“When you hold a person down so long, they are eventually going to fight back”, said Jones, who recently ran for election to the city government but lost.
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“It’s probably an array of different issues that got us where we were Saturday night and Sunday morning”, Walker said. He also said that officials had spoken to the city attorney’s office to be prepared in case they decide a “more widespread curfew” is needed.
The curfew earlier applied to teenagers up to and including 16-year-olds. And 26 members of the Wisconsin State Patrol were brought in to help local law enforcement.
It was a shot heard around the city, and fury swept through Milwaukee. Residents there say the city has been unresponsive to their needs. An 18-year-old man was shot and wounded Sunday night.
Officers ordered people to disperse Sunday and reported having rocks and other objects thrown at them, with four law enforcement personnel injured. Police said an injured officer was taken to a hospital after a rock broke the windshield of a squad vehicle. “We know there has to be more investment, and you’d have to be insane to think that this activity (rioting) is in any way helping”, Barrett told a news conference on Monday. He has also left town following threats against him and other police officers, Flynn said.
“Parents, after 10 o’clock your teenagers better be home or in a place where they’re off the streets”, Barrett said.
Milwaukee Police are stepping up their efforts to prevent a repeat of the violence that occurred over the past two nights.
According to Fox News, an autopsy revealed Smith was shot in his chest and arm, backing the police’s official account of the shooting.
A Chicago-based communist revolutionary group blamed by Milwaukee’s police chief for stoking a second day of violence says that some of its members did go there to “support a revolution”.
He says the police department’s ShotSpotter technology detected 30 gunshots in the neighborhood overnight.
Flynn said body camera video that they have seen shows that there was a “credible threat” to the officer.
Flynn and Barrett, who spoke to the press after attending the Milwaukee Police Department’s swearing-in ceremony for new police recruits, painted a portrait of disorder on the streets of Sherman Park, and noted that officers were struck with flying rocks and bricks to the hands, knees, ankles and shoulders.
“Those individuals, in my mind, are deliberately trying to damage a great neighbourhood in a great city”, Barrett said.
Police say Smith was stopped on Saturday afternoon for behaving suspiciously and that he then fled on foot between two homes.
People gather for a prayer vigil in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Police continued to make “multiple” arrests and there were more reports of shots being fired.
Such inequality has afflicted many USA cities as a result of the loss of manufacturing jobs over the past three decades, sometimes stoking unrest when police use deadly force. Authorities also used an armored vehicle to retrieve a shooting victim.
Flynn declined to identify the officer who shot Smith but said he is black.
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A spokesman for the Milwaukee police, Sgt. Timothy Gauerke, said Monday that officials were continuing to investigate the shooting of an 18-year-old man late Sunday along North Sherman Boulevard.
