By Malcolm C. Knox, The Associated Press
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) - A crowd of about 200 gathered downtown Sunday to protest a white police officer’s acquittal in the shooting death of a black teen-aged drug suspect.
Last week, former city police detective McKenzie Mattingly was found not guilty of murder, manslaughter and reckless homicide in the Jan. 3 death of 19-year-old Michael Newby. A mistrial was declared on a wanton endangerment charge because of a hung jury.
Mattingly was fired in April by Chief Robert White, but will seek to regain his job by appealling to the police merit board. The board has the authority to overturn his firing.
A protester, Tom Moffett, held a sign Sunday that read, “We don’t trust your review board.”
Moffett said the board does not consider the rights of the public.
“They are not designed to protect citizens against unjust actions of the police,” Moffett said. “The chief was right, even if he didn’t commit a crime. (Mattingly) lost his cool. He shot when he shouldn’t have shot. He executed that young man.”
Dwight Patton, president of the Cincinnati Black United Front, urged blacks to boycott events that would provide income for the city, specifically the Kentucky Derby. Patton said people in Cincinnati are sympathetic to the black community’s in Louisville.
“It’s definitely news up there,” he said.
The protesters, led by the Rev. Louis Coleman and Newby’s family gathered in a downtown park, marched around police headquarters and past the Hall of Justice twice, singing and chanting.
The peaceful procession followed two hearses.
“It symbolizes that we’re never going to forget,” Coleman said.
Newby was the seventh black man fatally shot by Louisville police in the last five years.
Coleman has written to the Congressional Black Caucus, requesting that they investigate race relations in Louisville.
The Justice Resource Center, a civil rights group headed by Coleman, began marching on Sundays after the shooting of James Taylor in December 2002. Taylor, who was black, was handcuffed when he was shot 11 times by one of two white officers trying to arrest him. The officers said Taylor lunged at them with a knife.
Mattingly’s trial lasted two weeks and no protests were held while it transpired.
On Sunday, police stopped traffic to allow the protesters to march down city streets. Four uniformed officers watched the procession from the sidewalk.
In January, shortly after Newby’s death, four people were arrested when a protest in the same area turned contentious. Activists threw objects and broke windows at the downtown police station while horse-mounted police drove back the crowd.