Teen's police killing tests long-frustrated black Pittsburgh
PITTSBURGH — The day after Antwon Rose Jr. was shot through the cheek and elbow and in the back, killing the 17-year-old honors student, young black people swarmed the East Pittsburgh police station.
Over the next several days, outraged protesters took over thoroughfares, disrupted rush hour and shouted from the steps of the county courthouse, demanding that the white officer who killed the black teenager be charged.
Rose's killing is the first in the Pittsburgh area in the Black Lives Matter era, and residents are galvanized. From the sustained marches to the swift announcement that Officer Michael Rosfeld will face charges of criminal homicide, what has unfolded in the hills of western Pennsylvania's steel country is a rare response to the killing of an unarmed black male, despite longstanding tensions in the area between police and the scattered black community.
Residents are guardedly optimistic the case could result in an even rarer conviction.
"It's a different political climate, a different energy with the people who are coming out," said Brandi Fisher, an activist who started the Alliance for Police Accountability in 2010. "This was a cold-blooded murder, and it's the first for this generation in our city to have witnessed."
For nearly two weeks, and despite a heavy media focus on immigration at the Mexican border, protesters have turned national attention to Pittsburgh without big names like the Rev. Al Sharpton or lawyer Ben Crump, and demonstrators have been largely local and diverse.
Unlike Ferguson, Missouri; Baltimore; Cleveland and other places where similar cases have caused outcry, Allegheny County is 81 percent white and 13 percent black. The black unemployment and poverty rates are triple that of whites. And the mountain-and-valley terrain that separates communities that are actually quite close as the crow flies can also prevent coalescence.
It all creates a climate that has failed and exhausted the area's black community, organizer Tresa Murphy said.
"We live in a city that has systematically oppressed us since our grandparents got here," said Murphy, 24.
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