BROOKLYN — A small crowd of demonstrators gathered at a
candlelight vigil on the corner of East 55th Street and Church Avenue in East
Flatbush on Saturday, in an ongoing protest over the death of Kimani Gray, the
16-year-old boy fatally shot by police officers one week earlier, after he allegedly
pointed a gun at them.
Following five nights of vigils for Gray, some of them
drawing more than three times as many people, the crowd of nearly 50
demonstrators marched to the 67th Precinct after nearly two hours at the
nightly protest.
Hundreds of police officers filled the streets surrounding
Saturday's evening demonstration, which began at 7 p.m.
“People were chanting,” demonstrator Lisa Knauer, a
56-year-old professor of anthropology at UMass Dartmouth, said of the scene at
the precinct. “The corner was barricaded off. We were across the street from
the precinct. People were giving impromptu speeches.”
On the way to the police station, the demonstrators stopped
at the East 52nd Street house in front of which Gray was shot, and paused again
at the intersection where 23-year-old Shantel Davis was allegedly shot and
killed by police after crashing a stolen car in June of 2012.
Cops on horses, motorcycles and even posted on top of a
building across the street, surrounded the protesters at the vigil, and gates
built for a much larger crowd penned in the protesters for several blocks.
“As I biked over here from East 16th Street, I counted at
least one police car per block — 40 police cars,” Knauer said.
“I don’t know if it means they’re afraid of the community.
It certainly makes me feel criminalized.”
An NYPD spokesman said on Sunday he could not say how many
officers had been assigned to the vigil site for Saturday's protest.
There have been several attacks on police officers following
the Gray shooting.
On Wednesday night, a protestor smashed an officer's face
with a brick, according to the New York Post and New York Times. Monday night,
some demonstrators allegedly threw bottles at cops, after vandalizing and
robbing a Rite Aid.
Activist Fatimah Shakur, 29, feels the police response to
the violence at the vigils has been unjustly harsh.
“They’re not playing fair,” Shakur said. “They’re not
respecting our constitutional right to protest. That’s not cool.”
Among the crowd of demonstrators at Saturday’s vigil was
14-year-old friend of Gray’s, Nia Denerville, who remembers him as “a good
boy.”
“It’s so sad he had to go like that for no reason,”
Denerville said.
Earlier that day, Denerville's 21-year-old brother Jelanie
Deshong hosted an event at the Tilden Educational Campus, organized by
Councilmember Jumanne Williams, a prominent voice over the past week's vigils
for Gray.
Deshong echoed a shared sentiment among anti-police
brutality protesters: Gray's death needs a probe conducted of outside of the
NYPD.
"We need to have an official investigation that's
independent of the NYPD," he said.