Meanwhile, in Minneapolis...

[Content Note: Police brutality; racism; violence.]

A day after masked gunmen opened fire on protesters rallying for justice after the police killing of Jamar Clark, more information is coming out about how police responded to that shooting, which happened right outside a police precinct:

"This is what you guys wanted," police told protesters after five demonstrators were shot and injured by masked men at a continuing protest in Minneapolis on Monday night, witnesses told the Guardian.

Protesters trying to tend to the wounded were also maced.

...Having shot five people, the attackers escaped in what looked like a black Toyota SUV, according to Nimo Omar, who was also at the protest.

After the shots, everything was "very chaotic," Omar said. Several people, including Sumaya Moallin and Oluchi Omeoga, ran back to the precinct to ask the police for help.

Moallin said they needed a squad car and an ambulance. "He looked at me and he said: 'Call 911,'" she told the Guardian. "I said: 'I thought you were 911.' Then he looked at me directly and said: 'This is what you guys wanted.'"

"Six [officers] were outside [the precinct building]," she continued. "They all just shuffled back into the door. They were not making eye contact ... I pleaded a good amount of time."

She said she felt "like I had the wind knocked out of me. We're here to protest against what they're doing wrong; we don't not want cops, we just want them to serve and protect. I fell to the ground and started crying."

...A "chaotic" 15 or 20 minutes passed, [Rachel Bean] said, with the crowd's anger at the police's refusal to offer aid growing. "I felt powerless," Omeoga said. "But the whole reason me and Jie [Wronski-Riley] were chasing around was to de-escalate." Another witness, Moallin, said that it was more like 10 minutes.

Then the police arrived at the scene in force, in full riot gear. Bean was still tending to Martin's brother's stomach wound when they released mace into people's faces, she told the Guardian. "I said, 'I called the EMS, you don't have to mace everyone,'" she said. "The officer said 'fuck you' or 'shut the fuck up' or something like that."

She said that attitude was representative of the behavior of other officers she interacted with after the attack. "The idea that you would mace a group of people that just had bullets fired at them – that's the opposite of responsible."

Rage. Seethe. Boil.

The sort of thinking that imagines protesters desire to be shot by anti-black gunmen is not just despicable; it's projection. It's the sort of thinking that comes from people who want to pretend that they're under siege, in order to justify their wanton murder of people over whom they have power, and then hold up as heroic martyrs a couple of fucking assholes who shot themselves.

I don't even know how these cops can spend a moment wondering why the fuck they're being protested, when they mace people trying to provide medical assistance to comrades who have been shot.

That shit right there is why you're being protested. Because you are aggressively hostile to black existence and survival.