The suburb’s police station was barricaded behind concrete barriers and tall metal fencing, watched over by police in riot gear and National Guard soldiers with armored vehicles and assault rifles. One video showed one protester carrying the head of a fake pig on a pole near a fence outside the heavily guarded station.
Demonstrators gathered outside the Brooklyn Center police headquarters Wednesday demanding justice and accountability for the fourth night in a row over the fatal shooting of Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, by a police officer earlier this week.
Before the night’s protests, Brooklyn Center Mayor Mike Elliott urged people to protest without violence, saying “your voices have been heard.”
Earlier, police fired rubber bullets into the crowd. Casey Clements, 30, was shot in the waist while by the fence.
“That’ll add to the zip-tie bruises I got the other night,” he told USA TODAY as he was tended to by a medic, referring to his arrest Monday night.
He added that he’s a student who is protesting “because I feel like I need to protect the people here,” he said, gesturing to the other protesters.
Potter, the officer who fatally shot Wright at a traffic stop on Sunday, is a 26-year veteran of the Brooklyn Center Police Department. She was arrested Wednesday and charged with second-degree manslaughter, officials said.
On Wednesday, some of his extended family came to the intersection where he was shot, carefully rearranging the lawn of flowers that had been left there in his memory or sobbing as they sat in the grass.
“He had a 2-year-old son that’s not going to be able to play basketball with him. He had sisters and brothers that he loved so much,” his mother, Katie Wright, said Tuesday on “Good Morning America.”
An Ohio State University student from northwestern Ohio was arrested for hitting a police sergeant with a wooden club. The protest was peaceful up until then, police said.
