Police arrest 28 over violent Nørrebro demo

Police ransacked several addresses in Nørrebro, inner Copenhagen, Valby and the city’s Nordvest district in a search for individuals involved in Saturday night’s demonstration. 

 

See also: Weekend demo turns violent in Copenhagen 

 

Police said that their investigation into the activists involved in Reclaim the Streets showed that addition to throwing Molotov cocktails, rocks and bottles at police and smashing several business windows on Saturday, several of the same individuals were involved in the vandalism of a bank in Østerbro. 

 

Officers arrested 19 men and nine women. Fifteen of the arrestees were brought in for further questioning while the others were released shortly after their arrests. Police said that weapons, cobblestones and hemp plants were found during their searches. Those arrests are in addition to the three that were made in the early hours of Sunday. 

 

Justice Minister Søren Pind, who vowed a “historically hard” response to the activists, praised police on Facebook. 

 

“Good work by the Copenhagen Police. As I said, I will not tolerate this behaviour, and there is plenty of place in our prisons,” he wrote. 

 

Following the Saturday demonstration, activists promised “similar events” in the future in a now-deleted Facebook post. 

 

“Yesterday [Saturday, ed.] we took the streets back and you were crazy! There were a lot of us on the streets and we will neither claim responsibility for, nor condemn, the night’s activities, but rather send a reminder that there is always a risk of revenge and action when one physically and aggressively reprimand people,” the group wrote. 

 

The group said its actions were in response to Nørrebro becoming a district full of “expensive parent-purchased flats, hipster cafes and asocial capitalist stores”. 

 

According to a former activist, another motivation for the demonstration was the far-left’s perception that the Copenhagen Police handled them unfairly in relation to demonstrations by the Islam-critical group Pegida, which has been staging regular but poorly attended demonstrations for months. 

 

“It’s as if the police have punished one side really hard while they have let the other group be in peace and many feel as though [the police] have used unnecessary violence and power,” Erik Storrud told Berlingske.