Protesters gather for sixth night in Lexington to call for police accountability
For the sixth night in a row, people gathered in downtown Lexington Wednesday to protest police brutality and demand police accountability.
Protesters gathered at the courthouse plaza to stand in solidarity with cities that have seen recent instances of black people being killed by police, and to call for more accountability for Lexington police. The group rallied in front of the courthouse, then marched down Main Street, past police headquarters, carrying signs and chanting.
At one point, they chanted, “Breonna was asleep, no justice, no peace!” The chant was about Breonna Taylor, who was shot and killed in her apartment by Louisville Police. Protesters also chanted the name of George Floyd, whose death in Minneapolis has sparked nationwide protests since last week.
Since the first Lexington gathering on Friday, protests have been mostly peaceful and drawn hundreds, some nights thousands, of people downtown.
On Tuesday, protesters were joined by clergy from about a dozen houses of worship.
A group of black faith leaders from Lexington and the surrounding area was set to gather Thursday at 10 a.m. to issue a “call to action” for local elected and appointed officials. The call to action and media briefing, which will take place at Main Street Baptist Church on West Main Street, will also include a march, according to a news release from the group.
“Being black is not a crime,” the group of faith leaders said in the release. “All of us must be treated with equal dignity and respect. The understandable unrest that is tearing our nation apart in far too many of our great cities is not what we want to happen here. We must, therefore, strike preemptively in order to mitigate to the best of our ability the seriously negative aspects of frustration that has fermented for 400 years.”
On Wednesday night, one pastor told the crowd that Lexington’s peaceful protests have set an example for other cities and are causing change.
Cooperation Lexington, a group that organized marches Friday and Sunday, and has helped in other protests in Lexington, has called for accountability in the Lexington Police Department.
On Wednesday night, Sarah Williams, a protest organizer with Cooperation Lexington, told the crowd about the group’s demands for accountability in the Lexington Police Department. Williams said if protests in Lexington have to go for eight nights, they’ll go eight nights, one for each time Breonna Taylor was shot by Louisville Metro Police.
In Lexington, the group has specifically pointed to an incident at Fayette Mall in 2019. The group accuses Lexington police chaplain Donovan Stewart of hitting an autistic black teenager during an arrest. The teenager’s family has since filed a civil rights lawsuit against Stewart.
Lexington police have said that by policy internal investigations have to wait until matters are concluded in court.
Cooperation Lexington has also called on the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council to consider a list of demands the group made last year regarding the soon to be renegotiated collective bargaining agreement for Lexington police.
Below are live updates on social media from Herald-Leader journalists covering Wednesday’s rally.
This story was originally published June 3, 2020 at 8:37 PM.
