About 30 members of the groups Latinos Unidas and BLACK raised banners and signs outside Rochester’s Public Safety Building Thursday evening, in what organizers say was meant to be a small-scale demonstration showing that Rochester Latinos support the Black Lives Matter movement.
Organizer Rosemary Rivera and other members of the group say they were surprised to see authorities react by closing the Hall of Justice early and barricading off the Public Safety Building. They say they never intended to close streets or block traffic as happened last month in the East End, and Rivera says she thought that was made clear in social media.
Eventually about 30 people lined the sidewalk along Exchange Boulevard for two hours, at times chanting and waving to passing cars. Police, who were watching unobtrusively from cars at various points along the block, didn’t intervene.
This comes a day after several of the activists arrested in the East End protest last month were in court, saying video of the event will show police never asked them to get out of the street before moving in to clear them out of East Avenue.