Hundreds of protesters descended on Michigan Avenue on Black Friday, marching up the major shopping strip in Chicago in response to the release of the dash-cam video showing the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald by a Chicago police officer.
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Earlier this week, officer Jason Van Dyke, 37, was charged with first-degree murder for the October 2014 shooting of the teenager.
At least 2,000 people gathered on Chicago’s “Magnificent Mile” on Friday, blocking traffic and barring shoppers from entering stores. The officer, a 14-year veteran of the police department, had a history of civilian complaints of misconduct, according to data obtained by the Chicago-based watchdog group the Invisible Institute.
“That’s why we’re not having problems that other cities are having, or have had in the past”, McCarthy said before Friday’s march. She asked in that NBC 5 Investigates not determine her. …
Employees at Crate & Barrel reported that protesters were shoving customers inside the four-story store. Rentz says she is in the city for a wedding. “I hate to say [the protest] is an inconvenience but it is”. Security guards persuaded shoppers to use an unobvious back door to get in. “We need to project just how the pain that we’re feeling in neighborhoods now needs to be felt on Michigan Avenue”, Hatch said.
So in the rain today’s activists on behalf of the LaQuan McDonald came out in numbers to Chicago’s Magnificent Mile beginning at the Tribune Towers represented various groups creating factions there for the same cause but with different ideas about how to go about acheiving the goal. So while protesters locked arms to block entrances to stores, police huddled on the street watching. Todd Harlan, 50, a real-estate property manager from Dayton, Ohio, had hoped to get a jacket altered at the store.
Protest leader Michael Pfleger said, “I would like to see Michigan Avenue stores take a big hurt”. The footage was released, against the city’s wishes, only after a journalist submitted a Freedom of Information Act request. Bill Howard, 51, a professor from Macomb, Illinois, shopped in the Nike Store with his wife, in-laws and two daughters. “It’s pretty miserable out here”, Andrew Boudwin said. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension has said handcuffs were at the scene and investigators were trying to determine whether they were on Clark or had simply fallen. A visitor from Fort Dodge, Iowa, 35-year-old Monica Rentz, was taking photos to send to friends as she stood outside her hotel on Michigan Avenue. “Not anymore though”, the protester said. “It didn’t bother us”. “Without some disruption, there is not going to be any change”, he said.
Protesters plan to walk from pioneer court to water tower place.
The powerful Chicago Teachers Union on Thursday endorsed a “Black Friday” march organized by civil rights leader Reverend Jesse Jackson, to protest McDonald’s shooting, and called for an independent investigation of what it described as a “cover-up”.
Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez defended herself and Mayor Rahm Emanuel Tuesday after critics slammed both of them for delays in filing charges against a Chicago police officer who fatally shot a teenager more than a year ago.
Also Wednesday, a Cook County judge dismissed a charge against a protester accused of hitting a police officer in the hours after the video was made public.
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Chicago’s South Side, where Lee was gunned down, has seen a drastic rise in homicides in recent months. “They’re going to be calling city hall, the state, the White House”.
