KENOSHA, Wis. — When Annie Hurst stepped outside her house on Sunday night, she saw something that made her scream.
Across the street, a police officer was aiming his gun at Jacob Blake, her neighbor, as he tried to get into his car with three of his children in the back seat. The officer grabbed him by his shirt and fired several times, shooting him in the back.
Within hours, graphic video of the shooting was racing across social media, and Kenosha erupted into protest, looting and fires downtown.
By late Monday, 125 members of the Wisconsin National Guard had been deployed to Kenosha, and hundreds of demonstrators marched through the streets in a second night of protest, in defiance of an 8 p.m. curfew. Near the county courthouse, officers tried to disperse the crowd with tear gas as protesters threw water bottles and set off fireworks near a line of officers in riot gear. A furniture store was set afire, and street lamps were knocked down.
The scene of a white police officer shooting a Black man continues to occur with devastating frequency in the United States, even at the end of a summer marked by widespread protests and calls for reform after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Kenosha, a city of 100,000 that a generation ago was a carmaking powerhouse, is the latest place where a police shooting left residents reeling. The shooting, which was captured in a brief but searing video by another neighbor, drew immediate condemnation from Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin, a Democrat, and set off protests throughout Kenosha’s small downtown area on the shore of Lake Michigan.
The shooting instantly became a rallying cry for demonstrators in cities like Portland, Ore., Madison, Wis., and Chicago, and a topic in the presidential race, where Wisconsin is a crucial battleground state. On Monday, as Republicans were kicking off their national convention, Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee for president, spoke out against the police officer’s actions. “The nation wakes up yet again with grief and outrage that yet another Black American is a victim of excessive force,” he said.
Around Kenosha on Monday morning, dump trucks that had been set ablaze outside the county courthouse were still sending an acrid smell through the air. Stunned shop owners swept up glass that had been smashed overnight, and boarded up their storefronts with sheets of plywood.
The police offered little detail about what had happened in the shooting, saying only that an officer had shot Mr. Blake while responding to a domestic incident. Local and state officials declined on Monday to provide detailed information about the officers who responded.
Mr. Blake, 29, was in stable condition at a nearby hospital on Monday.
The investigation was immediately turned over by the Kenosha Police Department to the Wisconsin Department of Justice, and the three officers who were at the scene were placed on administrative leave.
“What I saw in that video is disturbing,” said Anthony Kennedy, a Kenosha alderman who represents Mr. Blake’s district. “It is heartbreaking. And I don’t have an answer for what happened.”
While body cameras have become standard in many police departments around the country, they have been a matter of debate in Kenosha. Police officers in the city do not wear body cameras now, though the city plans to start using them in 2022, city officials said. Police cars are generally equipped with dashboard cameras.
Neighbors described an ordinary Sunday afternoon that suddenly and swiftly turned violent.
Shortly before the shooting, Mr. Blake, who worked as a security guard, stopped next door at the apartment of a friend, Donnell Lauderdale. Mr. Blake was carrying gifts for Mr. Lauderdale’s 8-year-old son.
“He had a bag full of presents,” Mr. Lauderdale said, standing outside his home. “He’s a family man. He takes good care of his kids.” Three of Mr. Blake’s six children — aged 8, 5 and 3 — are believed to have been in the back seat of the car when the shooting took place.
