Here’s what you need to know:
- Protests over police violence unveil more police violence.
- As protests stretch into a second weekend, the virus and job losses have hit black Americans especially hard.
- Trump says today is a ‘great day' for Americans and for George Floyd.
- Two Buffalo police officers are suspended after injuring a protester.
- ‘Stop hitting him.’ Video shows a witness pleading with police before a man died in custody.
- ‘Black Lives Matter’ is painted by city workers on the streets leading to the White House.
- Maine’s governor asks Trump to ‘check his inflammatory rhetoric’ on visit.
Protests over police violence unveil more police violence.
As protests over the death of George Floyd sweep the nation, the demonstrations have revealed powerful moments of peaceful protest and in some cases among police officers, who have been seen taking a knee in solidarity, reading the names of police brutality victims out loud or quietly crying alongside protesters.
But the protests have also revealed widespread incidents of police aggression, documented with the same tool that captured Mr. Floyd’s death under the knee of a white officer in Minneapolis: video.
In Buffalo, two police officers were suspended without pay after a video showed them shoving a 75-year-old protester, who was hospitalized with a head injury. In Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Miami Herald reporters filmed officers who were shooting a nonviolent protester in the head with foam rubber bullets, fracturing her eye socket. Cellphone videos show New York City police officers beating unarmed protesters and sideswiping demonstrators with opened squad car doors.
Captured by bystanders and sometimes shown on live television, the episodes have occurred in cities large and small, in the heat of mass protests and in their quiet aftermath. A compilation posted on Twitter by a North Carolina lawyer included over 300 clips by Friday morning.
The episodes have emerged over nearly two weeks of largely peaceful demonstrations in at least 600 cities across America, as thousands of people filled the streets in historic protests against systemic racism and police brutality.
Officers and protesters alike have been injured in tense conflicts, and several people have been killed amid unrest and looting. Video has played a prominent role in the case of a popular restaurant owner in Louisville, Ky., who was killed by law enforcement after he appeared to shoot his gun in a chaotic exchange.
The unsettled pain of an anguished nation has stretched over the past week from a Minneapolis chapel where speakers remembered Mr. Floyd, a 46-year-old black security guard and father, to the White House, where President Trump has been in a standoff with the Pentagon over the use of military force against protesters. The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, told a group of black supporters on Thursday night that “we’re in a battle for the soul of this country.”
The national attention has also brought past incidents to clearer view.
A black man who called out “I can’t breathe” before dying in police custody in Tacoma, Wash., in March was killed as a result of oxygen deprivation and the physical restraint that was used on him, a medical examiner ruled in a report released this week.
As protests stretch into a second weekend, the virus and job losses have hit black Americans especially hard.
With memorials and demonstrations planned across the United States for the second consecutive weekend, Americans will again gather shoulder-to-shoulder by the hundreds and the thousands, as the nation grapples with a public health and economic crisis that has loomed heavily over the crowded gatherings.
The risk of the coronavirus spreading at mass gatherings remains a real concern, public health experts say, but there were signs of slight improvements to the job market on Friday. The unemployment rate fell to 13.3 percent in May and the economy added 2.5 million jobs, the Labor Department announced, in an unexpected improvement that reflected limited business reopenings across the country.
The report noted that “employment rose sharply in leisure and hospitality, construction, education and health services, and retail trade,” even as jobs in the government continued their decline.
Economists had expected the unemployment rate to increase to as much as 20 percent, after it hit 14.7 percent in April, which was the highest since the government began keeping official statistics after World War II.
The economic crisis has converged with a public health crisis and years of systemic racism that have taken disproportionately large tolls on African-Americans. That reality was reflected in a memorial for George Floyd in Minneapolis on Thursday, as speakers recalled a father and community member who had been infected by the coronavirus, had been looking for new work after the restaurant where he worked as a bouncer closed to on-site dining and died in the custody of the Minneapolis police.
“It was not the coronavirus pandemic that killed George Floyd,” said Benjamin Crump, the civil rights lawyer who represents the Floyd family. “It was that other pandemic we’re all too familiar with in America — it was that pandemic of racism and discrimination that killed George Floyd.”
That message was also carried by demonstrators who again took to the streets from Seattle to New York City.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, who delivered a eulogy for Mr. Floyd, pledged that his death would be a catalyst for change, after a video showed a white police officer kneeling on Mr. Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes as he lay face down and handcuffed on the pavement, saying, “I can’t breathe.”
The protests, Mr. Sharpton said, have a straightforward symbolic message: “Get your knee off our necks.”
Trump says today is a ‘great day' for Americans and for George Floyd.
President Trump, hailing a dip in the unemployment rate and praising the National Guard for quelling protests in Minnesota, said the occasion was a “great day” for Americans and for George Floyd, a black man who died in Minneapolis after his neck was pinned under the knee of a white police officer.
“Hopefully, George is looking down right now in saying this is a great thing happening for our country,” Mr. Trump said. “A great day for him, a great day for everybody. This is a great day for everybody. This is a great day in terms of equality.”
Mr. Trump’s comments on Mr. Floyd came as he glanced down at a piece of paper during an otherwise scattershot speech to briefly address the need for law enforcement officials to treat Americans fairly.
“Equal justice under the law must mean that every American receives equal treatment in every encounter with law enforcement regardless of race, color, gender, or creed,” Mr. Trump said in the Rose Garden. “They have to receive fair treatment from law enforcement.”
Still, his assertion was remarkable given that the White House has constructed a fortified fence around the complex to deter demonstrations calling for justice for Mr. Floyd, whose neck was pinned for almost nine minutes as he lay face down and handcuffed on the pavement, saying “I can’t breathe.”
His comments drew immediate criticism from Democrats who felt that Mr. Trump was tying Mr. Floyd’s killing to a bright spot in the American economy.
“Keep George Floyd’s name out of your mouth until you can say Black Lives Matter,” Senator Kamala Harris of California, who is among those under consideration for a vice-presidential nomination from Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Trump’s challenger, tweeted at the president.
Throughout his speech, Mr. Trump largely skimmed over continued unrest. He instead hailed Friday’s jobs report, calling it “the greatest comeback in American history,” even though economists immediately warned that the situation was still too precarious to declare victory.
Mr. Trump also called for the reopening of the country amid a pandemic that has killed nearly 110,000 Americans, and bragged that he could send in the National Guard to any state that asked for help quelling protests.
“We will be ready for them so fast their heads will spin,” Mr. Trump said, adding that he sent the National Guard to Minnesota. “I called the governor and the National Guard went in and one night, it was over. ”
In fact, while violent confrontations have decreased, protests have continued in Minneapolis and grown throughout the country, with demonstrators calling for leaders to address police brutality and the deaths of black men in police custody. But in interviews with several of his allies this week, Mr. Trump has largely declined to address a larger effort to curb police violence.
The president did not take questions from reporters the White House had assembled for the event, and largely ignored shouted questions from journalists asking him to detail his plan to address what demonstrators feel is a systemic culture of police brutality.
As he attempted to sign a piece of legislation, Mr. Trump ignored a question from a reporter who asked why it was a great day for Mr. Floyd.
Two Buffalo police officers are suspended after injuring a protester.
Two police officers in Buffalo, N.Y., have been suspended without pay after a video showed them shoving a 75-year-old protester, who was hospitalized with a head injury, the authorities said.
The video, taken by WBFO, a local radio station, shows the man approaching a group of officers on Thursday during a demonstration stemming from the death of George Floyd. After the man stops in front of them to talk, an officer yells, “Push him back” three times. One officer then pushes his arm into the man’s chest and another extends his baton toward the man with both hands.
The man is next seen flailing backward, landing just out of the camera’s range, with blood leaking from his right ear. The video shows an officer leaning down to examine him, but another officer pulls the first officer away. Several other officers are seen walking by the man, who is motionless on the ground, without checking on him.
Mayor Byron Brown said on Thursday night that the man was in serious but stable condition.
The images, which rapidly spread across social media, added to a growing number of videos from across the nation showing officers responding to protests against police violence with more police violence. Anger among supporters of the protests was heightened by the police department’s initial claim that the man “tripped and fell,” a description at direct odds with the video.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York condemned the officers’ actions in a statement late Thursday.
“The incident in Buffalo is wholly unjustified and utterly disgraceful,” he said. “I’ve spoken with City of Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown, and we agree that the officers involved should be immediately suspended. Police officers must enforce — NOT ABUSE — the law.”
‘Stop hitting him.’ Video shows a witness pleading with police before a man died in custody.
A woman who witnessed the arrest of Manuel Ellis, a black man in Tacoma, Wash., called on the police to “stop hitting him” after they wrestled Mr. Ellis to the ground, according to a video of the arrest.
Mr. Ellis died in the minutes following his arrest in March after pleading, “I can’t breathe” — an eerie echo of some of the final words from other black men who have died in police custody, including Eric Garner and George Floyd.
The woman captured video clips showing brief portions of the arrest of Mr. Ellis, 33, including punches that officers threw while he was on the ground. She was in her car and had pulled up right behind the police vehicle on the southern edge of Tacoma late on the night of March 3.
After the videos were posted online, Tacoma’s mayor, Victoria Woodards, released a video message late Wednesday night saying she was enraged by what she saw and was directing the city manager to fire each officer involved.
“The officers who committed this crime should be fired and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Ms. Woodards said.
The first video captured by the witness begins in the middle of the encounter, showing both officers standing, right as they took Mr. Ellis to the ground on the road in front of some garbage cans. With Mr. Ellis on his back, one of the officers got down on his knees and began punching Mr. Ellis.
“Stop. Oh my god, stop hitting him. Just arrest him,” the witness called out in the video.
In a later clip, as she drove past the scene, video showed the officers asking Mr. Ellis to put his hands behind his back. The officers appeared to have Mr. Ellis subdued and on his side.
Detective Ed Troyer of the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department, which is handling the investigation, said Mr. Ellis at one point called out “I can’t breathe,” and the officers called for medical support.
‘Black Lives Matter’ is painted by city workers on the streets leading to the White House.
The city of Washington, D.C., which has sparred this week with the federal government over troops deployed onto the city’s streets, countered Friday morning by painting a two-block-long mural on the streets leading to the White House. “Black Lives Matter,” the mural reads, in yellow street paint that is likely to last well beyond this week’s protests.
Mayor Muriel Bowser also renamed 16th Street NW, just before the White House, “Black Lives Matter Plaza NW.”
The carefully choreographed scene unfolded as some city residents praised the mayor in her standoff with the federal government, while Black Lives Matter activists warned that the display was performative without more policy change.
Washington has been the site of fraught tension, including outside the White House, where the police fired tear gas canisters and flash grenades on protesters on Monday to clear out the way so President Trump could walk to St. John’s Church to pose for a photograph with a Bible. By Thursday, Mr. Trump, who had ordered military troops to Washington, agreed to begin sending some home.
As protests were marked by peace in recent days, Ms. Bowser said in a letter to the White House that she has ended the state of emergency in the city and asked for the withdrawal of all “extraordinary federal law enforcement” from the city’s streets.
Separately, the D.C. attorney general, Karl Racine, sent a letter to the Trump administration requesting information about the decision to bring in National Guards from other states.
With no governor or representation in the Senate, Washington has little power to push back on the federal government. A demonstration planned for Saturday in the nation’s capital is expected to be the largest yet.
The city’s Department of Public Works orchestrated the mural project, with city sanitation workers who had been downtown overnight cleaning up city streets staying off the clock to help paint it. A city official said the project was designed by muralists in the city, who have also lately been out of work.
The scene was a stark contrast to what was happening on the White House grounds Friday morning. Workers there have been busy erecting a metal fence, backed by concrete barriers, around the entire complex, stretching from Constitution Avenue to the north side of the White House half a mile away.
Maine’s governor asks Trump to ‘check his inflammatory rhetoric’ on visit.
Gov. Janet Mills of Maine, a Democrat, warned President Trump not to bring divisive language to the state ahead of his visit on Friday.
“As the individual responsible for the health and safety of Maine people, including those who support and do not support the President, I again ask the President to check his inflammatory rhetoric at the door and abandon the divisive language that sows seeds of distrust among our people,” Ms. Mills said in a statement on Thursday.
Earlier this week, the president threatened to send the American military to states where he said governors had not gotten protests under control. Mr. Trump, who also called protesters “terrorists,” blamed the destruction on the nation’s governors. “States have failed to take care of their citizens, like the young man in Dallas who was left dying on the street or the woman in upstate New York viciously attacked by thugs,” Mr. Trump said, recalling some of the violent incidents that angered him.
President Trump is expected to visit Bangor for a roundtable discussion on commercial fishing and tour Puritan Medical Products, which manufactures medical swabs, in Guildford.
The governor also said she hoped Mr. Trump would appeal to the best in all people and lead with courage and compassion.
Ms. Mills also said that those who are planning to gather, either in support of the president’s visit or in protest against, would do so with respect and safely amid the pandemic. The president’s planned visit follows days of protests over the death of George Floyd in the Maine cities of Bangor and Portland.
“Let us all remember during this time of high tension that, regardless of our various and differing political beliefs, we are all members of this Maine family,” Ms. Mills said.
A friend of Philando Castile’s is now running for office.
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody, John Thompson felt a familiar feeling.
“I still cry about Philando being murdered,” Mr. Thompson said. “Here I am now crying about George Floyd.”
Mr. Thompson was friends with Philando Castile, who was shot and killed by a police officer during a traffic stop in July 2016. The incident was captured on video by Mr. Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, who was in the car along with her 4-year-old daughter.
Back then, protests erupted across the country and Mr. Thompson, who met Mr. Castile at work, also took to the streets. The officer involved was acquitted in 2017.
In the nearly four years since Mr. Castile’s death, Mr. Thompson has become an activist and organizer. He has worked with local officials to push for police accountability, and he said he felt as if some progress was being made.
When Mr. Thompson became frustrated that change was not coming fast enough, he decided to run for office after his state representative announced he was retiring.
In our video above, we follow Mr. Thompson as he protests, reflects and considers the path forward.
Some troops amassed near Washington are returning to their bases.
President Trump moved on Thursday to begin sending home 82nd Airborne Division troops that he had ordered to Washington, amid a standoff with the Pentagon over the role of the armed forces in quelling protests that have broken out across the nation.
None of the active-duty forces had deployed in Washington, instead remaining on alert outside the city while National Guard troops took up position near the White House and elsewhere in the capital. But they became caught up in a confrontation pitting a commander in chief aiming to show strength in the face of street protests versus a military command resistant to being drawn into domestic law enforcement or election-year politics.
Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper initially tried to send home a small portion of the 1,600 active-duty troops on Wednesday, only to have Mr. Trump order him to reverse course. The president acquiesced on Thursday, however, according to an administration official who asked not to be named discussing internal deliberations, though it did not appear that the two men had spoken directly.
Listen to ‘The Daily’: The Stories of Five Protesters
“Hate killed Mr. Floyd,” one protester said. “This kind of conduct has been allowed for far too long against people of color. And enough is enough.”Mr. Esper ordered 700 airborne soldiers to return to Fort Bragg, N.C., by evening and a Pentagon official said the remaining 900 soldiers from the division and a military police unit from Fort Drum, N.Y., could begin withdrawing as early as Friday. More than 2,000 National Guard forces remain in Washington, a number that is set to climb to 4,500.
Yet what appeared to be an uneasy truce did not mean the conflict was over. While Mr. Trump’s advisers counseled him not to fire Mr. Esper, the president spent much of the day privately railing about the defense secretary, who along with Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, opposed the president’s desire to send regular troops into the nation’s cities.
Reporting was contributed by Emily Badger, Mike Baker, Peter Baker, Kim Barker, Katie Benner, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Julie Bosman, Julia Carmel, Emily Cochrane, Nick Corasaniti, Michael Crowley, Elizabeth Dias, John Eligon, Reid J. Epstein, Tess Felder, Thomas Fuller, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Erica L. Green, Shawn Hubler, Katie Glueck, Marc Santora, Anna Schaverien, Eric Schmitt, Neil Vigdor and Daniel Victor.
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