Here’s what you need to know:
- The defense secretary says he does not want active-duty troops used on the streets for now.
- Peaceful protesters defied curfews, but minimal mayhem was reported overnight.
- The statue of a former mayor, criticized for years as a symbol of racism, was removed in Philadelphia.
- The police in Minneapolis use force against black people at seven times the rate of whites, city data shows.
- In a New York City under ‘lockdown’ and curfew, mayhem subsides even as protests continue.
- Trudeau was asked about Trump on Canadian TV. He paused for an uncomfortable 21 seconds.
- Combat troops are deployed to the nation’s capital and placed on standby.
The defense secretary says he does not want active-duty troops used on the streets for now.
Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said Wednesday that he does not think the current state of unrest in American cities warrants the deployment of active-duty troops to confront protesters, just days after President Trump said he was considering use of the Insurrection Act to do exactly that.
In a Pentagon news conference, Mr. Esper said ordering active-duty troops to police American cities should be a “last resort and only in the most urgent and dire of situations.” He said that, for now, this was not warranted.
About 1,600 airborne troops and military police have been ordered to be positioned outside the capital, officials said Tuesday night.
Officials said that Mr. Trump had discussed the invoking the Insurrection Act, but had been dissuaded by Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Attorney General William P. Barr.
Mr. Esper also acknowledged on Wednesday that he did know beforehand that he was accompanying Mr. Trump to St. John’s Church in Washington Monday evening, changing his initial assertions that he was unaware of his destination when he joined the president for a walk across Lafayette Square for a photo op after authorities tear-gassed protesters to clear the way.
Mr. Esper said after the much-criticized photo op that he was unaware of his destination when he set out with Mr. Trump for what he thought was a visit to view troops near Lafayette Square.
“I didn’t know where I was going,” Mr. Esper told NBC News in an interview Tuesday. “I wanted to see how much damage actually happened.”
His comments on Wednesday were widely interpreted as an effort to distance himself from Monday night’s events, which spurred harsh criticism from former senior military officials.
Flowers surrounded a memorial on Tuesday night at the Minneapolis intersection where George Floyd died in police custody.
Credit...Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times-
Slide 1 of 9Flowers surrounded a memorial on Tuesday night at the Minneapolis intersection where George Floyd died in police custody.
Credit...Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times
Peaceful protesters defied curfews, but minimal mayhem was reported overnight.
For an eighth day and night, tens of thousands of people staged peaceful protests and impassioned marches across the United States, while the widespread destruction and looting that had followed demonstrations in recent days was largely absent.
President Trump called on states to bring in the military to restore order and combat “lowlifes and losers,” as an infantry battalion from Fort Bragg was dispatched to the nation’s capital as part of a broader show of force. But governors resisted the president’s entreaties, instead bolstering the police presence, changing tactics and imposing curfews to prevent people from using the protests as cover to wreak mayhem.
While demonstrators in many cities defied curfews, they did so peacefully.
They sang “We Shall Overcome” at the Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn. Outside Wrigley Field in Chicago, crowds chanted “Hands up” as they raised their arms to the sky. In Los Angeles, hundreds gathered outside the home of Mayor Eric Garcetti, who earlier in the day had joined the crowds and taken a knee as he listened to pleas. On a bridge in Portland, Ore., hundreds lay face down, hands behind their backs, for a “die in” intended to emulate the death of George Floyd.
Mr. Floyd, a 46-year-old black security guard, died after his neck was pinned under a white police officer’s knee for nearly nine minutes in Minneapolis last week. The officer has been charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. The killing, captured on video, was the spark for the outpouring of anger and anguish expressed in demonstrations in more than 140 cities for over a week.
As the sustained protests have made clear, the fuse has been burning for a long time, and despair has mounted with each case of a black person dying at the hands of the police.
A week after Mr. Floyd’s death, Minnesota said it had started a human rights investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department, citing evidence of systematic discrimination against people of color, particularly African-Americans.
The Floyd family gathered in Houston on Tuesday for a memorial and were joined by about 60,000 people, according to city officials.
Speakers offered emotional testimonials to a man they recalled as a “gentle giant.” A video of Mr. Floyd’s 6-year-old daughter, Gianna, taking in the outpouring of support was shared widely around the country.
“Daddy changed the world,” she said.
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Washington: More than 1,000 protesters on Tuesday faced off with officers across a newly erected chain-link fence outside the White House, but the demonstrations remained largely peaceful. Dozens of military vehicles were deployed on the capital’s streets.
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New York: Hundreds of demonstrators violated an 8 p.m. curfew in a standoff with the police at the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge. But overall there were fewer violent confrontations between the police and protesters and fewer acts of looting and vandalism than in recent days.
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Atlanta: Police and military personnel used tear gas to disperse a large crowd near Centennial Olympic Park shortly after the city’s 9 p.m. curfew.
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California: The Los Angeles police made hundreds of arrests throughout the city on Tuesday night, a police spokesman said. Santa Monica enacted among the strictest curfews in the nation, starting at 2 p.m. local time.
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Philadelphia: Hundreds of protesters had gathered outside City Hall by Tuesday afternoon, and later tried to pull down a statue of a former Mayor Frank Rizzo, an early proponent of white identity politics. Mayor Jim Kenney said later that the statue had been taken down.
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Charlotte, N.C.: Protesters and the police skirmished after the authorities ordered the crowds to disperse. Video showed officers surrounding demonstrators and using stun grenades, pepper spray and pepper pellets, tactics that were criticized by a black state lawmaker who represents Charlotte. The police, who said that they would conduct an internal review of the exchange, said that officers had been hit by bottles and rocks, and that a protester had thrown what they called a chemical agent at an officer on a bicycle. One person who was arrested had a military-style rifle and two 30-round magazines, the police said.
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St. Louis: Mr. Trump tweeted his condolences to David Dorn, a retired police captain who the police said had been shot by a looter on Monday night. Mr. Dorn died the same night that four active-duty police officers were shot during protests.
The statue of a former mayor, criticized for years as a symbol of racism, was removed in Philadelphia.
The City of Philadelphia on Wednesday morning took down a statue of the former mayor Frank Rizzo, a champion of conservatives who aggressively policed black people and gay people in the 1960s and ’70s and whose likeness has long been criticized as a symbol of racism and oppression.
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The statue, which sat on the steps of a municipal services building, had remained for more than two decades since its unveiling in 1999. It was often vandalized, and protesters in recent days have tried to take it down and light it on fire.
At a Wednesday morning news conference, Mayor Jim Kenney said that the statue was already scheduled to be removed — in 2021, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. But he said the protests showed that the statue “had to go away for us to understand where we need to go to look forward.”
“I believe this is the beginning of the healing process of our city,” he said. “This is not the end of the process. Taking that statue down, that monument down, is not the be all and end all of where we want to go.”
Mr. Rizzo became police commissioner in 1967, before serving two terms as mayor, from 1972 to 1980. As police commissioner, he rounded up gay people late at night and forced members of the Black Panthers to strip down in the streets.
He was celebrated by some as a law-and-order leader, who cracked down on crime. But his tactics, to other, bordered on the dictatorial, designed to suppress opposition and keep black people out of middle-class neighborhoods. While seeking a third term, Mr. Rizzo urged supporters to “Vote White.”
Mr. Kenney said the city did not yet know what would happen to the statue, and had no immediate timetable.
“We just needed to get it out of the way so we can move forward,” he said. “If there’s someone who wants it, wants to take it somewhere else, we’ll talk. We needed to get it to a place where it was out of people’s sight.”
The police in Minneapolis use force against black people at seven times the rate of whites, city data shows.
The police in Minneapolis used force against black people at a rate at least seven times that of white people during the past five years, according to an analysis of city data, underscoring the deep racial inequities that are driving demonstrations in the city and prompting the mayor to call for reform.
In an interview with the Times podcast “The Daily” on Wednesday, Mayor Jacob Frey said the protests showed the need for “true change” beyond a conviction for George Floyd’s killing.
“This is not just about the eight minutes of time where our officer had his knee on George Floyd’s neck,” Mr. Frey said. “This is about the previous 400 years. This is about a hundred years’ worth of intentional segregation and institutionalized racism.”
Listen to ‘The Daily’: The Mayor of Minneapolis
In our interview, Mayor Jacob Frey said he had been warned that a lack of policing reform could lead to a city crisis. “Every single day, I feel the weight of responsibility on my chest.”The city data backed up claims of a broader problem.
About 20 percent of Minneapolis’s population of 430,000 is black. But when the police get physical — with kicks, neck holds, punches, shoves, takedowns, Mace, Tasers or other forms of muscle — nearly 60 percent of the time the person subject to that force is black.
On The Daily, Mr. Frey also rejected President Trump’s vow to “dominate” protesters by deploying the full might of federal law enforcement in cities across the country.
“What we cannot allow is for the vision and mentality of Donald Trump to come into our city in the form of a militaristic rule,” he said. “The implications are more scary than I can even possibly imagine.”
Mr. Frey said he is also worried the president’s decision to turn Washington D.C. into a heavily armed fortress policed by war-grade armaments will only stoke further division.
“Well just look at the rhetoric that’s coming from the president. I mean, he’s talking about shooting people,” he said. “There is a dramatically different philosophy that the president has than ours here in Minnesota.”
The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota filed a lawsuit on Tuesday accusing the city of abridging the constitutionally mandated freedom of the press, after journalists covering the protests said they were attacked, arrested, intimidated with weapons or shot with nonlethal projectiles while doing their jobs.
In a New York City under ‘lockdown’ and curfew, mayhem subsides even as protests continue.
New York City, which has essentially been closed for business for more than two months to slow the spread of a coronavirus that has killed tens of thousands of its residents, spent a second night under a new restriction: citywide curfew.
The curfew took effect in New York on Tuesday at 8 p.m. as officials again tried to curb the violent clashes, looting and other destructive acts that had marred the mostly peaceful protests filling the streets for nearly a week.
As happened on Monday, when much of the worst damage was done before an 11 p.m. curfew took effect, groups of people lingered outside after the cutoff came. The largest crowd tried to cross the Manhattan Bridge from Brooklyn but was turned back peacefully after a lengthy standoff with the police.
Over all there appeared to be fewer violent confrontations between officers and protesters than in preceding days, and fewer acts of looting than in the two previous nights.
“Very calm situation,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Twitter after 11 p.m. “So far, the curfew is certainly helping, based on everything I’ve seen in Brooklyn and Manhattan over the last three hours.”
Mr. de Blasio and had been criticized earlier in the day by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and others for how he and the police department had handled what turned into a rash of looting across Midtown Manhattan on Monday before the 11 o’clock curfew.
On Tuesday, in the hours after the curfew took effect, the group on the bridge and several other crowds of hundreds of people continued to walk peacefully through Brooklyn and Manhattan, chanting protest slogans and urging change.
“As long as it takes, I’m going to do it,” Sam Fitzgerald, 35, of Brooklyn, said of protesting. “It’s a revolution, baby.”
Trudeau was asked about Trump on Canadian TV. He paused for an uncomfortable 21 seconds.
When asked what he thought of President Trump’s call for military action against American protesters and the tear gassing of peaceful demonstrators to make way for his photo-op, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada paused at his podium for 21 uncomfortable, televised seconds.
He opened his mouth, then shut it — twice. He softly groaned.
Finally, in a scene on Tuesday that has now spread wildly around the internet, Mr. Trudeau said: “We all watch in horror and consternation what’s going on in the United States.”
From their perch above the United States, Canadians have been watching in shock as the country they’ve long considered their closest friend and protector now seems like a crazed, erratic and dangerous stranger.
Much of the country’s horror has been focused squarely on President Trump.
Most Canadians soured on President Trump two years ago when he slapped tariffs on their country’s steel and aluminum exports, threatened to cut Canada out of the continental free trade deal and insulted Mr. Trudeau as “very dishonest and weak” moments after leaving the Group of 7 summit, which Mr. Trudeau had hosted.
But, during the pandemic, public opinion of President Trump has sunk to even lower levels among Canadians.
While politicians here have set aside their partisan differences to work together to protect Canadians against the coronavirus scourge, Mr. Trump is viewed as politicizing the pandemic for his own reelection efforts.
“My view is one of profound sadness — sadness at watching communities we respect being so torn apart, and sadness at watching the loss of life in the pandemic,” said Frank McKenna, a former premier of New Brunswick and a former Canadian ambassador to the United States. “The United States is so polarized, the question of wearing a mask or not is fraught with political overtones. It’s excruciating to watch.”
Combat troops are deployed to the nation’s capital and placed on standby.
Less than two hours before a 7 p.m. curfew went into effect in Washington on Tuesday, military vehicles assumed positions across the city. A crowd of protesters in Lafayette Square near the White House appeared to be at least twice that of a day earlier.
With the imminent arrival of military units and the use of helicopters to suppress protesters on Monday night — a tactic used for battles with insurgents abroad, now applied on U.S. soil — some in the crowd whispered that more soldiers were on the way.
Alec, a 32-year-old protester who spent two deployments in Afghanistan, said he had seen things over the past two days that he never expected to see in his own country.
“There are real problems here,” he said, declining to give his last name because he works for the government, “and no amount of uniforms or soldiers are going to fix them.”
While the evening ended with only flashes of confrontations, the city’s downtown is being flooded with agents from the F.B.I., the Bureau of Prisons, the U.S. Marshals, Customs and Border Protection, and several other agencies, along with the military. Transportation Security Administration officers have also been called out of airports to help protect federal property.
The militarization of the response to the protest has stirred deep concerns and drawn widespread criticism, including from retired Adm. Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said that “our fellow citizens are not the enemy, and must never become so.”
“I am deeply worried that as they execute their orders, the members of our military will be co-opted for political purposes,” he wrote in an opinion piece in The Atlantic published on Tuesday, adding that America’s cities and towns “are not ‘battle spaces’ to be dominated, and must never become so.”
The federal law enforcement response is being run by Attorney General William P. Barr. It was also Mr. Barr who ordered federal officers to clear peaceful protesters out of Washington’s Lafayette Park on Monday so that Mr. Trump could walk to a historic church and have his picture taken there, according to a Justice Department official.
In all, about 1,600 troops were being moved into the Washington area, according to the Pentagon, which described the troop movements as “a prudent planning measure.”
In Los Angeles, residents are reliving the trauma of 1992.
With America seized by racial unrest, as protests convulse cities from coast to coast after the death of George Floyd, Los Angeles is on fire again. As peaceful protests in the city turned violent over the past few days, with images of looting and burning buildings captured by news helicopters shown late into the night, many Angelenos, have been pulled back to the trauma of 1992.
The parallels are easy to see: looting and destruction, fueled by anger over police abuses; shopkeepers, with long guns, protecting their businesses. The differences, though, between 1992 and now, are stark. This time, the faces of the protesters are more diverse — black, white, Latino, Asian; there has been little if any racially motivated violence among Angelenos; and the geography of the chaos is very different, with protesters bringing their message to Los Angeles’ largely white and rich Westside.
“South Central has been completely quiet and peaceful,” said Ms. Cullors, now a prominent activist and co-founder of Black Lives Matter who organized a protest on Saturday in the Fairfax District, west of downtown. “That’s an important distinction, that these current situations are not happening in black communities.”
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Los Angeles, in many ways, is America’s reference point for urban racial unrest, including the Watts riots in 1965 and the uprising in 1992. The Rodney King beating in 1991, captured on film, was one of the first viral videos of a black man being abused by the police, before cellphones even existed. In those uprisings, dozens of people were killed — 34 in 1965, and more than 40 in 1992.
Some of the most searing images from 1992 were of racially motivated violence on the streets — the beating of Reginald Denny, a white truck driver; gun battles between Korean shop owners and black looters. But the mayhem largely stayed in the historically black community of South Los Angeles and in Koreatown.
Now, organizers here say, they have very deliberately brought their anger to those they believe need to hear it the most: the white and the wealthy.
After a U.C.L.A. stadium was used as a ‘field jail,’ for protest arrests, the university says it won’t happen again.
The University of California, Los Angeles says it will not allow a campus stadium to serve as a “field jail” in the future, after faculty members raised concerns about its use to process people arrested over curfew violations this week.
It was not immediately clear how many people were detained at the stadium, which is named after Jackie Robinson. But about 2,500 people were taken into custody in Los Angeles from Friday to Tuesday morning, according to the authorities. Scores more were arrested on Tuesday evening.
A group of 16 faculty members raised concerns about the use of the stadium in a letter made public on Tuesday by Ananya Roy, a professor of urban planning at the university.
“Testimony from arrested protesters is chilling,” they wrote. “U.C.L.A. students were arrested for engaging in the constitutionally protected right to peacefully protest against racial injustice, which is pervasive in American policing. They were detained and processed at a stadium on their own campus named after Jackie Robinson, an icon of the long and unfinished struggle for black freedom.”
The letter says that social distancing protocols put in place because of the coronavirus pandemic were violated by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department, with officers not wearing masks or following other guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The cruel irony that this took place at a location used as a Covid-19 testing site is not lost on those arrested or on us,” they wrote.
The university issued a statement on Twitter saying that it was troubled by the accounts of how the stadium was being used.
“This was done without UCLA’s knowledge or permission,” it wrote. “As lessee of the stadium, we informed local agencies that UCLA will NOT grant permission should there be a request like this in the future.”
‘We cannot tolerate or turn a blind eye to racism,’ Pope Francis says.
Pope Francis said on Wednesday that he was watching the “disturbing social unrest” in the United States with “great concern.”
“We cannot tolerate or turn a blind eye to racism and exclusion in any form and yet claim to defend the sacredness of every human life,” he said during his weekly general audience. He said he was praying for “the repose of the soul of George Floyd and of all those others who have lost their lives as a result of the sin of racism.”
He called for “national reconciliation and peace” and said the recent violence on U.S. streets “self-destructive and self-defeating.”
The pope’s comments came a day after Christian leaders criticized President Trump for using two religious sites in Washington for what they said were acts of political theater.
On Monday, Mr. Trump posed holding a Bible outside the historic St. John’s Church, and on Tuesday he and the first lady spent about 10 minutes inside the St. John Paul II National Shrine.
“I find it baffling and reprehensible that any Catholic facility would allow itself to be so egregiously misused and manipulated in a fashion that violates our religious principles,” Archbishop Wilton Gregory of Washington said in a statement.
The Rev. Gini Gerbasi, an Episcopal priest who had been on the patio of St. John’s when nearby protesters were sprayed with tear gas, said he was shocked by the events. “They took what literally had been holy ground that day,” he said in an interview, “and turned it into a literal battleground.”
Front-line medical workers clap for ‘front-line’ demonstrators.
For months on end, health care workers across the United States have cared for hundreds of thousands of people sickened by the coronavirus and even lost their own lives to the pandemic. They have also seen the virus infect and kill black people in the country at disproportionately high rates.
And just as New Yorkers have offered their applause in appreciation of those workers each evening, on Tuesday night the tables were turned and it was medical professionals offering their applause in support of the protests that have swept the country.
Dressed in scrubs, lab coats and protective equipment, doctors and medical personnel came out in droves in New York City to show support for the thousands who have taken to the streets in protest to call for an end to systemic racism. Some joined protesters in New York City’s Times Square, while others lined the streets outside hospitals, clapping for protesters as they walked past.
The organizers of a “Front Lines for Front Lines” group wrote on Twitter: “Every night, at 7pm, the city has clapped for us.” On Tuesday, they said, “We’re re-purposing that show of support.”
Elsewhere in the country, medical workers have handed out masks and milk to protesters in Minneapolis to ease the effects of tear gas. And in Washington, D.C., a doctor told a local news outlet that he would be riding a bike around protests in the city to offer first aid.
Reporting was contributed by Tim Arango, Emily Cochrane, Nick Corasaniti, Michael Crowley, Elizabeth Dias, Reid J. Epstein, Tess Felder, Sandra E. Garcia, Katie Glueck, Russell Goldman, Amy Julia Harris, Carl Hulse, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Catherine Porter, Elisabetta Povoledo, Alejandra Rosa, Marc Santora, Anna Schaverien, Thomas Shanker, Daniel Victor and Karen Weise.
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