"As Martin Luther King Junior said, 'an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,'” said State Senator Herron Gaston.

With miles separating them, it feels as if there's no distance between Memphis, Tennessee and communities in Connecticut.

"When I saw that video of the young man screaming for his mom, that touched me to my core... my soul,” says New Haven resident Leighton Johnson.

The outrage stems from police body camera footage released by the City of Memphis of a black man being kicked, punched, and beaten with batons on Jan. 7 after stopping him in his vehicle.

Tyre Nichols, 29, later died.

“I could any moment be a Randy Cox or a Tyre Nichols,” says Johnson.

In New Haven, protesters made their voices heard on the green. The community came together in June, when 36-year-old Randy Cox was paralyzed in the back of a police van. Cox was in handcuffs and had no seatbelt on.

Residents at Summerfield United Methodist Church in Bridgeport gathered to show support for Nichols' family. Organizers say the scope of this incident isn't on race, rather policing.

“It’s sickening to think that we have black police officers that would be dehumanizing black citizens when we would expect they would have the empathy that would come with them being black men in America,” says Wayne Winston.  

Five police officers in Memphis were charged with murder and other crimes for the death of Nichols.