Oxford Street in central London came to a standstill on Sunday as hundreds of Black Lives Matter protesters gathered to demand justice for the killing of two black men by US police.
Demonstrators holding banners saying “black lives matter” and “no justice no peace” gathered this morning at Oxford Circus and marched down the busy shopping street towards Hyde Park.
The crowd stopped outside the American Embassy in Mayfair and chanted “hands up don’t shoot,” in reference to the killing of Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana by white police officers last week.
The rally, held in solidarity with protesters in the US, follows two similar marches that stopped traffic for four hours in Brixton in south London yesterday and outside the Houses of Parliament on Friday.
“Stopping traffic everywhere. The streets are ours today,” wrote Instagram user Ezzy Anya.
Some protesters started clapping and singing Michael Jackson’s song ‘They Don’t Care About Us’.
Reporters Justin Carter and Carlet Cleare later received personal apologies from the City's Mayor and Rochester Police Department Chief Michael Ciminelli who said: "Two local reporters, Carlet Cleare and Justin Carter, were taken into custody at the scene.
"I apologize for that. They were there trying to do their job covering this event."
According to Chief Ciminelli, there had been more than 400 people at the protest and that the 74 were arrested for disorderly conduct.
While he said he could not go into details of each of the arrests, he did stress that the department "didn't blindly make arrests".
Chief Ciminelli added that the officers only started wearing riot gear after rocks had allegedly been thrown at them.
On the same night, over 30 people were arrested in Baton Rouge at another Black Lives Matter protest.
It was at a Black Lives Matter event in Dallas on July 7, gunman Micah Xavier Johnson shot dead six police officers and injured nine others.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...rling-philando-castile-activist-a7129216.html