Last night, a crowd gathered downtown to show solidarity with the Freddie Gray protests in Baltimore and to connect the Black Lives Matter movement to Denver’s history of police brutality and killing. As people marched up Colfax Avenue, police on motorcycles charged activists, shot pepper spray into the crowd and arrested 11.
“An officer got knocked off his motorcycle as he was basically patrolling and that was lead [sic] to the assault charge arrest,” Denver police spokesman Sonny Jackson said to The Denver Post. “That is what stirred up a lot of things at that point.”
But protestor Lee Hurter told The Colorado Independent a different story. “One of the cops fell off his motorcycle, which created this moment of chaos. I don’t know if they worried they’d be vulnerable, but they just started attacking people,” he said.
Direct Autonomous Media released this video of the action and arrests:
