A third day of demonstrations was under way in New York yesterday as public outrage continued over the acquittal of four white police officers on criminal charges in the shooting death of an African immigrant, Amadou Diallo.
About 2,000 people gathered yesterday near the UN headquarters to protest.
On Saturday there were at least three separate protests in the city against the verdict, with the largest drawing between 1,000 and 2,000 people to rally in front of the city hall. Police said they arrested 95 people, most of them for disorderly conduct.
During their appearance at one protest Mr Diallo's parents expressed hope that federal charges of civil rights abuses could be filed against the four officers, following the verdict on Friday by a mixed-race jury in the state court in Albany, New York.
Diallo's killing last year by the New York police officers, who say they fired 41 bullets at him because they mistook a wallet in his hand for a gun, has not only had a polarising effect along racial lines in this city - it has also become a hot issue among politicians at the national level.
The Democratic presidential candidate, Mr Bill Bradley, the former US senator from New Jersey, said he was "stunned by the verdict", though he stopped short of claiming the trial was flawed.
"I've heard from any number of African Americans over my lifetime that they've been put in the same position, surrounded by police officers with guns," Mr Bradley said.
"Most of them kept their hands up, but if one of them had, by chance, reached in his wallet to try to show identification, he could have ended up like Amadou Diallo."
The Republican presidential candidate, Mr John McCain, the US senator from Arizona, agreed with the verdict saying he would not want to second-guess a jury's conclusion "unless there was some clear evidence that there was a distortion of the judicial process in this case," he said.
The civil rights leader, the Rev Jesse Jackson, formerly a presidential aspirant, said on Saturday that the four police officers should go to jail for killing Diallo. "They did not accidentally kill him. They wrongfully killed him. They executed him - they assassinated him," he said.
Mrs Hillary Clinton called for closing the "trust divide" between police and ethnic minorities.
Governor George Pataki of New York said there is "no reason to do anything but support the verdict," adding that he has "confidence in our criminal justice system in New York State." He added, however, that "someone is dead, and I can understand the outrage in the community. . .
The Justice Department has now agreed to investigate . . . [and] I think that is appropriate."
Following the verdict the US Justice Department said federal prosecutors would consider filing federal civil rights charges against the officers.