NAACP president arrested in Chicago protests

Melanie Eversley | USA TODAY

NAACP President and CEO Cornell William Brooks was arrested with several seminary students and others in Chicago protests Monday that reacted to dash-cam video showing a police officer shoot 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times.

Brooks and the nine others received citations and were released, Brooks said in a telephone interview with USA TODAY.

Brooks and the protesters, which included NAACP youth and college division president Stephen Green, were taking part in a planned NAACP protests in which they carried caskets around the Cook County Courthouse that represented the death of McDonald, Brooks said.

The group that included students from the University of Chicago Divinity School and the McCormick Theological Seminary knelt and prayed before Chicago City Hall and then went into the middle of the street to kneel and pray, Brooks said.

"We were warned if we declined to move we would be arrested," Brooks said. "We were arrested and put in a paddy wagon."

The group was carted down the block in the paddy wagon and released after citations were issued, Brooks said. The group has a common court date sometime in December, he said. Everyone was physically fine after the incident, he said.

"The NAACP has a long history of standing up for injustice by using all the tools for justice, common among which is civil disobedience," Brooks said. "Sometimes, the best way for us to send a message to law enforcement in Chicago was to break the law."

The protest was intended to draw attention to the "culture of policing" in which an officer was able to go "400 days without being charged," Brooks said.

The NAACP chief was referring to Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke, charged in the Oct. 20, 2014, shooting.

"This young man, Laquan McDonald, he may have been a ward of the state, but he's everybody's child and that represents a slice of Chicago," Brooks said.

Ten people were arrested and cited with administrative notice of ordinance violations before being released, confirmed Chicago Officer Thomas Sweeny, a police spokesman. Sweeny did not immediately have the names of all the individuals who were cited.

Contributing: Aamer Madhani in Chicago