MILWAUKEE — A crowd of protesters skirmished with police Saturday night in a Milwaukee neighborhood where an officer shot and killed a man after a traffic stop and foot chase earlier in the day, setting fire to a police car and torching a gas station. One officer was hurt by a thrown brick.
Police said the 23-year-old man who was killed was armed with a handgun, but Assistant Chief Bill Jessup told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that it wasn’t clear whether the man had pointed a gun or fired at the officer. They described the man as a suspect, but didn’t say what led to the traffic stop.
The races of the man and the officer weren’t immediately released.
The Journal Sentinel reported that a crowd of more than 100 people gathered in a standoff with 20 to 30 officers, some of whom wore riot gear, several hours after the shooting. Officers got in their cars to leave at one point and some in the crowd started smashing a squad car’s windows. Another police car was set on fire.
The police department tweeted that a gas station had been set on fire, and said firefighters couldn’t extinguish the blaze because shots were being fired.
