NBC News<\/p>\n
Police arrested 74 people at a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Rochester, New York, on Friday amid nationwide protests against police shootings of black citizens.<\/p>\n
The Rochester demonstration was one of many<\/a> held in the wake of deadly police shootings in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and suburban St. Paul, Minnesota, and came after the sniper attack that killed five police officers in Dallas<\/a>.<\/p>\n Officials said they had made attempts to communicate with organizers and thought the protest was ending before the arrests were made.<\/p>\n “We actually started demobilizing officers and … arranging for some officers to be in the area just to keep an eye on things,” Rochester Police Chief Michael Ciminelli said at a press briefing early Saturday.<\/p>\n Officers donned riot gear “later on” and at one point the crowd began to surround them and rocks were thrown, he said.<\/p>\n “At this point … there were 74 arrests for disorderly conduct. There were also two charges for resisting arrest,” he said. The crowd numbered more than 400 people, he said.<\/p>\n At the same briefing, Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren said the situation had “escalated a little bit” but police did not have to use use any pepper spray, batons or “deploy any weapons, any tasers.”<\/p>\n Two journalists were also mistakenly arrested.<\/p>\n “I apologize for that. They were there trying to do their job to cover this event,” Ciminelli added. Warren also apologized to the journalists.<\/p>\n Nobody was injured during the night, Ciminelli said without going into very much detail about the circumstances around the detentions.<\/p>\n The “74 arrests made it’s difficult for us to break down each individual one,” he added.<\/p>\n In spite of the number of detentions, Ciminelli said the department “didn’t blindly make arrests.”<\/p>\n Earlier, Ciminelli said he would have preferred not to have the rally in the city on Friday, a day after the Dallas massacre. However, he said, if people wanted to gather and voice their concerns, “we will protect them in doing so.”<\/p>\n