Cheering protesters on Thursday torched a Minneapolis police station that the department had abandoned amid three days of violent protests across the US over the death of George Floyd in the custody of police after one officer had knelt on his neck.
A police spokesman said that staff had evacuated the 3rd Precinct station, the focus of many of the protests, “in the interest of the safety of our personnel” shortly after 10pm.
Livestream video showed people entering the building, where fire alarms blared and sprinklers ran as blazes were set.
Photo: AFP
Protesters could be seen setting fire to a Minneapolis Police Department jacket and cheering.
The nighttime scene veered between an angry protest and a street party. At one point, a band playing in a parking lot across from the 3rd Precinct broke into a punk version of Bob Marley’s Redemption Song.
Nearby, demonstrators carried mannequins from a looted Target and threw them onto a burning car. Later, a building fire erupted nearby.
Elsewhere in the city, thousands of peaceful demonstrators marched through the streets calling for justice.
Much of the violence occurred in the Longfellow neighborhood, where protesters converged on the precinct station of the police officers who arrested Floyd. In a strip mall across the street from the station, the windows in nearly every business had been smashed, from the Target department store at one end to the Planet Fitness gym at the other. Only the 24-hour laundromat appeared to have escaped unscathed.
“WHY US?” demanded a large expanse of red graffiti scrawled on the wall of the Target. A Wendy’s restaurant across the street was charred almost beyond recognition.
Among the casualties of the overnight fires was a six-story building under construction that was to provide nearly 200 apartments of affordable housing.
“We’re burning our own neighborhood,” said Deona Brown, a 24-year-old woman standing with a friend outside the precinct station, where a small group of protesters were shouting at about a dozen police officers in riot gear. “This is where we live, where we shop, and they destroyed it.”
“What that cop did was wrong, but I’m scared now,” Brown said.
Others in the crowd saw something different in the wreckage.
Protesters destroyed property “because the system is broken,” said a man who identified himself only by his nickname, Cash.
He dismissed the idea that the destruction would hurt residents of the neighborhood.
“They’re making money off of us,” he said of the owners of the destroyed stores.
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