Riot police drove Black Lives Matters protestors from the United States’ largest mall immediately after they arrived to protest police brutality against black Americans.
The police used a tactic called kettling — where they surround all sides of the protest but one —to drive the demonstrators from the center or Rotunda of the Mall of America, protestors said in a livestream of the event.
Police vehicles then barricaded protestors in the mall parking lot and requested that they leave premises. It was not immediately clear whether they would comply with police orders.
One woman unidentified had been arrested, organisers said in a livestream of the events. It was not immediately clear whether anyone had been injured in the standoff.
Protestors and local media reported that some of the protestors had gone to the Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport in an attempt to shut it down. Photos tweeted by demonstrators showed a similar standoff between Black Lives Matter affiliates and police inside and around the airport. Airport social media accounts indicated that prostestors had slowed traffic, but that operations were underway as normal.
Black Lives Matter mounted the protest a day after a judge granted the mall a restraining order against organisers ahead of protests calling for the release of video of the Minneapolis police shooting of Jamar Clark, a 24-year-old black man, last month. Reports have indicated that Mr Clark was unarmed and had not resisted arrest when he was killed.
Protest organisers like Miski Noor with Black Lives Matter in Minneapolis, Minnesota had been told that they were not blocked from the mall "if we just want to shop," but they were still "planning to move forward with the action." They expected around 1,000 participants to show up, but the exact number was not immediately clear.
Protestors would not immediately indicate whether they would shift locations, saying that they did not want to tip off police to their plans.
“They are keeping the plans close to the vest, which is what I would recommend to them,” Nekima Levy-Pounds, law professor at the University of St Thomas and president of the local branch of black rights advocacy group National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), told The Independent before the protest.
Ms Levy-Pounds was one of 11 demonstrators charged over their role in the December 2014 Black Lives Matter protest at the Mall of America that drew about 3,000 protestors. The eight misdemeanor charges against her and her fellow activists were only dismissed last month.
The protest this year has for its goal not just an outcry against police brutality but also economic injustice, Ms Levy-Pounds said.
“The main message for today’s demonstration is to see justice for Jamar,” Ms Levy-Pound said. “One of the reasons that they chose Mall of America, is because it is the epicenter or one of the epicenters of capitalism in our state.” Black rights advocates like Ms Levy-Pound have charged that not just police brutality but a socioeconomic system that they say subjects black Americans to second-class citizenship are to blame for ongoing rights violations against their community.
Ms Noor agreed with the economic component of the protest.
"Violence that black people and people of color face in this country is economic. It's social. The police violence is the entire system. We don't think the system is broken. It's set up to support people who are men, white, wealthy, cis, probably straight," she said.
Regardless of the outcome, Ms Noor regards Wednesday's demonstration as a success.
"The attention this action has gotten so far is a win and a new tactic in itself. We have made sure everyone knows Jamar Clark's name and that the Minneapolis Police Department is a racist police department," she added. Minneapolis Police did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Mr Clark’s death.
Police in Bloomington, Minnesota where the Mall of America is located, were also keeping their plans a secret, “generally as a precautionary measure.”
“We’re not really providing any specifics as to what the precautions are — numbers, costs. We’re ultimately going to have to tally that at the end of the day,” Deputy Chief of the Bloomington Police Department said prior to the confrontation with demonstrators.
