Police cases stir national protests, debate
Published 9:33 am Friday, December 5, 2014
NEW YORK — Thousands and thousands of diverse people united by anger took to the streets from New York City to San Francisco for a second straight night to protest a grand jury clearing a white police officer in the chokehold death of an unarmed black man.
Grandparents marched with their grandchildren. Experienced activists stood alongside newcomers, and protesters of all colors chanted slogans.
“We’re under siege and it has to stop,” Harlem resident Judy Edwards said at a rally Thursday night in lower Manhattan’s Foley Square.
The 61-year-old black woman was accompanied by her daughter and twin 10-year-old grandchildren, a boy and a girl. She said it was important to her that the children saw a crowd that was racially mixed and diverse in many other ways all insisting upon the same thing — that something must be done.
That was the message, too, in cities across America: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Minneapolis Oakland, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., among them. Sign-carrying, chanting demonstrators marched down heavily-traveled streets and shut down highways and bridges. Politicians talked about the need for better police training, body cameras and changes in the grand jury process to restore faith in the legal system.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said a “long string of events” involving the deaths of black men at the hands of police, not just the Eric Garner case in New York City, threaten to erode the belief many Americans have in the nation’s criminal justice system.
Cuomo, speaking on NBC’s “Today” on Friday, said the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and similar previous cases in New York City show that it’s necessary to “pull back the lens to understand it’s not just about Eric Garner.”
The governor said if people don’t feel they’re fairly represented by the justice system, “you have a fundamental problem.”