Minneapolis protesters slam police killing of Jamar Clark

Protesters in the US city of Minneapolis hold a fresh rally against the recent fatal police shooting of a young, unarmed African American.

Scores of people gathered Sunday night outside the Minneapolis police department’s 4th precinct, near where 24-year-old Jamar Clark was shot dead last week.

Protesters called for the release of videos of the incident but authorities say there is footage from multiple sources and that making the recordings public would compromise their investigations.

Minneapolis Police Department officers Mark Ringgenberg and Dustin Schwarze were involved in the shooting of Clark shortly after midnight last weekend, according to the city’s Department of Public Safety.

Police have said the officers were responding to an assault call and found Clark interfering with paramedics. Authorities say there was a struggle and he was shot. Some people in the community say they saw him handcuffed at the time of the shooting.

The head of the Minneapolis police union, Bob Kroll, however, insisted that Clark was not handcuffed.

Clark’s death, which is the latest in a series of unarmed black men killed at the hands of police in the US, sparked demonstrations in the city’s small but concentrated minority community.

Meanwhile, reports say US Justice Department attorneys were expected to fly to Minnesota on Sunday to investigate the killing of Clark that has prompted calls for the two Minneapolis police officers involved in the shooting to be prosecuted.

Police brutality in the United States has raised nationwide debates amid a string of police killings of unarmed black men that has resulted in creating the Black Lives Matter movement.

Large-scale demonstrations were held across the country in 2014 after a series of high-profile incidents of white police officers killing unarmed African-American men, including Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio; Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York and Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina.