Curfews were enacted in more than two dozen cities and the National Guard was summoned in at least 12 states and the District of Columbia as officials pleaded for peace. But mayhem convulsed the country, leaving scores of police officers and protesters injured and parts of America smoldering.
Here are some significant developments:
- Thousands gathered in London’s Trafalgar Square in support of U.S. demonstrators, according to the Associated Press.
- Some of President Trump’s allies are urging him to address the nation about the intensifying unrest. Trump’s presumptive Democratic rival, former vice president Joe Biden, released his own statement condemning the violence that followed the in-custody death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
- The unrest spread to cities large and small, including Ferguson, Mo., which was rocked by violent protests in 2014 after a white police officer shot and killed a young black man, Michael Brown.
- Federal buildings in the nation’s capital were vandalized, and clashes erupted for a second day between Secret Service agents and demonstrators outside the White House.
- The mayor of Richmond said a curfew will be imposed starting Sunday night after protesters targeted the city’s symbols of history — a scene repeated in Charleston, S.C.; Raleigh, N.C.; and other Southern cities.
- California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) declared a state of emergency and deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles as violent demonstrations raged. Mayor Eric Garcetti initially resisted asking for Guard troops because he did not want to evoke memories of the 1992 Rodney King riots, but conditions continued to deteriorate in the city.
- Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slammed New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) for saying he would not “blame” New York City policy officers who appeared to have driven their vehicle into a throng of protesters.
- Target said it was temporarily closing 175 of its stores across 13 states, including in Minnesota, where the retail giant is headquartered.
- Saturday’s protests came one day after fired Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter in Floyd’s death. Chauvin, who is white, was captured on video pressing his knee onto Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes.
Richmond mayor imposes curfew, cites outside influence in violence
Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney announced a citywide curfew of 8 p.m. Sunday in an effort to prevent further violence after a night of mayhem that he and Police Chief William C. Smith said was provoked by “outside actors.”
Sunday morning the city awoke to widespread scenes of destruction. Most of the famous Confederate statues on Monument Avenue had been tagged with graffiti, and the headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy — the group that led the construction of most of the statues a century ago — had been damaged by fire.
Photos on social media showed black smoke marks above at least one window of the low marble building along Arthur Ashe Boulevard, and adjacent to the Kehinde Wiley statue of a black man on a horse unveiled last year. That statue seemed to have been left unmarked.
Social media also featured blurry images of a group of white people who had broken windows at a synagogue across the street, with claims that the group was espousing a far-right ideology of “boogaloo” or race war.
Along Broad Street near the state capitol, windows had been smashed at many stores and dumpsters set on fire. One dumpster fire at Virginia Commonwealth University briefly spread into a high-rise dormitory but city officials reported little internal damage to the building.
Smith attributed much of the violence from Saturday night and early Sunday morning, as well as less severe incidents from Friday night, to “people from outside this state and outside this area. And we’re doing our best to identify them.”
He said protests had begun peacefully both Friday and Saturday nights, with large numbers of local residents holding signs and chanting against police violence.
“But it suddenly turned,” he said, referring to Friday night. “Our citizens left very quickly. This more organized group was active until about 6 a.m. Saturday morning.”
Elected officials of both parties condemn Trump’s response to protests
Speaking on CNN, several politicians of both parties criticized President Trump’s response to the protests, particularly his Twitter declaration, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
“He should just stop talking,” said Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (D). “This is like Charlottesville all over again. He speaks, and he makes it worse. There are times when you should just be quiet. And I wish that he would just be quiet. Or if he can’t be silent, if there is somebody of good sense and good conscience in the White House, put him in front of a teleprompter and pray that he reads it and at least says the right things, because he is making it worse."
Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) also invoked Trump’s comments after the 2017 Charlottesville protests, as well as his targeting of the Central Park Five and attacks on majority-black U.S. cities, in saying he was not surprised by the tone of Trump’s response.
“Every time I respond to Donald Trump, I do it from a place where I realize he doesn’t deserve a response,” he said.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said Trump’s words have served to escalate, not defuse, the tensions.
“It’s not lowering the temperature. It’s sort of continuing to escalate the rhetoric,” he said. “And I think it’s just the opposite of the message that should’ve been coming out of the White House.”
Hogan also went further than national security adviser Robert O’Brien in acknowledging a more systemic problem with police brutality and systemic racism.
On ABC News’s “This Week,” Patrick Gaspard, president of the Open Society Foundations and former U.S. ambassador to South Africa, also pushed back against O’Brien’s comments and emphasized the broader issue of police brutality.
“This is not about bad apples,” Gaspard said. “This is about systemic rot.”
Pelosi, Omar stress need for systemic reforms to stop police violence
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) on Sunday emphasized the need for broader reforms in the wake of Floyd’s death.
“This is part of a pattern,” Pelosi said on ABC News’s “This Week,” describing Floyd’s death as “murder.” “We saw the execution of a person on live TV.” Asked about the protests that have erupted across the country, she said, “When you have a crowd, you will have those who will disrupt, and that is most unfortunate.”
“Let’s have a look at what really is happening, who is … taking what actions. But we should not, we should not ignore the fact that there is a room for peaceful protest in all of this,” the speaker said.
Pelosi also called for Trump to be “a unifying force” but declined to weigh in on his most recent inflammatory comments.
Omar was more forceful in criticizing Trump’s recent statements, arguing that the president has been “glorifying violence” and that his behavior must be met with “the highest sort of condemnation.”
“This president has failed in really understanding the kind of pain and anguish many of his citizens are feeling,” Omar said, also on “This Week.” She also condemned the use of violence by some protesters, saying that those who are setting fire to buildings and taking other violent actions “are not interested in protecting black lives.”
Omar called for the other three officers involved in the Floyd case to be charged, as well. But she added that the unrest rippling across the country “isn’t just because of the life that was taken.”
“It’s also because so many people have experienced injustices within our system. … We are living in a country that has a two-tiered justice system, and people are sick and tired of being sick and tired,” she said.
Dallas mayor condemns violence after weapon-wielding man brutally beaten on video during protests
Dallas’s second day of protests reached a flash point late Saturday as a widely circulated, graphic video showed a man charging at protesters with a machete before being brutally beaten.
In various videos on social media, the man is seen carrying a machete and chases a group of protesters. A Dallas Police Department spokesman said the man was trying to protect his neighborhood from protesters.
The man was then assaulted by a group of people, who kicked and punched him in the body and head. Once the attackers cleared, the unidentified man was left behind with a bloody head and twisted limbs, and he was not moving.
Shortly before midnight local time, the police spokesman said the victim was in stable condition at a hospital. The man was transported from the scene before officers arrived, the spokesman said.
Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson condemned the violence in an interview with WFAA ABC 8, adding that the police are investigating the attack.
“It’s unacceptable for a beating like that to happen in my city,” Johnson said.
The initial call came in as a stabbing at the House of Blues, a popular downtown music venue.
Protests intensify across California
Across California on Saturday night and into Sunday morning, demonstrators gathered to protest the death of George Floyd and clashed with law enforcement in some places, shutting down highways and burning buildings.
- Los Angeles: Mayor Eric Garcetti implemented a curfew from 8 p.m. Saturday to 5:30 a.m. Sunday, and the governor declared a state of emergency there and sent in the National Guard. Other L.A.-area cities also enforced a curfew, reported CBSN Los Angeles: Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Santa Monica, Pasadena and Culver City.
- San Francisco: Protesters took their grievances to Mayor London Breed’s home Saturday night, lighting fireworks and tearing down signs outside, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Elsewhere in the city, retail stores were looted or set ablaze, reported the Chronicle. Breed issued a curfew that will go into effect at 8 p.m. Sunday and said the National Guard will be on standby.
- Oakland: As of Sunday morning, Oakland police told ABC 7, they had arrested three people overnight and other law enforcement agencies made six arrests on burglary and looting charges. Police said on Twitter that a demonstration in one area of town had become “unlawful” and asked protesters to disperse. In nearby Emeryville, a shopping mall was vandalized and looted and a vehicle was set on fire.
- Sacramento: Peaceful demonstrations over Floyd’s death became a five-hour looting spree in the state’s capital and ended after 2 a.m. Sunday, reported the Sacramento Bee. Police in riot gear used pepper balls, tear gas and rubber bullets to push out the looters. KCRA reported that a teen boy was struck in the head and bloodied by a rubber bullet fired from a Sacramento County sheriff’s deputy.
- Santa Ana: No injuries were reported in Santa Ana, though law enforcement told ABC 7 that some protesters among the hundreds gathered threw fireworks at police.
- La Mesa: Demonstrators clashed with police after midnight Sunday after refusing to leave downtown La Mesa, reported the San Diego Union-Tribune, prompting the city manager to issue a curfew from 1:30 a.m. to 7 a.m. Branches of Chase Bank and Union Bank were burned, the paper reported. Looters broke into a shopping center and stolen flower bouquets that were left at a memorial for Floyd, according to the paper.
Trump national security adviser O’Brien blames violence on ‘Antifa militants,’ dismisses reports of far-right groups’ involvement
Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien on Sunday repeatedly blamed “Antifa militants” for stoking violence in U.S. cities and discounted the possibility that right-wing provocateurs may have played a role.
“I haven’t seen the reports on far-right groups,” he said. “This is being driven by Antifa, and they did it in Seattle. They’ve done it in Portland. They’ve done it in Berkeley. This is a destructive force of radical — I don’t even know if you want to call them leftist — whatever they are, they’re militants who are coming in and burning our cities. And we’re going to get to the bottom of it.”
Pressed by host Jake Tapper on the issue of police violence, O’Brien responded by referring seven times in a 14-minute interview to “bad apples” in police forces that should be rooted out. He also questioned why officials in Minneapolis did not act sooner to get the officer charged in the George Floyd case, Derek Chauvin, off the street.
O’Brien called Chauvin a “dirty cop” who should have been be fired long before, but he said he saw no evidence of a deeper problem with American policing.
“I don’t think there’s systemic racism,” O’Brien said. “I think 99.9 percent of our law enforcement officers are great Americans, and many [are] African American, Hispanic, Asian. They’re working in the toughest neighborhoods. They’ve got the hardest jobs to do in this country. And I think they’re amazing, great Americans, and they’re my heroes."
“But you know what?” he added. “There are some bad apples in there. … There are some bad cops that are racist, and there are cops who maybe don’t have the right training, and there’s some that are just bad cops, and they need to be rooted out because there’s a few bad apples that are giving law enforcement a terrible name.”
O’Brien also said he knew of no firm plans by President Trump to address the country about the violence. “Whether he has an address from the Oval [Office] or he speaks to the press, he’s accessible and will continue to be accessible to the country and give his views on these events,” he said.
Police turn more aggressive against protesters and bystanders alike, adding to violence and chaos
Police in several cities significantly increased their use of force on Saturday night against protesters decrying police use of force — wielding batons, rubber bullets and pepper spray in incidents that also targeted bystanders and journalists.
The intent seemed to be a forceful restoration of control, after earlier nights where police in Minneapolis were criticized for being too passive — even abandoning a police precinct to protesters, who set it afire.
But in Minneapolis and elsewhere on Saturday the effect was often the opposite, signaling disorder among those whose job it was to restore order.
Hundreds more arrested as dozens of cities impose curfews
On the fifth night of unrest and protests over the death of George Floyd, escalating tensions between police and demonstrators fueled hundreds of arrests in nearly two dozen U.S. cities, according to news reports.
Since Thursday, police have arrested at least 1,669 people in nearly two dozen U.S. cities, according to a tally by the Associated Press. Nearly a third of those arrests were in Los Angeles, where protesters clashed with police on Saturday, causing city officials to ask the state for 500 to 700 National Guard troops overnight as Los Angeles ordered a curfew.
Charges against the protesters arrested included violating curfew but also burglary and damaging property as reports of looting and rioting bubbled overnight.
In New York City, 345 people were arrested Saturday evening and early Sunday morning, police told The Washington Post, bringing the total number of arrests in the city over the weekend to nearly 600. Police were unable to provide a breakdown of the charges against those arrested. Forty-seven police cars were damaged and 33 officers were injured Saturday, police said.
Indianapolis police said they lost count of how many reports of gunfire they received Saturday. One person was killed by gunfire and two were injured. Officers did not fire their guns Saturday, police said.
Curfews were enacted in more than two dozen cities, and the National Guard was summoned in at least 12 states and the District of Columbia.
Confederate monuments vandalized across the South
On a night of violence in the former capital of the Confederacy, protesters targeted Richmond’s symbols of history as they decried the killing of George Floyd — a scene repeated in Charleston, S.C., Raleigh, N.C. and other Southern cities.
The statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, which towers over Monument Avenue in Richmond, was covered with graffiti, including the words “No More White Supremacy,” “Blood On Your Hands,” and “Black Lives Matter.” The Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis memorials were also defaced. A noose hung from the statue of Davis, the president of the Confederacy, and an ardent defender of slavery.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported that the United Daughters of the Confederacy headquarters was set on fire early Sunday morning. The blaze was extinguished by Richmond firefighters.
Night of chaos in New York City
BROOKLYN — The downtown area of this New York City borough looked like it was under martial law as Saturday night turned into Sunday morning.
Dozens of police vehicles screamed to a halt in front of a McDonald’s near the DeKalb subway stop, as what appeared to be at least a hundred officers with plastic shields pushed back on crowds shouting “George Floyd,” and “Eric Garner,” two African Americans killed by police. “Go home!” officers shouted back, waving batons.
A pile of trash burned on the asphalt. Cars honked their horns. Sirens blazed. Fire trucks rushed to the scene. Multiple times, police pushback caused a stampede — sometimes prompted by glass bottles thrown at officers from the crowd, sometimes seemingly prompted by nothing at all.
One woman who said she was a medic rushed forward to help a man bleeding from his forehead. Seconds later, she ran the opposite direction, clutching her eyes, saying she’d been pepper sprayed and asking for someone, anyone to grab saline solution from her bag.
“At nighttime they get real dirty. They want you to go home and they become very, very aggressive,” said protester Derek Rutledge, 53, an unemployed accountant born and raised in downtown Brooklyn.
He’d arrived by bicycle for a way to escape if things got hairy and said this was his second night protesting. “There are good cops and there’s a whole bunch of dirty cops. If I was a cop and I saw somebody killing somebody for $20, I’d say, ‘Dude, get off of him!’ There’s no need.”
On Sunday morning, the police said that they’d made more than 300 arrests during the overnight protests in New York. At least 30 officers were injured and nearly 50 police vehicles were damaged or destroyed.
“I’m extremely proud of the way you’ve comported yourselves in the face of such persistent danger, disrespect, and denigration,” Police Commissioner Dermot Shea wrote to the NYPD force on Twitter. Shea noted that the spams of violence in the city were driven by “a mob bent solely on taking advantage of a moment in American history, to co-opt the cause of equality that we all must uphold, to intentionally inflict chaos, mayhem, and injury just for the sake of doing so.”
All along Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue thoroughfare were shattered windows and piles of glass, at a TD bank, a Men’s Wearhouse, and the downtown Brooklyn Apple Store, where a single panel of the store’s tempered glass facade had cracked but was not broken.
Photographer Flo Ngala, 25, came from Harlem and was wearing a Martin Luther King Jr. T-shirt. She carried a sign reading, “Can’t breathe with a mask on. Can’t breathe without one.” Most of the day, she said, had been inspiring, with crowds cheering protesters on from cars and balconies. Two little black boys had marched with them, one with a sign that read “Stop killing us.” Ngala stopped talking mid-sentence, as batons and plastic shields came into view, and ran.
Among the bystanders caught up in the melee were a few people exiting the subway and a homeless woman pushing a shopping cart filled with her belongings. She leaned over and let out a hacking cough. A protester with his mask around his chin stood in the sidewalk, directing the traffic of fleeing protesters around her. “Yo brother, run that way,” he said. “Coronavirus is real.”
Around a corner, a 26-year-old black woman slumped on the sidewalk surrounded by five other protesters, all of them people of color who said they came from the city. They’d been strangers to her until moments earlier, when, they said, she’d gotten pepper sprayed. The woman’s face was caked with salt and milk from a solution the other protesters poured into her eyes to stop the burning.
Even when the stinging stopped, she cried. “They’re just good people who saw me in pain,” she said of her new protest friends. “I’m moved to tears by the kindness.”
A special education teacher from Brooklyn, the woman said she’d previously been arrested when an ex-boyfriend beat her and she physically defended herself. “I want to believe in them so badly. I want to believe that they’re good,” she said of police, but that was hard when she’d spent five hours in the same station as her ex-boyfriend.
She burst into tears explaining that she’d come out to protest, despite her fears of the police and the pandemic, because she felt like she’d be letting her students down if she didn’t.
The woman works in a poor school district with mostly children of color. “And they tell me, ‘I want to be an astronaut. I want to become a pilot,’” she said.
This protest was for them, she said, and getting pepper sprayed wasn’t going to stop her from staying out all night if she had to. “I want them to live long enough to achieve their dreams.”
Fox News host joins other conservatives in urging Trump to give national address
Fox News host Griff Jenkins implored President Trump to address the nation as chaotic protests continued into Sunday morning following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
“I really believe it is time for President Trump to do an Oval Office address,” Jenkins said on “Fox and Friends Sunday.”
“Remember George H.W. Bush’s address after the [Los Angeles] riots was one, by many political analysts’ reckoning, one of the most effective of his presidency,” Jenkins said.
Bush addressed the nation on May 1, 1992, just days after Los Angeles Police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King, a decision that sparked riots in that city. California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has declared a state of emergency and deployed the National Guard to help enforce a Los Angeles curfew as violent demonstrations continued Saturday night.
Jenkins, like Trump, slammed the response of local officials in cities like Minneapolis who have failed to gain control of protests that continued to gain steam overnight Sunday in places like New York and California.
He called on Trump to be the “uniter in chief."
The urge for an Oval Office address is not the only one from a conservative ally of the president.
Other conservative media figures, including Jack Posobiec, a right-wing provocateur and correspondent for the One America News Network, have made a similar push.
Trump’s last Oval Office address was widely panned due to his failure to properly articulate his own policy on the novel coronavirus, until this week a crisis threatening to consume his presidency.
Ocasio-Cortez slams de Blasio after New York police cruisers drive into crowd
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slammed New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) for saying he would not “blame” New York City policy officers who appeared to have driven their vehicle into a throng of protesters.
“@NYCMayor your comments tonight were unacceptable,” Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) wrote on Twitter. “This moment demands leadership & accountability from each of us. Defending and making excuses for NYPD running SUVs into crowds was wrong.”
Though it was unclear to what exactly he was referring, President Trump tweeted late Saturday night, “Let New York’s Finest be New York’s Finest. There is nobody better, but they must be allowed to do their job!”
De Blasio was responding to social media footage that shows two clearly marked NYPD SUVs partially surrounded by protesters on Saturday, some of whom appear to be throwing water bottles at one of the vehicles. The first SUV idles behind a barrier as the other begins to move through the crowd. The other then accelerates through the barrier into more people, followed by more protesters pounding on the vehicle’s windows and an individual jumping on top of the SUV as its siren continued to blare.
The mayor said the incident is under investigation. But he added that he would not criticize police officers facing such an “impossible situation.”
“If those protesters had just gotten out of the way and not created an attempt to surround that vehicle, we would not be talking about this,” de Blasio said on local television station NY1.
He added: “In a situation like that, it’s a very, very tense situation. And imagine what it would be like, you’re just trying to do your job and then you see hundreds of people converging upon you. I’m not gonna blame officers who are trying to deal with an absolutely impossible situation,” de Blasio said. “The folks who were converging on that police car did the wrong thing to begin with and they created an untenable situation. I wish the officers had found a different approach. But let’s begin at the beginning. The protesters in that video did the wrong thing to surround them, surround that police car, period.”
Other New York City politicians have also criticized the police actions in the video.
Here is the overhead... pic.twitter.com/US6Qqhkz3O
— Rob Bennett @ 🏡 (@rob_bennett) May 31, 2020
City Council Speaker Corey Johnson called it “outrageous” and added “if NYPD’s intent is to keep folks safe, this isn’t it.”
‘Stay safe. Stay dangerous, too,’ formerly incarcerated New York protester says
BROOKLYN — Sultan Malik, 40, who seems to have become an impromptu leader of protesters here, was exhausted after two days of demonstrations. He sat down on the speaker he’d been carrying for seven hours. His voice was gone.
“When y’all ready to fight, I’ll fight,” Malik told fellow protesters as they scattered.
Police had closed in like a vise on both the north and south ends of one of Brooklyn’s main streets in the upper-middle-class, largely white neighborhood of Cobble Hill. Some onlookers cheered on the demonstrators as they drank to-go cocktails.
A native of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Malik said the protests had gone on peacefully and unimpeded for hours in the poor, predominantly black neighborhood of Flatbush where he had started his day Saturday. Flatbush is also one of the areas hardest-hit by covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, in a city that was a hotspot of the epidemic.
“As soon as we came into where the wealthy white folks are, that’s when the police showed up in riot gear,” he said. “But not when we was in the ghetto."
Malik didn’t want to be called a leader of the protesters, but everyone on the street was leaning in to listen. He is used to taking command, as a fitness trainer and part owner of ConBody, a prison-style fitness boot camp where all of the instructors were formerly incarcerated. Malik spent 14 years at a maximum-security prison for armed robbery. Seven of those, he’s said, were in solitary confinement for acting out against abuse from the guards.
Beyond his frustration over the police brutality that sparked these protests, Malik is dismayed by the direction of the protests.
“No one seems to have an outright game plan as to how to approach power. It’s just, ‘End racism,’” he said.
But he has thought of a three-point plan.
First, there should be economic consequences for police officers who abuse their positions.
“Taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for any civil litigation made against them,” said Malik. “We’re paying for police brutality! So to stop it we need to have a law and a mandate that not only are they fired and not reinstated — it comes out of their pensions. If the civil litigation is successful following their removal from their position, they need to be penalized monetarily.”
Second, police should not have a “license to kill,” he said. “It’s indescribable when we see these terrible shootings. They’re trained professionals. Are they not trained to disable arms, legs? No, it’s shoot to kill. It’s head shots. Same with batons. Head shots.”
Third, Malik believes there should be legislation to hold other law enforcement officers who witness crimes accountable.
“Officers who are present during these assaults and murders, they, too, are held responsible,” Malik said. He pointed to a young white man on a bike nearby. “If this young man unfortunately finds himself in a situation where a crime is committed and his friends are nearby, wouldn’t he be culpable? Why does that not apply to the officers?”
In Brooklyn, Malik looked out at the peacefully dispersing crowd. “They got the nerve to talk about looting,” he said, shaking his head. “This very country was created by looting, burning, bleeding, pillaging, stealing — any of the synonyms.”
He picked up the speaker he’d been sitting on. “Stay safe,” he said. “Stay dangerous, too.”
Newsom declares emergency in Los Angeles, deploys National Guard
The California National Guard is being deployed to Los Angeles overnight to support our local response to maintain peace and safety on the streets of our city.
— MayorOfLA (@MayorOfLA) May 31, 2020
After days of protests and bursts of violence around the city, California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in Los Angeles County late Saturday night.
The state also granted Mayor Eric Garcetti’s request to deploy the National Guard to Los Angeles to help “maintain peace and safety on the streets of our city,” wrote Garcetti in a late-night tweet.
Garcetti had already extended curfew in the city from 8 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. Sunday to maintain order after fires raged and violence broke out around the city Saturday. The mayor initially resisted calling on troops to avoid evoking memories of the 1992 Rodney King riots.
The Los Angeles Times reported that people lit a dumpster fire in the Melrose district and continued looting until long after the curfew. In his state of emergency declaration in the county, Newsom acknowledged that “local authority is inadequate to address the threat posed by civil unrest within Los Angeles County and the city of Los Angeles.”
Elsewhere in the state, protesters did not disperse until early Sunday morning. In La Mesa, local reporters caught footage of banks burning and reported destruction of a block of bars and businesses.
Union Bank almost completely gutted by fire. #LaMesa @sdut pic.twitter.com/oq2Rg9kZwe
— Andrew Dyer (@SDUTdyer) May 31, 2020
Crowds also lingered into the morning hours in Sacramento; shortly before 2 a.m. local time police tweeted out an advisory warning they would be using “chemical agents” to “disperse a crowd throwing rocks at officers and lighting fires.”
About 40 minutes later, the department tweeted that most people had dispersed.
Ferguson police department evacuated
The police department in Ferguson, Mo., was evacuated early Sunday morning as multiple officers were injured and the building sustained significant damage, according to the St. Louis County Police Department.
“At this time, 2 officers were injured and transported. 2 others were treated at the scene for minor injuries,” the county police department wrote on Twitter, adding that some protesters are throwing rocks and fireworks at officers.
The St. Louis County Police Department said it is continuing to assist officers in the suburb that became a national focal point after Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in 2014. Ferguson, like many cities across America, is also under a curfew, which went into effect at midnight Sunday.
In Houston, protesters say threat of police brutality outweighs fear of the coronavirus
Before she left her home, Chavon Allen, 33, agonized over whether it was a good idea to bring her eight-year-old daughter to an unpredictable protest in the streets of downtown Houston Saturday evening.
It was frightening enough that some protests had turned chaotic the day before, with some people destroying police property and officers responding with force. Video footage captured a mounted patrol officer trampling a protesting woman, who narrowly avoided severe injury.
But what was scarier than the potential chaos, Allen said, was the risk of being exposed to the deadly coronavirus amid the dense crowd of protesters. Ultimately, she decided the viral menace paled in comparison to another threat to her health and safety.
“I understand we’re in a global pandemic right now, but I also feel like our lives are in a state of emergency as well because of the police,” she said, noting her brother had been shot by a Houston police officer three years earlier and survived. “That’s why we’re out here.”
Allen and her daughter were joined by several hundred other demonstrators of all ages who gathered at City Hall before peeling off to walk through the streets of downtown Houston chanting “black lives matter!”
Like Allen, many in the crowd wore masks and said the urgency of addressing George Floyd’s death was worth the risk of exposure to severe illness.
“There’s some things more important than your own life — like the life of your children,” said Rickey Davis, a 56-year-old father who was motivated to march to keep his 20-year-old son safe from police brutality. “We want an end to this senseless violence.”
Despite a few minor skirmishes between protesters and police, Saturday night’s demonstration, in which Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo participated, was far calmer than the day before.
The crowds dispersed around 9 p.m., with only a handful of arrests. For her part, Allen said bringing her daughter to the demonstration was the right choice.
“She just did a report for Black History Month on Dr. Martin Luther King,” she said. “This is why she’s out here. If you’re going to read about it and going to speak about it, I want you to live through it, too.”
Trump’s conservative media allies urge him to address nation
It’s time for @realDonaldTrump to address the nation
— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) May 31, 2020
Some of the president’s most prominent proponents in right-wing media took to Twitter late Saturday to urge him to address a nation seething with racial and economic unrest.
“It’s time for @realDonaldTrump to address the nation,” wrote Jack Posobiec, a right-wing provocateur and correspondent for the One America News Network.
The same message was then posted by numerous other conservative Internet personalities, including writers affiliated with Breitbart and the website Infowars.
It was unclear what they wanted him to say, or how additional words from a president prone to conflict would shape events through the critical early-morning period.
Trump’s most recent post, at about 10 p.m., assailed the Democratic mayor of Minneapolis, where Monday’s death of a black man in police custody touched off nationwide protests punctuated by looting and rioting in some cities.
The president’s silence in the wee hours, as peaceful protests descended into violent chaos, was striking, especially as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Joe Biden, issued a nine-paragraph statement that ended with a plea to “stay safe” and “take care of each other.”
Biden: Protesting is ‘right and necessary,’ but violence is not
Shortly after midnight, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden released a statement acknowledging the pain that has inspired widespread protests across the country and urging those feeling it to avoid violence as a means of expression.
“Protesting such brutality is right and necessary. It’s an utterly American response,” Biden wrote. “But burning down communities and needless destruction is not. Violence that endangers lives is not. Violence that guts and shutters businesses that serve the community is not.”
The statement from Biden amounted to the most detailed and forceful warning yet from the presumptive Democratic nominee against violent and destructive activities by protesters. Although he has said in recent days that protesters should demonstrate peacefully, he has put much more focus on the need to speak out.
In a five-minute video address on the killing of George Floyd on Friday, for example, Biden made no effort to warn protesters to be mindful of their tactics. In his remarks, Biden urged people not to be complacent or silent, lest the risk perpetuating the violence that Floyd and others have been subjected to over the years.
He offered a similar message Saturday.
“If we are complacent, if we are silent, we are complicit in perpetuating these cycles of violence,” he tweeted. “None of us can turn away. We all have an obligation to speak out.”
Many high-profile Democrats, including potential vice presidential pick Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), have been urging the public to listen to protesters’ grievances in tweets and other public statements. Harris attended a protest outside the White House on Saturday.
But Biden’s remarks combine continued support for the rights of protesters and the reality of a “nation in pain” with a warning against allowing “pain to destroy us.”
“We are a nation enraged, but we cannot allow our rage to consume us,” he wrote. “We are a nation exhausted, but we will not allow our exhaustion to defeat us.”
Biden also vowed to keep a promise he said he made to George Floyd’s brother, Philonise, that George will “not just be a hashtag.”
“I know that a grief that dark and deep may at times feel too heavy to bear. I know. And I also know that the only way to bear it is to turn all that anguish to purpose,” Biden said. “So tonight, I ask all of America to join me — not in denying our pain or covering it over — but using it to compel our nation across this turbulent threshold into the next phase of progress, inclusion, and opportunity for our great democracy.”