About two dozen officers in riot gear confronted protesters who were throwing rocks and other objects at police near where Sylville Smith was killed Saturday.
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“This was, quite frankly, unanticipated”, Chief Edward Flynn said two days after the worst of the rioting in the Sherman Park neighborhood, which is on the city’s economically depressed and largely black north side.
“Hopefully they can voice their problems and their opinions to us”, local chaplain Marcy Spoke told Xinhua.
We welcome strong opinions and criticism of our work, but we don’t want comments to become bogged down with discussions of our policies and we will moderate accordingly. “We need to unite the community and love one another”, another local chaplain, Melvin Reese, said.
Multiple social media videos showed crowds of young people in the predominantly African-American neighborhood setting fires and celebrating as police cars burned.
A nighttime curfew for teenagers appeared to be maintaining calm in the U.S. city of Milwaukee on early Tuesday (Aug 16), following two nights of violence over the fatal police shooting of a black man.
Milwaukee saw a second night of unrest on Sunday following a fatal police shooting this weekend.
For those who just can’t see beyond what they obviously think is their own self-interest we have one word – Milwaukee. The officer who fired the deadly shot was also black.
Smith’s sister Kimberly Neal mourned a brother she described as a high school graduate who played basketball, not a “man with a lengthy arrest record” described by police.
He says the loss of life was tragic for the family and Sherman Park community: “But what I want our residents and anyone who is watching this to understand that what that police officer encountered was an individual running who had a gun in his hand”. They threw bottles, chunks of concrete and rocks at officers. The police department might also have hesitated to give the officer’s race sooner for fear it would identify him, Klinger said. “I said a little prayer, you know?”
Authorities scrambled Monday to restore calm after this city endured a weekend of unrest in the wake of a police officer’s killing of an armed man. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker declared a state of emergency for the county Sunday afternoon.
Police said Smith’s auto was stopped because he was acting suspiciously, raising skepticism within largely African-American neighborhoods where people report racial discrimination from police. – Chief Flynn on his officers in the fieldChief Flynn said he has an opportunity to meet with some of his officers overnight.
“There is a curfew that will be more strictly enforced tonight for teenagers”, Barrett said.
The decision to intensify enforcement of the curfew came after a night of trouble that left four police officers injured.
Fourteen people were arrested Sunday after protesters lit six businesses on fire, including a gas station, torched squad cars, and heaved rocks at officers, according to the Milwaukee Police Department.
Police made six arrests Monday night in Milwaukee, as protesters continued to vent their frustrations over the shooting death of an armed black man, Sylville Smith, on Saturday.
Smith and the other suspect fled on foot.
CNN reports the 18-year-old man was struck in the neck and has been hospitalized. The state is investigating.
That probably is not a great overstatement given the dysfunction of Wisconsin’s biggest city, where the familiar elements of inner-city decay – poverty, joblessness, hopelessness, crime and toxic relations between the police and the black community – are exacerbated by racial disparities that are among the more pronounced in the nation.
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The Milwaukee Police Officers Association published a statement calling demonstrators who’d destroyed property “terrorists” who “must be held accountable”.
