Latest news with #NoKingsProtest
Yahoo
21 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
DA requests more time to review deadly ‘No Kings' Salt Lake City rally
The Salt Lake County District Attorney's Office was granted more time Thursday to determine what charges, if any, should be filed against the man arrested during Saturday's deadly 'No Kings' protest in Salt Lake City. 'Today, the Salt Lake County District Attorney's Office requested and was granted by a 3rd District Court judge an extension for the detention of Arturo Gamboa at the Salt Lake County Jail. A three-day extension was requested because the Salt Lake County District Attorney's Office has not yet received a formal screening of the evidence associated with the charge of murder, for which Mr. Gamboa was booked,' Sim Gill's office announced Thursday. Although police say he was armed with a rifle, Gamboa did not fire a shot during a confrontation with rally volunteers, one of whom fired three rounds from his own handgun and injured Gamboa, 24, but also killed an innocent bystander, 39-year-old Arthur Folasa 'Afa' Ah Loo. The incident happened just before 8 p.m. Saturday, as an estimated 10,000 people were marching on State Street. Two men who police say described themselves as part of the 'peacekeeping' group for the rally spotted Gamboa near 151 S. State. One of the men says he watched Gamboa move away from the main crowd to a secluded area behind a wall. 'The peacekeepers found this behavior to be suspicious and kept Arturo in view. One of the peacekeepers observed Arturo remove an AR-15 style rifle from a backpack he was carrying. He observed Arturo begin to manipulate the rifle, and they called out to him to drop the gun after drawing their own firearms. Arturo then lifted the rifle, and according to witnesses he began to run toward the large crowd gathered on State Street holding the rifle in a firing position,' a police booking affidavit states. After Gamboa was treated for a gunshot wound to the stomach, he was booked into the Salt Lake County Jail for investigation of murder. Under state law, once a person is booked into jail, prosecutors have 'by 3 p.m. on the fourth calendar day after the defendant was booked' to file formal charges, as long as the fourth day isn't a weekend or holiday. If charges are not filed by then, prosecutors can request a person be held in jail for another three days while they screen potential charges. In asking for an extension to hold Gamboa, prosecutors noted that police are still interviewing witnesses and 'involved parties,' as well as going through 'voluminous amounts of surveillance and amateur footage of the incident. This extension will allow the police to present their evidence at a formal screening scheduled for this Friday and allow the Salt Lake County District Attorney's Office sufficient time to review, analyze, and make an informed decision to any allegations of criminal wrongdoing,' Gill said Thursday, 'I ask for everyone's patience. When a person loses their life, we are all impacted as a community. It is critical that we are thorough, accurate, and faithful to the truth. Arthur Afa Ah Loo's family and our community of citizens deserve no less,' he said. The so-called 'peacekeeper' who fired the shots that killed Ah Loo and injured Gamboa was not arrested. However, police say the investigation into the man — whom event organizers say has military experience — has been continuing, and the district attorney, while screening for potential charges against Gamboa, will also determine if criminal charges are warranted against the 'peacekeeper.'
The Guardian
a day ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Were the No Kings protests the largest single-day demonstration in American history?
The scale of last weekend's 'No Kings' protests is now becoming clearer, with one estimate suggesting that Saturday was among the biggest ever single-day protests in US history. Working out exactly where the protest ranks compared to similar recent events has been a project of G Elliott Morris, a data journalist who runs the Substack Strength in Numbers, calculated turnout between four million and six million, which would be 1.2-1.8% of the US population. This could exceed the previous record in recent history, when between 3.3 million and 5.6 million people showed up at the 2017 Women's March to rally against Trump's misogynistic rhetoric. Morris estimated the No Kings Day protest turnout in two steps. First, his team gathered data at events for as many locations as possible, defaulting to tallies published in local newspapers. Where that wasn't available, they relied on estimates from organizers and attendees themselves. To come up with a rough approximation of nationwide numbers, he then estimated the attendance in each unreported protest would be equal to the medium of the attendance in places where data did exist. 'That's a tough approximation, but at least an empirical one,' Morris wrote in an email. 'We use the medium instead of the average to control for outliers, [such as the fact that] big cities pull the average up, but most events are not huge urban protests.' Morris stressed that the Strength in Numbers tally remains unofficial, and he hopes that researchers will 'build' on his data when they conduct more studies. But his estimation is similar to that made by Ezra Levin, the co-founder of Indivisible, the progressive non-profit that organized the event. He estimated that five million people across the globe took to the streets. Not everyone is ready to call it the biggest protest ever. Jeremy Pressman of the Crowd Counting Consortium, a joint Harvard University/University of Connecticut project that estimates political crowds, told USA Today it would take 'some time' to get an official tally. Meanwhile Steven Cheung, Trump's director of communications, unsurprisingly called the protests 'a complete and utter failure with miniscule attendance' on X. (No Kings took place on Donald Trump's birthday, which coincided with a parade the president threw in celebration of the US Army's 250th anniversary.) Omar Wasow, an assistant professor in UC Berkeley's department of political science, told Guardian US that the demonstration was 'without question, among the largest single-day protests in history'. Wasow compared protest movements to standing ovations given at a theater. 'We see a cascade effect: if one person stands after the curtain drops, then more follow,' he said. 'If 1.8% of the US adult population showed up to protest on Saturday, those are the people who stood up to clap first. It sends a signal to all these other people that you can stand up, too.' The 1963 March on Washington, where Dr Martin Luther King Jr made his famous 'I have a dream' speech was at the time one of the largest protests in history, with up to a half a million people in attendance. It was dwarfed in size by the first Earth Day protests in 1970, in which 20 million people helped spark the creation of the Environmental Protection Act. 'At the time this was about 10% of the US population, possibly the largest we will ever realistically see – unless the political environment deteriorates significantly, prompting more backlash,' Morris said. In 1986 at the Hands Across America fundraiser, an estimated five million Americans formed a human chain to raise money to fight hunger and homelessness (each person was asked to donate $10, though many participants didn't end up paying and the politics of the Coca-Cola-sponsored event were murky). More than a million people took to the streets in 2006 for a boycott called 'A Day Without Immigrants' in protest of stricter immigration laws. Polls taken during the summer of 2020 found that between 15 and 26 million Americans protested against the murder of George Floyd during the month of June (though day-by-day numbers were smaller). Gloria J Browne-Marshall, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and author of A Protest History of the United States, said that it's difficult to compare crowd sizes for various protests, especially ones that take place over the course of several days and span various locations. 'There are different processes that have been used over the years, from eyeballing things to actually counting the number of people per square mile,' she said. In the days following No Kings, an idea put forth by political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan called the 3.5% rule spurred social media discussion. Chenoweth, a Harvard professor and Stephan, a political scientist who covers nonviolent movements, studied 323 revolutionary campaigns around the world that took place from 1900 to 2006. They found that all nonviolent movements that had the support of at least 3.5% of a population always succeeded in triggering change. No Kings, with its massive turnout, could be seen as a turning point. There are caveats to this rule, which was published in the team's 2011 book Why Civil Resistance Works. 'The 3.5% rule is descriptive, not prescriptive – and has been revised significantly since being originally published to allow for exceptions,' Morris wrote. 'Chenoweth now is clear that hitting 3.5% does not guarantee success, especially in political regimes where change is harder, and that movements can accomplish their goals with much smaller mobilization, through things like media coverage and alliances with elites.' Organizers and attendees of No Kings feel invigorated enough to continue the demonstrations, with another round of coordinated protests to fall on 17 July, the five-year anniversary of the death of John Lewis, the congressman and civil rights leader. But they admit there are limits to these events. 'We're not going to win if a lot of people show up at a protest one day,' Levin said. 'We need people actually taking democracy seriously, and that's not going to be done through a top-down action. It has to be done from the bottom-up. When pro-democracy movements succeed, it's because of a broad-based, ideological, diverse, geographically-dispersed, grassroots organizing – not just mobilizing.'
CNN
3 days ago
- Politics
- CNN
Journalist live-streamed his arrest by ICE during protest
Salvadoran journalist, Mario Guevara live-streamed his arrest by ice agents during a "No Kings protest" in Atlanta, and is still being held on an immigration detainer.
CNN
3 days ago
- Politics
- CNN
Journalist live-streamed his arrest by ICE during protest
Salvadoran journalist, Mario Guevara live-streamed his arrest by ice agents during a "No Kings protest" in Atlanta, and is still being held on an immigration detainer.
The Hill
3 days ago
- Politics
- The Hill
Chris Cuomo: Intense partisanship ‘killing' America
NewsNation host Chris Cuomo argued tribalism and partisanship in modern politics is hurting the country in a major way, and warned it could have major consequences for the future of the country. 'The mandate really is to stop looking left and right and see what is right in front of our damn faces,' Cuomo said Monday on his prime-time program on the network. 'Over the weekend, 5 million Americans protested — the largest single day of demonstrations in U.S. history. And we know why. On one level, it was a reaction to the Army's birthday-Trump's birthday bash. They called it the 'No Kings Protest.' Let me tell you what I call it — a high-water mark for disunity.' The host noted that he was 'not saying I am against the protests. It's a signature American blessing of our democracy.' 'And I get the arguments against MAGA, against the president,' he continued. 'I get the arguments on both sides — this battle of which is more toxic, however, is making us all sick.' Over the weekend, major protests against President Trump's agenda popped up across the country, while a state lawmaker in Minnesota was assassinated at her home in a suspected act of politically-motivated violence. The developments have led to a heightened sense of uncertainty and stress among many Americans, while a hot war in the Middle East between Israel and Iran is sparking fears of a wider global conflict the U.S. could become involved in. The root of the intense divide among Americans, Cuomo argued, is the incentive structure present in both politics and media. 'We have to see this battle to the bottom of which side is worse for what it is – it is killing this country,' he said. 'This is not hyperbole. This is not a hot take. We are killing ourselves.'
