“We out here like the Taliban” one protester shouted into a Facebook live video of Mills Shaka Zulu Gill as protests erupt after another police shooting.
Around 5:15 on Monday evening in Charlotte North Carolina, a black police officer shot a disabled black man waiting for his daughter to get home from school. Those are the facts we know for sure.
What we don’t know is weather the man was carrying a gun or was carrying a book.
Police say the man that was shot brandished a weapon and that is why the police shot him.
The family and eyewitnesses say that the man was carrying a book and the police had no reason to shoot and kill him.
The conflicting sides of the story and the Facebook live feed from a local resident named Mills Shaka Zulu Gill, is what fanned the flames of the protestors.
It started out as a few people hanging out and yelling at the police, but Shaka Zulu kept telling people to share his video and they did. At one point over 100,000 people were watching and the video received almost two million views.
People from all over kept showing up through the night. By 9pm the police had arrived with riot gear, but it wasn’t enough.
The crowd protesting for Black Lives Matter destroyed police cars, threw rocks and insults at cops and marched six miles to shut down interstate 85.
Twelve officers and at least one protestor were injured.
The protests lasted through the night and ended in the early morning on Tuesday.
Despite the good intentions of Shaka Zulu Gill, he was one of the main people that got into the faces of the police and antagonizing them.
He was the first one to start destroying one of the police cars. He was seen on Facebook live with a gun at one point and he smoked weed several times during the five hours he broadcasted.
At the end of the night, he went home and wasn’t arrested. None of the main agitators were arrested.
Instead, the police just stood their ground and launched tear gas and shot rubber bullets into the crowd.
The protestors looted trucks that they stopped on the highway, a Walmart that was along the way and countless other acts of vandalism.
The protest was not peaceful in any way. It was violent, only the police acted in a peaceful manner.
This isn’t going to stop either. The more black men that police kill, the crazier the protests are going to be until we see a full blown riot with dozens of police and protestors killed. It almost happened last night. It might happen tonight.
Charlotte is bracing itself for another round of protests and tonight people will be ready on both sides. The police will have their plan, but the protestors will be more organized and out in larger numbers tonight.
Hopefully peace can prevail, but after the way things went last night, tonight will most likely be a lot worse.
