Protesters took down an American flag during #StopTheCops street protests against police in Chicago, replacing it with one that read “Unapologetically Black” on Saturday. The protests, which shut down streets, were organized as a response to the International Association of Chiefs of Police meeting at McCormick Center.
“Unapologetically Black” is the slogan of the Black Youth Project, a Black Lives Matter affiliated group that organized the protests. As CBS Chicago reports, the group opposes increased spending on law enforcement:
Protester Maria Hadden of the Black Youth Project says the money could be better spent elsewhere.
“To provide better education, to provide access to basic human needs, housing and healthcare, those are the ways that we address crime,” Hadden said. “Those are the ways we improve the city, not by spending more money on police so we believe we need to spend less money on policing, more money on community services.”
Chicago, which has some of the strictest gun controls laws in the country, has the highest violent crime rate of any large American city, with 884.26 violent crimes per capita.
Some protestors taunted the police by singing “Stop cops, stop cops whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when we defund you?” to the tune of the Bad Boys theme song from the TV show COPS.
The protests had a social media component, as the #StopTheCops hashtag began trending on Twitter Saturday night, and people posted photos and video from the protests.
President Obama defended Black Lives Matter activists this week, saying the protests were based on “legitimate issues.” However, as Breitbart News reported, many of the President’s claims about the radical anti-police movement are contradicted by the founders themselves.