Joseph Kent: Baltimore Protesters Demand Release Of Community Organizer ‘Kidnapped By Police’


Jospeh Kent, a Baltimore “community organizer” was arrested quietly and peacefully on Tuesday evening and is now prompting a firestorm of backlash from Freddie Gray protesters. Joseph Kent is like “Martin Luther King with tattoos and gold fronts,” according to Baltimore pastor Heber Brown III. Social media posts about Kent quickly went viral as claims of “police kidnapping” were published.

The Baltimore community organizer first garnered national attention during the Michael Brown riots in Ferguson. Kent reportedly stated that he felt the call to protest after listening to Mike Brown Sr. speak about the shooting.

Joseph Kent’s arrest was captured by CNN cameras around 10 p.m. on Tuesday, as the police and National Guard worked to stop the Baltimore riots. A video of the arrest shows Kent walking in front of police officers after the mandatory curfew as a humvee rolls by. Law enforcement officers are shown quickly moving towards Kent and taking him into custody as he is moved behind the police line.

Baltimore attorney Stephen Beatty tweeted at 2:30 a.m. that Joseph Kent was at Baltimore Central Booking & Intake Center and was awaiting processing. Beatty later maintained that the Baltimore community organizer’s named was not on “the list of people being presented for bail reviews.” The attorney described the scene at the police department booking center as “chaos” and hoped that Kent would be released on his own recognizance soon.

On his LinkedIn page, Kent states that he is a Morgan State University student and is studying music. He also notes that since early last year, he has been employed as an administrative assistant at the historically black college.

During an interview with the Baltimore City Paper, Joseph Kent said that he has been involved with community organizing since he was in middle school.

“Everyone knows me at Morgan already, organizing and making sure everything running the correct way and peaceful and everything like that. So, everybody already knows I’m going to do things the right way, so when everybody else and community people and civilians and people who joined and saw that the Morgan students were looking up to it, before you knew it, the whole city was on my back and I was just carrying the whole city.”

What do you think about the Joseph Kent arrest?

[Image via: Twitter]

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