Traffic crawls to a standstill and anger spills onto the streets after cop is cleared over a chokehold death.
Protesters enraged by a grand jury’s decision not to indict the officer whose chokehold killed Eric Garner took their cause to the New York City streets Wednesday, bringing traffic to a standstill.
Hundreds chanted ‘I can’t breathe’ as they marched through Midtown Manhattan or laid their bodies end to end on the city’s West Side Highway.
The protests, which carried on through to Thursday morning, remained civil and peaceful.
They clogged Lincoln Tunnel, staged ‘die-ins’ in the middle of Grand Central Station and crossed the Brooklyn Bridge on foot as pockets of demonstrators across America’s largest metropolis sought to spread their simple message: black lives matter.
After midnight, 1,000 demonstrators took their cause out of Manhattan and into the adjoining borough of Brooklyn as they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge en mass.
Prior to that, a pocket of protesters blocked on of the tubes of the Lincoln Tunnel, which connects Manhattan to New Jersey to the west.
Others across town had planned to disrupt the annual Rockefeller Center tree lighting ceremony– where protesters and revelers alike thronged the busy Midtown streets–but police ensured the Garner supporters got nowhere near the world famous tree.
Wednesday’s protests in New York were civil, with about 30 arrests by mid-evening, although police were clearly showing restraint and allowing demonstrators to express their views.
Read more: Daily Mail
