A scene from demonstrations in Baltimore, during which ‘nonviolent protest organizer’ Joseph Kent was taken into custody live on CNN, have sparked social media outcry.
Kent was spotted in footage on CNN on the evening of 28 April 2015, shortly after a temporary 10 PM curfew was implemented to impede ongoing civil unrest. Kent is seen standing alone amid police activity, then a black police humvee drives into the shot, temporarily blocking Kent as he is surrounded by officers. When the vehicle drives away, Kent is nowhere to be seen:
Kent, a 21-year-old student from Morgan State University, was prominently featured in a 26 November 2014 article published in Baltimore’s City Paper when that outlet was covering local protests following the police shooting death of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Kent said of those demonstrations and their related movement:
Kent, who is also a musician, says the next day by phone that he has been organizing since middle school. He began marching at 11 that morning and helped lead the group of protesters through the campus at Morgan State, meeting with the president of the school to try to convince the administration to close the school for the day, and then going from Cold Spring Lane to York Road to Greenmount Avenue and finally onto St. Paul Street and down to City Hall, where they met up with the Baltimore Bloc group.“Everyone knows me at Morgan already, organizing and making sure everything running the correct way and peaceful and everything like that,” he says. “So, everybody already knows I’m going to do things the right way, so when everybody else and community people and civilians and people who joined and saw that the Morgan students were looking up to it, before you knew it, the whole city was on my back and I was just carrying the whole city.”The protesting, the marching, and the movement, it was important to a lot of people out there. Of course, it’s Baltimore and you’re gonna have the ones who wanna be violent and ignorant and stuff like that, but the majority of the people were of one accord and wanted to send a message to the people that don’t understand what is going on and blind to what is happening that it is just not OK to kill our young people.
Kent’s whereabouts were not immediately known on the morning of 29 April 2015, despite massive interest from social media supporters (many of whom described the arrest as a “black bagging” or “kidnapping”). A Baltimore lawyer whom claimed to be attempting to advocate for and retain Kent as a client tweeted that he was:
No current and confirmed information was available regarding Kent’s arrest, status, or location.
Read more at http://now.snopes.com/2015/04/29/joseph-kent-cnn/#uL2AoAkZZy2jLAZM.99
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