Police made dozens of more arrests in Baton Rouge on Sunday evening as protesters sought to block Interstate 110, pushing the total number of protesters arrested in the Capital City to more than 160 since last week, The Associated Press reports.
Earlier Sunday, some 2,000 people rallied outside the Capitol building to protest police killings of black people, State Police Maj. Doug Cain says.
“They didn’t have any problems out there. They seemed to be very organized and peaceful,” Cain says.
But by nightfall, a few hundred people aimed for an on-ramp of Interstate 110, trying a tactic protesters were using over the weekend in multiple cities. More than a thousand people left a Black Lives Matter rally in Memphis and walked up a bridge over the Mississippi River on Sunday night, temporarily blocking all traffic on Interstate 40.
At a West Coast protest, hundreds of people poured into the streets of in Southern California late Sunday night, blocking traffic for several minutes on the 405 Freeway. Authorities told the Los Angeles Times there were no arrests and no reports of violence.
And after a lengthy standoff on Sunday evening in Baton Rouge, more police in full riot gear moved in, pinning some of the protesters as others fled. Some 30 to 40 people were taken into custody for trying to block a highway, sheriff’s spokeswoman Casey Rayborn Hicks says.
That could push Baton Rouge’s weekend arrest total above 160, with just one reported injury to a police officer.
Gov. John Bel Edwards says he was “very proud” of the Louisiana law enforcement response to the protests that have followed the fatal shooting of a black man by white police officers in the city. Edwards says he doesn’t believe officers have been overly aggressive by using riot gear to push protesters off a highway.
The Associated Press has the full story.
