4000 to attend Black Lives Matter rally despite second coronavirus spike
Police say they’ll do everything in their power to stop Sydneysiders gathering for another Black Lives Matter rally on Tuesday.
The NSW Police Commissioner has urged people not to attend another Black Lives Matter rally in Sydney’s CBD next week as the number of coronavirus cases in the country grows.
A protest scheduled for next Tuesday has more than 4000 people expected to attend and organisers lodging a formal protest application. But Police Commissioner Mick Fuller told 2GB he intends to block the protest from going ahead and will take the activists to the Supreme Court.
“Relying on some pretty good intelligence from Victoria, we know how dangerous these protests can be, in terms of health,” Commissioner Fuller said.
“A number of people who came to the protests (in Victoria) were living in those vertical towers,” he said. “At the moment, you just can’t take chances.”
He said if police can’t successfully block the protest from being able to go ahead police will try to write up thousands of fines on the day. He said the decision to take the organisers to court was made with NSW Police Assistant Commissioner Mick Willing.
RELATED: Follow our live coronavirus coverage
RELATED: Venues where virus has spread in Sydney
NSW has been reporting its highest daily coronavirus numbers in two months in recent days, today reporting 20 new cases of COVID-19. Yesterday 18 new cases of coronavirus were reported in the state.
It’s not the first time the NSW Police have moved to block a Black Lives Matter rally over COVID-19 concerns. The organisers of a large Black Lives Matter rally won a last-minute appeal to protest in June, hours before the protest started.
NSW Police had blocked the rally in the Supreme Court days earlier, with police arguing the planned event breached coronavirus restrictions.
The June 6 rally had initially been approved, but police later argued that as numbers swelled over 18,000 the gathering had become unsafe.
Woman dead, man injured at Sydney hotel
A woman has been found dead and a man has been rushed to hospital with critical injuries after the pair were found at a hotel in Sydney’s west.
Strange discovery after sailor’s epic swim
A Vietnamese sailor who was miraculously rescued after spending nearly 24 hours in the water off the coast of NSW had a plastic bag strapped to him.
2km drive that sparked new Tyrrell theory
The police theory about William Tyrrell’s foster mother has been revealed as her grilling at the secretive NSW Crime Commission was revealed this week.