KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Kansas City, Missouri, police deployed pepper spray to disperse several hundred protesters Friday night who had marched from the Country Club Plaza to Westport.
An estimated 150 to 200 protesters, who began gathering before 3 p.m. at the J.C. Nichols Fountain just east of the Plaza, marched along West 47th Street from the shopping district to the bar district.
The protest had remained peaceful for more than seven hours.
Once in Westport, some of the marchers broke a window then picked up a type 3 traffic barricade — one of the orange-and-white-striped barriers with three horizontal planks on a metal frame — and began carrying it, according to a statement from KCPD.
“It appeared they were going to use the barricade to cause more damage,” KCPD Capt. David Jackson, a department spokesman, wrote in an email to media outlets. “A few deployments of pepper spray encouraged them to stop the behavior.”
Protesters put down the barricade at that point and returned to the Plaza.
Jackson said he wasn’t sure if the pepper spray actually hit any of the protesters.
