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Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Sunday praised Chicago police for handling Saturday’s protests “fairly quickly” after they turned into violent skirmishes.
The mayor made the comments during an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday after Saturday’s protests against police brutality.
Police stand guard as pro and anti-police protesters gather outside the Homan Square Police Station on August 15, 2020 in Chicago, Illinois.
(Getty Images)
The protests began on Saturday with a march around noon. Later, a separate protest near the city center resulted in two dozen arrests, 17 police officers injured and at least two protesters injured.
Lightfoot said the agitators “have integrated themselves into these seemingly peaceful protests and come to fight” as the clashes have “ended very fairly quickly as our police department is committed to making sure we protect the peaceful protests.”
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Chicago Police Department Superintendent David Brown said some members of the group used black umbrellas to prevent police from seeing them, pushing officers and assaulting them.
In a video posted by the Chicago Police Department, a person swinging a skateboard hits a policeman.
Activist groups and some elected officials, meanwhile, accused police of using aggressive tactics, including spraying the crowd with a chemical irritant and hitting protesters with batons.
“The march was peaceful until the CPD and other law enforcement agencies began a full-blown attack on protesters,” a statement from the youth activist group Raise the Peace said on Sunday.
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The march took place about a week after a police shootout on a black man in the city’s southern neighborhood prompted large crowds of people to walk into Chicago’s downtown shopping district, where they smashed into shop windows and took merchandise from stores.
A social media post falsely claimed that police shot and killed a 15-year-old, when in fact the man was 20 and had not suffered life-threatening injuries.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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