There was mayhem on the streets of Manhattan for a second night Tuesday as demonstrators tied up traffic and taunted police to protest the Missouri decision to let Michael Brown’s killer cop walk.
An angry swarm marched around the city for hours, amid a cacophony of frustrated drivers’ car horns, before halting at the NYPD kiosk at 43rd St. in Times Square just after midnight.
“Hands up, don’t shoot!” the group chanted, as they plopped themselves into the busy street for a sit-in that quickly became a traffic jam — one of several that ground parts of the city to a halt.
“This is madness. An injustice was done down in Ferguson. I see that. What I don’t see is how causing a traffic jam in New York City helps resolve anything,” said Rita Dominguez, 42, from Washington Heights, who sat in gridlock for 45 minutes.
Other commuters took the inconvenience in stride.
“If it was my son, I’d be out there, too. I think they’re doing right by New York City,” said Janet Rosenberg, 51, of the Upper West Side.
The demonstrations had started earlier that evening, with hundreds gathering in Union Square, then heading up Broadway.
“Send the racist cop to jail!” they chanted,
as police officers gave chase and the number of demonstrators swelled to around 600 and stretched for six blocks.
“Young men are being killed,” said 29-year-old Gary Schaffer of Brooklyn. “We’ve got to demand an end to this . . . We need to keep people angry.”
“A black kid was killed and nobody paid for it,” said Brittaney Edmonds, 26, of Brooklyn.
Cops made no attempt to arrest any of the ringleaders or try to stop them when
they clogged Lincoln Tunnel traffic by sitting down at 40th St. and Eleventh Ave. for 15 minutes.
Some of the marchers hurled abuse while others carried signs that read “Jail killer cops.”
There were at least two arrests in Times Square just before 8 p.m. when an officer warned the crowd to stop blocking cars and move on.
As the night progressed, a splinter group moved east and jumped onto the FDR, stopping traffic for several minutes. Then the wave moved to the Williamsburg Bridge. A blue barricade of cops stopped its progress there — but the melee also halted bridge traffic for a short time.
Moments later, another human surge nearly shut down the Manhattan Bridge and the protests spread to Brooklyn.
The Queens-bound lane of the Midtown Tunnel had to be closed for 15 minutes around 10:30 p.m. when a protest offshoot tried to walk through it.
Meanwhile, the largest group continued to march its way around Manhattan, bouncing between the FDR, Times Square and Union Square before drifting north toward Harlem.
More than a dozen members of the City Council also registered their disgust with what happened in Ferguson, Mo., by walking out of a council meeting earlier Tuesday.
Amid chants of “Black lives matter!” they marched to the City Hall rotunda, where they took turns denouncing the grand jury decision — and also condemned the recent killings of African-American men by NYPD officers.
“We stand here today as members of the New York City Council, representatives of our majority minority city to proclaim in solidarity that black lives matter,” they said in unison.
“Black lives matter in Ferguson, Mo.; black lives matter in the stairwells of our NYCHA communities.”
That was a reference to the recent fatal shooting of 28-year-old Akai Gurley by a rookie cop.
“Black lives matter on the streets of Staten Island,” they said, referring to NYPD chokehold victim Eric Garner.
With John Marzulli