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Predictably enough, protesters who take the Zimmerman case to be a civil rights matter have voiced their outrage at the trials outcome – that George Zimmerman was innocent of murdering 17-year-old Trayvon Martin – with riots, looting, attacking pedestrians, and so forth, especially in Los Angeles, but also in New York. Demonstrations in other cities managed to keep things civil, peaceful, and lawful.
Los Angeles police arrested fourteen people who did not disperse after hundreds of protesters turned to violence, with car stomping and window breaking.
“It started off as a peaceful protest at Leimert Park,” said LAPD Officer Bruce Borihanh. “Unfortunately, a small group started disrupting it. It just got out of hand.”
The “small group” wandered Crenshaw Boulevard breaking windows, igniting fires, and attacking random people, including a reporter and his cameraman – one of who was hospitalized for a concussion.
Protesters also stormed a Wal-Mart, throwing down merchandise, harassing shoppers, and others, to do justice, apparently, attempting to break the jewelry glass display.
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Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti characterized the violence as coming from “a small group [that] has taken advantage of the situation,” and said that while protestors have the right to voice the pain at the verdict, “people also deserve to be safe on the streets and in their cars.”
Police fired rubber bullets at the crowd after the protesters hurled rocks and D-cell batteries at them.
Oakland saw more of the same as protesters wandered about Interstate 880 on Monday blocking traffic and chanting, until police cleared it up, and they headed downtown.
Protesters in New York mobbed Times Square and blocked traffic for hours.
Protesters in other cities, however, remained for the most part civil and pointed in their grief and demands for justice, not resorting to furthering injustice in their protests.
“I know this case has elicited strong passions. And in the wake of the verdict, I know those passions may be running even higher. But we are a nation of laws, and a jury has spoken. I now ask every American to respect the call for calm reflection from two parents who lost their young son,” said President Obama. The implication seems to be that justice may not have been produced by our justice system, and Zimmerman’s lawyer, for one, criticized the president for expressing no consonance with Zimmerman’s precarious situation. He has, after all, been made to stand for something much larger than he could ever have intended or known, and has been made into a civil rights case despite himself.
