NEW YORK: Thousands of protesters took to the streets across New York City and in other cities on Wednesday evening after a Staten Island grand jury said it would not indict a white police officer in the death of a black man.

They snarled the streets of Manhattan especially Times Square, the theatre district and the highways.

The Staten Island jury’s decision made US Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to announce the opening of a federal civil rights investigation.

Holder, in announcing the federal civil rights investigation of the Staten Island case, sought to calm down the furor in New York.

The jury declined to bring charges in the death of Eric Garner, a 43-year-old Staten Island man who died in July after a New York police officer placed him in an apparent chokehold during an arrest.

The decision struck many protesters as a chilling and frustrating repetition of events in Ferguson, , where a grand jury last month said it would not indict the white officer who killed Michael Brown, a black 18-year-old.

The Brown case ignited waves of protests and a national debate over the treatment that African American men receive at the hands of law enforcement officers.

The country has been confronted with a series of images of unarmed black men who have died after encounters with police: video of Garner grappling with officers on a sidewalk, pictures of Brown’s body lying in a street and surveillance footage of a black 12-year-old in Cleveland, Tamir Rice, who was fatally shot after a police officer mistook his BB gun for a firearm.

Published in Dawn, December 5th, 2014