Adam Duvernay, and Esteban Parra

The News Journal

Hundreds marched through downtown Wilmington on Monday evening with a message shouted through a bullhorn and echoed back in chorus: "No justice, no peace. No racist police."

They were not just black, though they marched under a Black Lives Matter banner. They were infants and elderly, Christians, Muslims and Jews, and blunt talk from rally organizers was met with the sort of amens usually reserved for Sunday morning services. The police were there in force and got an earful.

"You can't straddle the fence," the Rev. Donald Morton, Complexities of Color's executive director, blasted through the horn. "We're asking police officers that know that the shootings are bad, the killings are bad, that they're wrong and not just, we're asking you to get a backbone. And we've got your back. We ain't against y'all, but you can't keep killing us and expecting we're going to keep smiling about it."

The march in Wilmington was a piece of the nation's nausea, a sickness whose symptoms, protesters say, are dead black men and whose cause is institutional racism manifested in local police forces. The fever boiled during the previous week when two men 1,200 miles apart died during encounters with police caught on video. And in which five officers were subsequently killed and others injured in a hail of gunfire by a man police say sought to kill white police during a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas.

There is a sense the nation is on the brink. President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden met with major national policing organizations Monday.

"They talked about the need for better training. They talked about the need to train in de-escalation. They talked about the need for us to reach out and be more supportive in terms of what we say about the risk they’re taking and they talked about needing to reach out to the communities to acknowledge the fear and apprehension that exist in the communities," Biden told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos Monday. "And I agreed that with the president’s permission that I’m going to reconstitute this meeting 10 to 12 days from now with an agenda, and we’re gonna work through the kinds of things that they need help on and what they’re going to do to reach out as well."

Though he said the vast majority of police forces work by the book, Biden backed the claims of the Black Lives Matter movement – racism is real, and it is institutional in law enforcement. That message matched calls in Wilmington on Monday.

Morton acknowledged the latest group of graduates from the Wilmington Police Academy was the most diverse group he’s seen yet, but he said more still needs to be done to increase the number of black officers serving Wilmington. He called on local black residents to apply to join the Wilmington Police force.

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County Councilman Jae Street said, "We have a responsibility to do what we can to get rid of the things that protect police," referring to policies that justify police shootings if they feel there is a threat of danger to themselves or others.

There also was a call to demand the firing of Wilmington Police Senior Cpl. Joseph Dellose. Dellose was one of four Wilmington officers who fatally shot 28-year-old Jeremy "Bam" McDole, who was in his wheelchair.

In a report issued in May, the state Attorney General's Office said it would not criminally prosecute Dellose for the Sept. 23 shooting. The report, however, said prosecutors had considered filing a felony assault charge against Dellose, an 11-year member of the force. Dellose had shown "extraordinarily poor police work" during the incident, the report said.

Dellose fired at McDole with a shotgun approximately two seconds after ordering him to put his hands up, the report found, creating uncertainty among other officers – Senior Cpl. Daniel Silva, Cpl. Thomas Lynch and Cpl. James MacColl – who, not knowing where the gunfire came from, turned their weapons on McDole.

At the rally, Street demanded Dellose had to be removed, leading rally members in a chant. Police were seen from the tops of different buildings looking down on the crowd. A drone was also seen hovering nearby.

"The shooter who we call Shotgun Joe should not be allowed to be on the streets of Wilmington with a weapon in his hand," Street said leading the chant: "Shotgun Joe, he's got to go."

One of the rally's stars wore a shirt that read across its back: "Justice for Bam." Keandra McDole, Jeremy McDole's 27-year-old sister, said everyone in attendance should be proud for showing up, but she promised the next march would be during business hours so government officials would hear and see them from their offices.

"When we say 'black lives matter,' we're not saying we don't care about the color of your skin. What we're saying is, 'Can you support us for once?' We've been getting dogged, been going through so much stuff for decades, for centuries, for years. We're not saying y'all's lives don't matter. We're saying help us. Support us," Keandra McDole said. "We need to promise each other we're going to throw away all this hate. Whatever it is, right now is the time to stick together."

It was the first Black Lives Matter rally for Wilmington resident Nyhema Thomas, whose daughter Jada Thomas got them out the door Monday night. They agreed last week’s killings – of civilians and police – demanded their attention.

"We've had an upsurge of violence throughout the United States, and this last incident last week – the Dallas incident, the Baton Rouge incident – is just really depressing to see we’re at this state at this time. I’m really hoping we can collectively come to some resolution,” Thomas said. “A lot of times people are just hurt, and they have some deep-rooted issues, and for whatever reason, that guy took justice into his own hands. He took a lot of people’s lives, and that is not what should happen ever.”

For Jenny Lambert, who recently ended her military career and now lives in Wilmington, the rally was a painful reminder that service to the country doesn’t end injustice at home. She said she was disappointed only a couple hundred people were present.

“The killing is ridiculous. I was in the military, and I feel like my time in the military was a waste. I go out to defend my country, for my country, so a lot of the police people can kill our people and get away with it,” Lambert said. “There’s more people that should be coming. There’s more people that should be here, but they refuse to come and then something happens to them and they want people to support them.

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Wilmington’s Black Lives Matter leader, Mahkeib Booker, said the rally was organized out of frustration with the city’s lack of engagement with what they call continued police officer brutality against blacks. He spoke out against gentrification in Wilmington, a common complaint certain areas of the city are well-protected from crime at the expense of black neighborhoods.

"They're making moves on us, brothers and sisters, wake up," Booker said. "I'm telling you, brothers and sisters, they want us out of here. They want us extinct. You can look at mass incarceration. You can look at the dropouts. You can look at the Ritalin they're giving our children."

The rally remained peaceful despite growing national unease with such demonstrations, though members and organizers of the Black Lives Matter movement have vowed to continue spreading their message in the wake of the Dallas massacre.

Similar scenes have erupted across the country with protests – and arrests – in New York City; Boston; Chicago; Atlanta; Miami; and St. Paul, Minnesota all stemming from the deaths of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile, who was killed in his car by a police officer outside Minneapolis while his fiancée filmed the aftermath.

Contact Adam Duvernay at (302) 324-2785 or aduvernay@delawareonline.com and Esteban Parra at (302) 324-2299, eparra@delawareonline.com.