Here’s what you need to know:
- Three more officers are charged in George Floyd’s death, and officials upgrade charges against Derek Chauvin.
- The defense secretary says he does not want active-duty troops used on the streets for now.
- The statue of a former mayor, criticized for years as a symbol of racism, was removed in Philadelphia.
- Trump admits he went to a secure bunker, but claims it was only for an inspection.
- The police in Minneapolis use force against black people at seven times the rate of whites, city data shows.
- Peaceful protesters defied curfews, but minimal mayhem was reported overnight.
- Obama will address George Floyd’s death at 5 p.m.
Three more officers are charged in George Floyd’s death, and officials upgrade charges against Derek Chauvin.
Minnesota officials charged three additional police officers on Wednesday in the death of George Floyd, and added a new enhanced charge against the officer who held his knee to Mr. Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes, according to court filings.
The three former officers, Thomas Lane, J. Alexander Kueng and Tou Thao, were charged with aiding and abetting murder, court records show.
The fourth officer, Derek Chauvin, 44, who was arrested last week, faces an increased charge of second-degree murder.
All four officers were quickly fired from the Minneapolis Police Department after video of the encounter emerged. Officers arrested Mr. Floyd on the evening of May 25 after a store employee called the police, saying that someone had used a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes.
Mr. Chauvin kept his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes, including for 2 minutes 53 seconds after Mr. Floyd fell unresponsive, according to the charging document released by prosecutors.
The other officers did not stop Mr. Chauvin, and Mr. Lane and Mr. Kueng helped hold Mr. Floyd to the ground for at least part of the time, while Mr. Thao stood nearby, according to video reconstruction of the arrest by The New York Times. Mr. Lane asked at one point whether they should turn Mr. Floyd onto his side, prosecutors said, but Mr. Chauvin said “no, staying put where we got him.”
Ben Crump, a civil rights lawyer representing Mr. Floyd’s family, visited the scene of the arrest earlier on Wednesday and said he expected all of the officers to be charged “to the full extent of the law.”
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.
To date, the troops that have assisted with protest response around the country have been National Guard forces under state control, and not active-duty military forces, which are prohibited from carrying out domestic law enforcement under most circumstances. On Wednesday, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida offered to send 500 Florida National Guard troops to Washington.
Officials said that Mr. Trump had discussed invoking the Insurrection Act to permit use of active-duty troops, 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
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.
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.
Latest Updates: George Floyd Protests
- Three more officers are charged in George Floyd’s death, and officials upgrade charges against Derek Chauvin.
- The defense secretary says he does not want active-duty troops used on the streets for now.
- The statue of a former mayor, criticized for years as a symbol of racism, was removed in Philadelphia.
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 others, 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.”
Trump admits he went to a secure bunker, but claims it was only for an inspection.
President Trump on Wednesday first denied and then acknowledged that he had gone to a secure bunker below the White House over the weekend as protesters demonstrated nearby. He said he went there for an “inspection,” rather than out of concern over his safety.
Mr. Trump has been irritated by news reports that he and his family were taken to the bunker while protests flared, and on Wednesday he was asked about the events in an interview with Brian Kilmeade of Fox News Radio.
“Well, it was a false report,” Mr. Trump said.
“I wasn’t down — I went down during the day, and I was there for a tiny little short period of time, and it was much more for an inspection, there was no problem during the day,” he added. He did not say which day.
That contradicted the accounts of other officials, including one with firsthand knowledge, who told The New York Times that the Secret Service had rushed him to the bunker for his safety, not for an inspection, and that it occurred on Friday night, not during the day.
An official familiar with the events said the agents acted after the White House’s security status was changes to “red,” a warning of a heightened threat, amid the protests.
Mr. Trump’s concern about the perception that he was hiding contributed to his decision to walk across Lafayette Square on Monday to a church that was damaged by fire the night before. Law enforcement officers used pepper spray to disperse a crowd of demonstrators and clear the way for his walk.
In the Fox interview, the president said he would step in to deal with protests in New York City, where Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have been at odds over the best way to contain the unrest. “If they don’t get their act straightened out, I will solve it,” Mr. Trump said, without offering details. “I’ll solve it fast.”
Mr. Trump also repeated his baseless claim that the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough was connected to the death in 2001 of Lori Klausutis, a young woman who worked for him when Mr. Scarborough was a congressman.
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.
Peaceful protesters defied curfews, but minimal mayhem was reported overnight.
For an eighth day and night on Tuesday, 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, where more than 1,000 people gathered outside the White House and military vehicles could be seen on the streets. 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 Barclays Center in Brooklyn and a large crowd tried to cross over the Manhattan bridge in defiance of a curfew. Outside Wrigley Field in Chicago, crowds chanted “Hands up” as they raised their arms to the sky. In Los Angeles, even as hundreds were arrested throughout the city, a crowd gathered outside the home of Mayor Eric Garcetti, who earlier in the day had joined the demonstrations 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.
Still, Tuesday did bear some of the marks of violence from previous days. In 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.
Video from Charlotte, N.C., showed officers surrounding demonstrators and using stun grenades, pepper spray and pepper pellets, tactics that were criticized by a black state lawmaker who represents the city. The police, who said that they would conduct an internal review of the exchange, said that officers had been attacked with bottles, rocks and even some sort of chemical agent.
Obama will address George Floyd’s death at 5 p.m.
President Barack Obama will make his first on-camera comments about the killing of George Floyd and the protests over police use of force on Wednesday evening, as he takes on an increasingly visible role in addressing the nation’s crisis and criticizing the White House.
The former president — who is taking pains to avoid upstaging his friend Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee — is expected to appear at a roundtable with his former attorney general, Eric H. Holder, at 5 p.m. Eastern time as part of a video town hall series sponsored by My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, a nonprofit group Mr. Obama founded.
Mr. Obama plans to start with brief remarks echoing two essays he posted online, imploring young protesters to channel their rage into political action by turning out for Mr. Biden in November and by embracing specific local measures to hold police officers accountable for abuses. He will also field a series of questions screened ahead of time and mediated by Mr. Holder.
Mr. Obama intends to draw a contrast between the Trump administration’s handling of the crisis and his administration’s approach to issues of race and policing, a person close to the planning said.
“We should be fighting to make sure that we have a president, a Congress, a U.S. Justice Department, and a federal judiciary that actually recognize the ongoing, corrosive role that racism plays in our society and want to do something about it,” he wrote in a post on Medium last week.
In recent appearances, Mr. Obama has become more forceful in his attacks on the White House, hammering Mr. Trump’s actions without invoking his name.
Friends of Mr. Obama say his passions are running high, and the disciplined former president is finding it harder to stay on script. Last month, on a conference call with members of his former administration, he called the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus epidemic as “chaotic” and questioned Mr. Trump’s commitment to the rule of law.
Over the last few days, Mr. Obama has been working the phones with close associates, including Mr. Holder, venting his disgust at the White House response to the protests and strategizing about the best way to address the issues without inflaming the crisis or squaring off one-on-one with Mr. Trump, people close to him said.
Louisville’s mayor orders an outside review of the city’s police.
The city of Louisville, Ky., will hire an outside consultant to conduct a comprehensive review of its police department, after the recent fatal shootings of two black residents — Breonna Taylor in March and David McAtee early on Monday.
Mayor Greg Fischer, who announced the review in a news conference on Wednesday, said the consultant would be asked to examine the Louisville Metro Police Department’s policies on training, use of force and bias, among other matters, and that the review would include listening sessions with residents. The mayor called the review “an exciting moment of opportunity for our police department and the city.”
The announcement came as the city is searching for a new police chief. Mr. Fischer fired the previous chief, Steven Conrad, on Tuesday after learning that officers did not have their body cameras turned on when Mr. McAtee was killed on Monday. Mr. Conrad was due to retire in a few weeks.
Mr. McAtee, who was 53, owned a popular barbecue restaurant where a crowd had gathered outside on Sunday night, after the city’s 9 p.m. curfew. Shortly past midnight, two Louisville police officers and two National Guard members on the scene heard gunshots and fired their guns, and Mr. McAtee was killed.
Ms. Taylor, who was 26, was killed in March when the police executed a “no-knock” search warrant at her home. Outrage over her death has helped to fuel six days of protests in the city. At a demonstration last Thursday, seven people were struck by gunfire.
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.”
Residents of Los Angeles 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.
Outrage erupted after reports surfaced that a stadium at the University of California, Los Angeles was being used as a “field jail” for people detained during the protests. Faculty members objected, and the university said early Wednesday it would not allow the stadium to be used that way 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 she was shocked by the events. “They took what literally had been holy ground that day,” she said in an interview, “and turned it into a literal battleground.”
Reporting was contributed by Tim Arango, Emily Cochrane, Nick Corasaniti, Michael Crowley, Elizabeth Dias, Reid J. Epstein, Tess Felder, Lazaro Gamio, Sandra E. Garcia, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Katie Glueck, Russell Goldman, Amy Julia Harris, Carl Hulse, Patricia Mazzei, Richard A. Oppel Jr., Catherine Porter, Elisabetta Povoledo, Alejandra Rosa, Marc Santora, Anna Schaverien, Thomas Shanker, Glenn Thrush, Daniel Victor and Karen Weise.
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