Protests continued Thursday in cities across the country, a day after a Staten Island grand jury decided not to indict NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo. Pantaleo was captured on video using a chokehold to arrest Eric Garner, leading to the 43-year-old unarmed black man’s death.
At Binghamton University, about 100 students gathered to demonstrate against police brutality. They observed a four-and-a-half-minute silence. The length of the silence was the same amount of time that the body of Michael Brown, another unarmed black man whose death at the hands of police led to a grand jury declining to indict, lay in the street. The BU demonstrators also marched through campus streets chanting “Black lives matter” and “No justice, no peace.”
The protest was a follow-up to a similar one on Tuesday. The first protest was in response to a Missouri grand jury’s refusal to indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot Brown. The university’s speech and debate club and NAACP chapter helped organize Thursday’s protest as one more attempt to drive the message home before the holiday break.