New Rally Set To Protest Fatal Oakland Police Shooting
OAKLAND (CBS/BCN) - For the second straight day, a rally will be held Friday to protest the fatal shooting of an unarmed man by two Oakland police officers on Monday night.
The killing was cited by protest organizers as the latest example of an unjustified killing of a black man by law enforcement.
Ronald Cruz of By Any Means Necessary, a social justice group, said the rally will begin at 3 p.m. at the barbershop at 5815 Bancroft Way that Jones owned.
Oakland police said the officers shot Derrick Jones, 37, when he refused repeated orders to surrender after they responded to a report that he was attacking a woman at a laundromat next to his barber shop.
Deputy Chief Jeffrey Israel said Jones was reaching into his waistband, which the officers thought indicated that he was reaching for a gun.
Israel also said one of the officers spotted a metal object in Jones' hand, but no weapon was found at the scene.
Oakland police spokesman Jeff Thomason said Friday that the shiny object officers described seeing near Jones' waist area has been identified as an electronic scale.
Thomason said the scale is silver and the dimensions are approximately three inches by five inches and three-fourths inch thick.
There was also marijuana found in Jones' pocket in a glass jar, he said.
Friday's rally is a follow-up to a rally on Thursday that included about 100 protesters who gathered at the barber shop and then marched to the Fruitvale BART station in Oakland, which BART police closed for about an hour as a precautionary measure.
Protesters gave angry speeches at the Fruitvale station and chanted "Kill the cops now!" but there weren't any arrests at the station or along the route of the march.
Protesters went to the Fruitvale station because that was the site of another incident in which a police officer shot and killed an unarmed man.
In the early morning hours of Jan. 1, 2009, BART police officer Johannes Mehserle fatally shot 22-year-old Oscar Grant III of Hayward after he and other officers responded to reports that there had been a fight on a train.
Mehserle was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to two years in state prison.
Cruz said there's another rally Friday because Oakland officials haven't met the protesters' demands.
He said protesters wanted the officers who killed Jones to be named and jailed and they want Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums and Mayor-elect Jean Quan to condemn the shooting.
"We will keep marching until the officers are jailed," Cruz said.
He said it hasn't yet been decided if protesters will march to the Fruitvale station again or whether they will just stay in the area of Jones' barber shop.
