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New York: Hundreds of angry people marched through Harlem after the Reverend Al Sharpton promised to "close this city down" to protest the acquittals of three police detectives in the 50-shot barrage that killed a groom on his wedding day and wounded two friends.
"We strategically know how to stop the city so people stand still and realise that you do not have the right to shoot down unarmed, innocent civilians," Sharpton told a crowd of several hundred people on Saturday at his National Action Network office in the historically black Manhattan neighbourhood.
"This city is going to deal with the blood of Sean Bell."
Sharpton was joined by the family of 23-year-old Sean Bell - a black man - and a friend of Bell who was wounded in the 2006 shooting outside a Queens strip club. Two of the three officers charged were also black.
The rally at Sharpton's office was followed by a 20-block march down Malcolm X Boulevard and then across 125th Street, Harlem's main business thoroughfare, where some bystanders yelled out "Kill the police!"
Fifty of the marchers carried white placards bearing big black numbers for each of the police bullets fired at Bell and his friends.
Sharpton urged people to return for a meeting this week "to plan the day that we will close this city down" with the kind of "massive civil disobedience" once led by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
"They never accused Sean Bell of doing anything. Then why is he dead?" Sharpton asked, his voice roaring with anger.
Injustice?
'They killed Sean again'
The fiancee of an unarmed man who was killed in a hail of 50 police bullets said on Saturday that the acquittal of three officers charged in his death was like "they killed Sean all over again".
"That's what it felt like to us," said Nicole Paultre Bell in her first public comments about Friday's verdict, in which a state judge cleared two detectives of manslaughter and a third of reckless endangerment in the death of Sean Bell, 23.
Reuters
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