Police body cam footage released from night of protests

GRAND ISLAND - Black Lives Matter protesters and the Grand Island Police clashed during a demonstration earlier this month. While there's many sides to every story, the police department released more than 30 hours of body camera footage Friday morning to show their view of the night.

Police say they did not use force until protesters started to throw rocks at their officers. A large majority of the crowd walked away with their hands up when police arrived. While it remains unclear which party disturbed the peace first, footage from one patrol car's camera does show a few people throwing an object at the officers.

"We were just confused to why they didn't just pursue the individuals instead of breaking out the tear gas on a largely innocent group of people," Justice Coalition of Grand Island President Keren Gutierrez told Local4 News.

Many protesters didn't even see the people throwing rocks and said they requested the body camera footage to hold police accountable.

"We didn't think the police here were like that," Gutierrez said. " That's why everyone was so confused because we were like we were just being peaceful and they just started rubber bulleting us. So we wanted to see what they were talking about because there's always a billion sides to every story."

Gutierrez says the response they got was that police didn't know where the rocks where coming from and it wasn't safe to send officers in unprotected.

The department is still investigating the incident, but did release the footage so the public could see what happened.

"We decided there was nothing of specific evidentary value and it didn't inhibit anyone's right to a fair trial," Grand Island Police Captain Jim Duering said. "In the interest of transparency and community communication, we thought it was best just to allow the footage to be viewable to the public."

The department met with protesters again that next afternoon to make sure everything stayed peaceful moving forward.

"Our message to them was obviously you're protesting for a reason, there's something you see a problem and it really doesn't do any good unless we're willing to sit at the table, discuss those problems and see what we can do as a community to resolve those issues," Captain Duering said.