After the interstate arrests, police stopped protesters walking in the road on Grand Avenue early Sunday and arrested 52 people.
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While numerous demonstrations nationwide remained peaceful, scuffles broke out overnight Saturday in St. Paul, Minnesota, where protesters clashed with police on Interstate 94. The officer, Jeronimo Yanez, has said through his attorney that Castile was displaying a handgun and was warned to comply with the officer’s orders.
The Minnesota Police Bill of Rights also extends special protections to police during misconduct investigations, including by allowing them to record and review any formal statements they give to investigators-a measure that critics say would help officers “keep their story straight”.
“That is being addressed by us also”, Dabadie said.
Baton Rouge Police Chief Carl Dabadie Jr., at a press conference Sunday to explain the arrests, acknowledged a Baton Rouge officer pointed an assault weapon at protesters, but he said a supervisor immediately intervened to secure the weapon from her.
DeRay Mckesson, a well-known activist with a large Twitter following, was among more than 30 people arrested Saturday outside the Baton Rouge Police Headquarters.
After another night of intense, and sometimes violent, protests against the police shootings of black men, hundreds of demonstrators were either in jail or waiting to get out as the sun came up Sunday.
Protests have broken out nationwide following the deaths of 32-year-old Castile and 37-year-old Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La.
The unrest happened just miles from where Philando Castile, one of the victims, was shot by police. The interstate reopened early Sunday morning.
On Friday night, the protest group had been stationary for the most part, listening to music and taking turns at the microphone outside the governor’s residence discussing state laws and calling for changes to police tactics.
Kira Marrero, a 22-year-old New Orleans resident who graduated last year from Williams College in MA, was the first protester freed from Baton Rouge’s jail on Sunday.
Police are on high alert, as a lone shooter attacked the Dallas Police Department, killing five officers on Thursday night. He was killed by using a remote controlled bomb robot, to avoid risking officer’s lives. Although the police report that Johnson acted alone, many witnesses claim that other suspects were seen with camouflage bags in the vicinity. The general idea is that police have inadvertently killed black men. Brown said police were still going through Johnson’s laptop and cellphone to determine whether others are connected, and they “haven’t ruled out whether or not others are complicit”.
In Washington, during the third night of protests, a group marched peacefully through downtown Saturday night, chanting, “We young”.
London resident Aifur Rahman, who described himself on social media as a mathematics graduate, said the event was astonishing in its protest against police shootings in the United States.
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He compared the tension between law enforcement officials and demonstrators to a relationship in which “you love that person, but that person can’t express or show that love back”. President Barack Obama has also made a statement via Facebook, stating that all Americans should be deeply troubled by the two shootings and that it is clear that these are not isolated incidents but are “symptomatic of the broader challenge within our criminal justice system, the racial disparities that appear across the system year after year, and the resulting lack of trust that exists between law enforcement and too numerous communities they serve”.
