him up. We have to own the fact that in the moment we did not do that.”
Warren pledged overhauls, including increasing mental health resources and transferring Rochester’s crisis intervention team from the police department to another city department. Other changes would follow over “weeks, months and years,” she said.
Hours after the news conference, a diverse crowd of about 1,000 protesters blocked an intersection near the spot where Prude was arrested, erecting barricades with trash cans and orange traffic cones. The demonstrators then marched to the main public safety building downtown, where police in riot gear formed a cordon in front of the building, separated from the protesters by fences.
Some protesters sat on the pavement while others waved flags or banged makeshift drums as a drone aircraft buzzed overhead. In contrast to earlier demonstrations, the mood was mostly calm, as a group of community leaders dubbed “the elders” formed a human chain as a buffer between protesters and police. After midnight, the crowd began to thin. Someone lobbed a couple water bottles toward the police line, instantly drawing rebukes from others. A man toting brown paper bags from a fast-food restaurant walked through the crowd handing out chicken sandwiches.
Protesters last week had called for the resignations of both Warren and Police Chief La’Ron Singletary, whom activists accused of concealing police misconduct in Prude’s arrest. On Saturday, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced that a grand jury would be impaneled as part of a broader investigation of the circumstances behind Prude’s death.
Singletary, who joined Warren at the news conference, said he supported the planned police overhauls. Seven officers who were involved in Prude’s arrest have been suspended pending an internal investigation.
The Rochester protests were sparked by the release of a video that depicts Prude handcuffed and wearing a “spit hood” after being arrested on a Rochester street. Prude, who was naked and unarmed, appeared to be experiencing a mental breakdown. He died a week later, and an autopsy subsequently confirmed that he had used the hallucinogenic drug PCP.
In Portland, about 100 protesters marched through a residential neighborhood Sunday and converged outside Portland’s North Precinct police headquarters, setting fire to several mattresses while blasting music laden with profanities directed toward the city’s mayor and police department. About two dozen officers emerged to push the crowd back so that firefighters could extinguish the flames.
A much larger crowd had turned out the previous night to mark the 100th consecutive day of demonstrations in the city. On Sunday, as the smaller group gathered in a park for the night’s protest, an organizer exhorted them to “keep disrupting.”
“They’re starting to get antagonized, they’re starting to break,” the organizer said of the police. “They’re tired, they are. We have to go double time now.”
Chris Libonati in Rochester and Joby Warrick contributed to this report.
September 07, 2020 at 04:21PM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/09/07/mayor-pledges-reform-fresh-protests-hit-rochester/
Mayor pledges policing overhauls as fresh protests hit Rochester - The Washington Post
https://news.google.com/search?q=fresh&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
No comments:
Post a Comment