Organizers are busing in potentially thousands of protesters from other states — including from high-crime urban areas such as Newark — to attend Saturday’s march against police brutality.
“People are coming from everywhere to march in Staten Island against the double standard in policing,” Rev. Al Sharpton said of the “justice caravans.”
“Not only from New York — from New Jersey, from Connecticut, from Delaware. People are coming from everywhere,” Sharpton said on his radio show. “I want people everywhere to get on a bus.”
Sharpton’s National Action Network is providing free bus pickups in Elizabeth and Newark. As many as 50 buses may come from New Jersey alone, NAN’s New Jersey organizer said.
Health Care Workers Union 1199 and the NAACP are also providing bus service for people demanding justice in the case of Eric Garner, who died July 17 after being put in a chokehold by a police officer.
Organizers said the point of the march is to seek justice in Garner’s case, not to cause chaos or violence.
Each organization will have “marshals” to monitor its own marchers, said Hazel Dukes, New York state president of the NAACP.
“It’s going to be very peaceful. We’ll see to that,” Dukes said.
Sharpton announced that former Gov. David Paterson and Council Speaker Melissa Mark Viverito will join him at the march.
The noon march will begin at Bay Street and Victory Boulevard — near the site of Garner’s death — and go past DA Daniel Donovan’s office on Stuyvesant Place.
The NYPD, sensitive over the heavy-handed law-enforcement response to protests over the shooting death of an unarmed black man in Ferguson, Mo., insisted city cops will be have a more deft presence.
“We are not planning on having an aggressive police presence. NYPD is expecting a peaceful rally,” a police official said.
“We’re going to have mainly community-affairs and Staten Island Task Force cops assigned for the march.”
Additional reporting by Jennifer Bain