It’s not clear which faction Mayor Bill de Blasio was addressing in his call for a moratorium on protesting — those protesting the “racist police” or those protesting him. In any case, only one side has answered, and the response is “No dice.” Reuters reports:
[T]he Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist representing the families of [Eric] Garner and [Michael] Brown, said de Blasio’s call was too nebulous to heed.
“Is a vigil a protest? Is a rally?” Sharpton said in a telephone interview, calling de Blasio’s comments “an ill-defined request.”
The reaction from the ANSWER Coalition, a radical activist group, was even more pointed. Denouncing the the mayor’s request as an “outrageous” attempt to “chill” free expression, a spokesman for the group for group said it had no intention of cancelling a long-planned protest march Tuesday evening.
Meantime, protesters at the makeshift memorial site in Brooklyn where the two officers were murdered, taunted and shouted at police and others who came to pay their respects last night. In a televised report from the site by CNN’s Sara Ganim, you can hear noise in the background as she speaks. Ganim finally acknowledges “in the interests of full disclosure” that the source of the din is protesters yelling at the silent mourners.
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