Protesters Block Freeway, Hurl Rocks At Police In Minnesota

NE and then returned to where they started. Protesters in Fort Lauderdale on Saturday chanted “No justice, no peace” and “Hands up, don’t shoot”. The release, which includes surveillance images of the robbers, states that the St. Anthony PD was looking for help finding two black suspects, both with long dreadlocks not dissimilar from the ones worn by Castile.

Officers used smoke bombs just after midnight as about 200 people blocked the roadway to protest recent fatal police shootings of black men, including 32-year-old Philando Castile who was killed last week during a traffic stop in suburban St. Paul.

The location given in the audio also matches the location of the traffic stop, KARE notes.

“Would this have happened if those passengers would have been white?” “That inconsistency has got to be answered”.

Police Officer Jeronimo Yanez shot Philando Castile, 32, in the driver’s seat of a vehicle on Wednesday night in the Falcon Heights neighborhood, just outside the state capitol.

When the officer had initially approached the auto, Reynolds said, Castile had told him that he was carrying a firearm. His study, using information supplied voluntarily by 65 law enforcement jurisdictions in the state, found a strong likelihood that racial and ethnic bias played a role in traffic stop policies and practices. But in an interview with the Star Tribune, Thomas Kelly, the attorney representing Officer Yanez, suggests the story isn’t so simple. Yanez also told the dispatcher that Castile and his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, looked like people who were involved in a robbery. “That was one of the reasons he pulled him over”.

The fatal shooting of Philando Castile, 32, on Wednesday night in a St. Paul suburb has sparked days of protests in Minnesota and cities around the United States, intensified by a video of the bloody aftermath Castile’s girlfriend Diamond Reynolds streamed live on the internet from the vehicle. She said she saw about 30 people being peacefully taken away by officers, who said they warned protesters they would be subject to arrest if they didn’t leave the interstate, which reopened early Sunday.

The woman in the video says the man she identified as her boyfriend was reaching for his ID and wallet when the officer shot him.

“Even if they say he looked like someone in a robbery, it still doesn’t give him a right to kill someone”, he said.

Kelly said Yanez could see a weapon in the vehicle.

As for what led up to the shooting, Kelly said, “This incident is not about race, it’s about the presence of a gun”. He did not elaborate.

Twenty-one St. Paul police officers and seven Minnesota State Patrol troopers were injured during the incident.

At that same time, thousands of protesters were congregated outside Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton’s residence in St. Paul to denounce violence and remember Castile, the St. Paul native.