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Slew of Police Encounters Precedes Latest Milwaukee Shooting

A man being interviewed by a Milwaukee TV station during the violent protests over the weekend basically said that until rich people pay up to black people, violence and riots will continue.

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Smith was allegedly armed with a semiautomatic handgun when a Black police officer shot him. Police moved in to try to disperse the crowd.

Tracy had been arrested for being argumentative during the traffic stop, allegedly spitting and cursing before officer Richard Schoen pulled her from the vehicle. Although there was no widespread destruction during protests as there had been on Saturday, protesters threw rocks at police and at least one person was shot and taken to a hospital. Police posted on Twitter three locations where they said shots were fired. There were no other reports of injuries and no major destruction of property after six businesses were burned in the unrest Saturday.

Rioters torched buildings and attacked police and reporters after a black police officer shot 23-year-old Sylville Smith on Saturday. As we have seen in Ferguson, a military-style crackdown only serves to provoke confrontation and to fracture already damaged relationships with the community. “And no matter what the circumstances are, his family has to be hurting”.

“This was my brother, my protector, somebody that was supposed to be there for me”, said Sherelle Smith, Sylville’s younger sister. “These locals are angry and they’re angry for a reason”, he said. He and Mayor Tom Barrett say they are not yet releasing video from the officer’s body camera, but the mayor notes what he has seen shows “without question” that Smith was armed with a gun. “He was raising up with it”, the chief said. It was unclear how many rounds the officer fired. But Milwaukee said late Sunday that the National Guard had not been deployed.

In September 2011, Milwaukee police Officer Richard Schoen repeatedly punched Jeanine Tracy in the head in the back of a squad vehicle, CNN affiliate WISN reported.

A freelance reporter who films protests across the USA says he is leaving riot-torn Milwaukee because the situation there has grown too risky for white people. Where do we go from here?

Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke said at a news conference that Smith had been arrested 13 times. Online court records showed a range of charges against Smith, many of them misdemeanors.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Smith was also charged in a shooting and was later charged with pressuring the victim to withdraw testimony that identified Smith as the gunman. The charges were dropped because the victim recanted the identification and failed to appear in court, Chief Deputy District Attorney Kent Lovern told the newspaper. The police officer who shot him was also black.

She asked people for donations for his burial.

Some people in America are reacting to these shootings too quickly and they quickly turn to violence.

“There has been rioting following the death of a man at the hands of the police”.

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Milwaukee has the unfortunate distinction of being the country’s most segregated city between blacks and whites, according to a recent study. The Justice Department is working with police on what’s called a collaborative reform process, a less stringent review than a review of the department’s patterns and practices requested by some critics.

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