Mayor Henry talks about the George Floyd protests

Mayor Henry talks about the George Floyd protests

Tonight we sat down with fort wayne mayor tom henry to find out who ?he?

Believes caused this weekend's peaceful demonstrations to escalate into violence and vandalism.

Fox 55's jentill neal met with mayor henry today and now she's live downtown to tell us how he thinks it could have been handled differently.

Jentill?seeing as how this is the first time fort wayne has seen something of maginitude hunter, mayor tom henry tells me they had to make a decision on how to handle it in a short amount of time.

Trt: 3:13 outcue: they're still getting the word out it is now day 6 of protests in fort wayne.people are still lined up along clinton in front of the court house green hoping for justice for george floyd.>10:12:40-10:12:45"what happened to mr. floyd is unacceptable."over the weekend hundreds of people protested downtown urging the arrests of all four officers in floyd's death.

When they took it to the streets - they were met by police in riot gear.officers fired tear gas and later some protesters damaged buildings.

Mayor tom henry says police did what they had to given the circumstances.00:23:02-00:2... "when they start kicking people's doors and start scaring the heck out of the drivers, they didn't know what to do.

Traffic was stopped because we had kneelers in the street.

Cars can't move.

In the meantime, you've got people climbing on your car.

A lot of our citizens were scared, so what are we supposed to do?"protesters say they were tear-gassed without warning.

Henry says they were told several times to stay out of the roads.

10:11:43-10:12:04 "we had the ten point coallition and other volunteers trying to get those individuals out of the main corridor through our city.

When those demonstrators refused to do so, we had to take approriate action because they were in fact putting citizens in harms way.

That's totally unacceptable.

That's not our city."looking back on it- he says there are things they could have done differently.00:22:02-00:22:36 "i can tell you right now, one of the things we probably would have done was friday night, make sure we had more people in the demonstration area.

Not uniform police officers, but others who could have gotten a better idea of what was being said among the demonstators.

Who these instigators were.

Why did it start off peaceful and then all of a sudden flip?

Who caused that to change?"

00:01:38-00:01:56??jentil speaking??many of the protesters on friday were upset about george floyd and didn't have a problem specifically with fort wayne police before that incident.are you worried the city's relationship and trust with the young community has been damaged.

If so, how does it get better?00:11:12-00:11:30 "there's a lot of mending that's going to need to be taken in this community some of it perhaps as a result of the actions of our officers took, but i think it goes beyonf that.

There's a lot of healing that needs to take place."even though most of those who were arrested were from fort wayne ... henry says he talked to police chief steve reed and they believe people from outside the city escalated the situation.

00:07:07-00:07:36"those individuals as far as we know are no longer in the city and they came in.

They insighted a negative demonstration one that ended up hurting people, that ended up damaging property, but as far as we know they've left our community.

I think that's evidence that the last three nights in our city, we had approriate demonstrations.

They're still getting their word out."

Mayor henry did tell me a forum is in the works with police to talk to residents about what's going onreporting live in fort wayne jentill neal...