Protests in Baltimore, Maryland USA against the treatment of black people by the police resulted in 34 arrests last night. The protests, many under the banner of #BlackLivesMatter, a movement to increase awareness of extra-judicial killings of black people across the world, came after the death of Freddie Gray.
The 25-year-old had been arrested on April 12th after running away from a police officer when they made eye contact. He was then put into a van to be taken to the police station, half an hour’s ride away. Footage filmed at the scene appears to show a witness exclaiming ‘his leg is broke, and you’re dragging him into that van.’
Freddie wasn’t buckled into his seat. He suffered a spinal cord injury, and his family say his voice box was crushed and his neck snapped before he slipped into a coma. He died on April 19th.
While an autopsy is due, mourners are in despair – this story follows many other incidences where black men are killed in incidents of police brutality, always disproportionately more than white men.
Anthony Batts, Police Commissioner, told reporters at a news conference that there are no excuses for the fact he wasn’t belted up in the van, and that the van driver or officer should have listened to Freddie’s pleas for medical care: ‘We know our police employees failed to get him medical attention in a timely manner multiple times.’
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The van stopped three times. The first was so the police officer and van driver could put Freddie in leg irons, the second was ‘to deal with Mr Gray and the facts of that interaction are under investigation,’ and the third time was to put another prisoner in the van.
You can watch the witness footage of the arrest here, but be warned, it's pretty unnerving.
Hundreds of mourners turned up to pay their respects to Freddie at his wake, taking hours to file past his coffin at a funeral home. Some held signs saying: ‘We remember Freddie’ and ‘Our Hearts Are With The Gray Family’, The Guardian reports. Meanwhile, 1,200 people gathered at City Hall to protest Gray’s death on Saturday.
The daily protests have turned violent, seeing 34 people arrested and two journalists attacked (one mugged by a group of boys, another allegedly beaten up by police after being mistaken for a protestor), and Baltimore’s mayor has called for a peaceful resolution: ‘At the end of the day we are one Baltimore. We need to support peaceful demonstration and continue to enforce in our communities that rioting, violence, and looting will not be tolerated in our city.
‘Together we can be one Baltimore and seek answers as we seek justice and as we seek peace.’
When stories like this happen basically every month with so little done to address it, it’s very little wonder that people might not want to protest quietly. The White House has issued a statement that Broderick Johnson, the head of My Brother’s Keeper, an initiative for young men of colour, will attend Gray’s funeral. An autopsy is set to provide some answers in 30-45 days.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.