I watched the whole thing on a streaming feed from that intersection. It was well handled all around. There were several local leaders who immediately interposed themselves between the crowd and the police and encouraged the crowd to calm down and to listen to LE commands. While that confrontation was going on, some agitator tossed a cherry bomb into the space between the police line and the demonstrators. And a car containing two armed youths who’d been driving around shooting was stopped a few feet away, and the media got in the middle of the “hot stop”. All in all, quite a potential for a really severe incident, averted by excellent discipline from a number of different quarters.
Could have
after the water bottle was thrown, the leaders and clergy were trying to communicate to the crowd but the sound machine was so loud nobody could hear - they ended up linking arms and walking the crowd back away, forcing some of them even, but they did it themselves. I thought the gun-car happened well up the street at McDonalds/QT area, far away from the police line group. The sound machine does more to inflame things on a line than to than calm things down imo