Naked fury in Rochester
Unclothed protesters demand firings in Black man’s death
Naked protesters wearing nothing more than “spit hoods” sat outside upstate Rochester’s police headquarters Monday, demanding accountability for the death of Daniel Prude, an unarmed Black man who was fatally injured during a March encounter with cops.
Seven police officers involved in Prude’s suffocation death were suspended last week for their involvement in the March 23 arrest during which a hood was slipped over Prude’s head to keep him from spitting at cops, who allegedly held him down for about two minutes until he stopped breathing. Prude, 41, died a week later after he was taken off life support.
Rochester cops found Prude wandering the street naked after police said he smashed a storefront window. Prude could be seen on body camera footage spitting in the direction of officers and claiming to be infected with coronavirus.
His death sparked outrage last week after his relatives released the police body camera video and written reports they obtained through a public records request.
A half-dozen naked protesters sat along a rain-slicked street outside the city’s public safety building Monday morning with their hands behind their backs, some with the words “Black Lives Matter” written across their backs.
The peaceful protest ended a short time later after the demonstrators were given blankets and driven away in cars.
Demonstrators, who have protested every day since the body cam revelation, want the officers to lose their jobs, along with Police Chief La’Ron Singletary and Mayor Lovely Warren, who says she’d been misled for months about the circumstances of the fatal encounter.
Warren praised protesters for their peaceful demonstration after previous clashes during which officers doused activists with a chemical spray and fired what appeared to be pepper balls to drive them from barricades around the headquarters building. At one point, fireworks were shot off and a bus stop set ablaze.
Sunday’s protest went off without a violent hitch.
“Last night the world saw the true spirit of Rochester,” Warren said, adding that she had told the Police Department on Sunday “to adopt a smaller and more restrained posture.”
Meanwhile, President Trump, in a Monday tweet, lu umped Rochester in with a list of o cities that had “bad nights” Sunday. “Rochester N.Y., Brookly yn N.Y., Portland — All had bad nights,” n Trump wrote. “All weakly run by Radical Left Democrat Governors and Mayors! Get the picture?”
Warren, a Democrat, urged residents r to ignore Trump, accusing c him of trying “to bait people p to act with hate and incite violence that he believes will benefit him politically.”
The Rochester Police Department has come under fire for using spit hoods, mesh fabric bags often utilized for mental health emergencies.
Prude’s death has underscored one of the top demands of the police reform movement: Certain duties should not be handled by law enforcement but by social workers or mental health experts. Police union officials have said the officers were following their training.