Prometheus 6

There's such fear of Black violence in these situations, and so little history of it.

I'm not prepared to think about the utility of officially sanctioned protests today. It needs to be considered, though.

216 Held in Protests of Police Acquittals
By THOMAS J. LUECK

In the largest public protest against the acquittal of three detectives in the shooting death of Sean Bell, 216 people were arrested on Wednesday in carefully orchestrated demonstrations that halted traffic at busy intersections in Manhattan and Brooklyn, the police said.

The demonstrations, described by the Rev. Al. Sharpton as “pray-ins,” played out on a bright spring afternoon as boisterous displays of civil disobedience in which people signed up to be arrested, assuring organizers and lawyers that they were carrying proper identification to show to the police.

Once positioned at the intersections, demonstrators dropped to their knees or sat and prayed briefly before hundreds of police officers escorted them to buses and police vehicles.

“We believe deeply in what we are doing today,” said Hazel Dukes, the president of the New York State chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., who was one of a dozen people arrested after they knelt and blocked traffic about 4:30 p.m. on the Canal Street ramps to the Holland Tunnel.

“We have come to raise our voice for justice,” she said before being placed in white plastic handcuffs and taken to a police van.

In all, it appeared that more than 1,000 people participated in the protests, although they attracted so many onlookers that it sometimes became difficult to distinguish protesters from tourists or people out for a stroll after work who had stopped to watch the commotion.

“It’s good to see people stand up for their rights,” said Julia Mordaunt, 27, a graphic designer from Burlington, Vt., who was on her way to buy jeans and stopped to watch about 100 demonstrators who had gathered at the southwest corner of 60th Street and Third Avenue, near an entrance to Bloomingdale’s. About 3:50 p.m., that group marched east toward the Queensboro Bridge, linked arms and sat along Second Avenue, blocking traffic on and off the bridge. Thirty-six people there were arrested.

The protests were staged at six locations in the city. In the largest one, about 400 people assembled about 4:30 on the Centre Street approach to the Brooklyn Bridge and blocked Brooklyn-bound traffic for more than an hour. About 60 people in that demonstration were arrested, including Mr. Sharpton and Nicole Paultre Bell, who was to have married Mr. Bell on the day he was killed in a hail of 50 bullets fired by the officers outside a nightclub in Jamaica, Queens, in 2006.

Two friends of Mr. Bell’s, Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield, who were injured in the fusillade, were among those arrested at the Brooklyn Bridge site.