WARNING: GRAPHIC LANGUAGE/BREITBART: Mob of protesters
confronted by Chicagoans in their neighborhood near Halsted Street.
Breitbart has published a video that shows mobs in Chicago streets invading the Halsted Street Orange Line Station near the interchange of the Dan Ryan Expressway and the Stevenson Expressway, just north of Bridgeport.
The CTA Halsted-Orange Line is about ten blocks from the location near James Ward Public School, 2800 South Princeton Avenue, where seven teens were involved in the videotaped beating of an Asian-American teen in January, 2012 (See also The Cardinal Raymond Palomino Charged As An Adult, 7 Other Teens Charged After Beating in Bridgeport Alley Posted on YouTube).
Going back to the 1800′s the Bridgeport neighborhood was a large settlement of Irish immigrants who worked on the Illinois and Michigan Canal. The Bridgeport neighborhood was also known as “Lithuanian Downtown” and the center of Lithuanian-American settlement in Chicago. Today, the neighborhood includes large numbers of Chinese-Americans and Mexican-Americans.
The National Lawyers Guild claims Chicago police wrongly arrested a group of NATO protesters in the Bridgeport neighborhood earlier this week. Initially arrests were related to reports Molotov cocktails, but the lawyers say the protesters (their ‘client’) only had beer brewing equipment. Police raided the apartment building about 11 p.m.
Nine people were arrested at an apartment in the 1000 block of West 32nd Street. Occupy Chicago protesters are reported to have been staying for two weeks leading up to this weekend’s NATO summit.
UPDATE (Saturday, May 19, 2012): Police identified Brian Church, 20, of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, Jared Chase, 24, of Keene, New Hampsire, and Brent Vincent Betterly, 24, of Oakland Park, Florida as subjects charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism, providing material support for terrorism and possession of an explosive or incendiary device. There is an unconfirmed report that the suspects, with their faces concealed, were subjects of a YouTube video that showed a traffic stop about one week before their arrests. The erratic YouTube video (YouTube.com/NewsPowerTV) claims police threatened “pre-emptive police violence” and harassed the subjects, but really just shows police talking about violence that occurred in 1968.
OccupyChicago protesters begin a night before the Chicago NATO Summit. About 200 protesters marched down Halsted at about 10:00 p.m. Thursday.
Group of protesters pause near Halsted and Taylor.
See also …
National Lawyers Guild