MINNEAPOLIS (Reuters) - The Mall of America on Monday asked a judge to block a protest planned for Wednesday afternoon by the group Black Lives Matter Minneapolis over the fatal shooting of an African-American man by a Minneapolis police officer in November.

The group said the protest would go on at the suburban Minneapolis mall regardless of the lawsuit. Hennepin County Judge Karen Janisch took the issue under advisement after a hearing and said she would rule quickly on the request.

Up to 1,500 demonstrators clogged the mall last December, with several dozen arrested, in a protest over the deaths of black men in police-involved incidents in New York and Missouri.

An attorney for the mall, Susan Gaertner, told the judge the privately held retail center was not a place for a protest.

“You demonstrate in places like this, in a courthouse,” Gaertner told reporters afterward. “Mall of America on Wednesday is a place to take your kids to shop.”

The mall lawsuit names the group Black Lives Matter and four people as defendants. It asks the judge to bar a demonstration without mall permission, and to require Black Lives Matter to remove social media posts supporting the protest and post notices that it is canceled.

Attorney Jordan Kushner, who represents the named individual defendants, told the judge the mall could be free to tell people to stay away, but not what they may or may not say.

The mall has not established that the individual defendants organized the protest or control what appears on Black Lives Matter social media, Kushner added.

“We are here for Black Lives, no matter what,” Kandace Montgomery, a named defendant, said before the hearing.

Black Lives Matter has organized demonstrations since a Minneapolis police officer shot Jamar Clark, 24, on Nov. 15. The shooting of Clark, who died the next day, added fuel to a heated debate in the United States over police use of lethal force, especially against black people.

Demonstrators camped outside a Minneapolis police station for nearly three weeks after Clark’s shooting and planned Wednesday’s protest to demand release of videos from that night.

Demonstrators also want a special prosecutor to hear the case and want to bypass a grand jury, which some see as part of a process that exonerates officers.