US protesters denounce police shooting of black man in Minneapolis
US protesters have rallied in a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota, to denounce last week’s police shooting of an 18-year-old African American man.
Demonstrators held banners reading Black Lives Matter and Justice for Khaleel Thompson on Wednesday in the city of Crystal.
Minor scuffles also occurred between protesters and counter-protesters but no injuries were reported.
Khaleel was shot and critically injured by Crystal police after he was reportedly seen holding a weapon. However, it later turned out to be an airsoft gun.
He survived the shooting and is currently in critical conditions, pending several surgeries, including one to remove a bullet from his brain.
Community activists say Minneapolis suffers from racial disparities, including high unemployment rates for blacks, a disproportionate number of arrests for minor crimes and inequities in housing and the school system.
In May, a white policewoman in the US state of Oklahoma, who was accused of fatally shooting an unarmed African American man, was acquitted from all charges. Officer Betty Jo Shelby, 43, shot dead 40-year-old Terrence Crutcher next to his car on a street in Tulsa on September 16, 2016.
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Similar rulings were issued by grand juries in the deaths of Alton B. Sterling last July in Baton Rouge, Eric Garner on Staten Island, Tamir Rice in Cleveland and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, all of them controversial cases that prompted a national debate about race relations and the use of force by law enforcement.
US police officers fatally shot nearly 1,000 people last year, amounting to three deaths each day, according to an investigation by the Washington Post. A disproportionate number of those killed in 2016 were black, and about a quarter involved a victim who had a mental illness.
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