Here’s what you need to know:
- Minneapolis to ban the use of chokeholds in response to George Floyd’s death.
- 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.
- Democrats pillory Trump for saying today is a ‘great day' for George Floyd.
- Facebook said it removed accounts of hate groups urging followers to infiltrate protests.
- On Breonna Taylor’s birthday, social media users raise the visibility of her case.
- Two Buffalo police officers are suspended after injuring a protester.
Minneapolis to ban the use of chokeholds in response to George Floyd’s death.
Minneapolis officials announced an agreement to immediately ban the use of chokeholds and strangleholds on Friday, in a move meant to bolster accountability within a police department that uses force against African-Americans far more often than against white residents.
Officials also announced a duty for officers to intervene and report any use of unauthorized force, according to an agreement between city and state officials.
The agreement comes after nearly two weeks of protests over the death of George Floyd, a black man who was pinned under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer for nearly nine minutes, including after Mr. Floyd fell unresponsive. The officer faces a charge of murder, and three other officers on the scene were charged with aiding and abetting the killing.
“George Floyd’s service yesterday underscored that justice for George requires more than accountability for the man who killed him — it requires accountability from elected leadership to deep, structural reforms,” Mayor Jacob Frey said in a statement.
The manual of the Minneapolis Police Department previously stated that neck restraints and chokeholds were basically reserved for life-or-death situations for officers, a threat that was not apparent during Mr. Floyd’s detention.
Under the agreement with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, the Minneapolis Police Department must also comply with an ongoing civil rights investigation and can only use force to control protest crowds with the approval of the chief of police. After approval by a county judge, the terms of the agreement will be enforceable by the court.
The Minneapolis ban came as use of force policies are being re-examined across the country. Earlier this week, Colorado introduced legislation to ban the use of chokeholds by law enforcement, and on Friday, California Governor Gavin Newsom called for the removal of neck restraints from the state’s police training programs, saying that such tactics have “no place any longer in 21st century policing and practices.”
The Los Angeles Police Department banned the use of neck restraints in 1982 after 16 deaths in police custody in seven years were attributed to choke holds. Illinois, Colorado and California have also passed laws restricting the use of the tactic.
But various types of neck restraint remain within policy in many departments, even in states where its misuse has been a problem. For example, in Sacramento, Calif., where video surfaced over the weekend of police using a neck restraint on a suspected looter, the tactic is still regarded by law enforcement as a permissible use of force.
The use of neck restraints have come under intense scrutiny after high-profile deaths, including the death of Eric Garner at the hands of the New York Police Department in 2014. The New York Police Department has banned chokeholds since the 1990s, but some officers still use them, and investigators determined that the officer who wrestled Mr. Garner to the ground was using a banned chokehold.
Mr. Garner famously gasped “I can’t breathe” 11 times while lying facedown on the sidewalk, a sentence that Mr. Floyd also said several times.
Elsewhere, Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Tuesday urged passage of legislation aimed at minimizing the use of lethal police force and New Jersey’s attorney general said the state will update its use-of-force guidelines for the first time in two decades. In Maryland, a bipartisan work group of state lawmakers last week announced a police reform work group.
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 police 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.
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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.”
Democrats pillory Trump for saying today is a ‘great day' for George Floyd.
President Trump was pilloried by Democrats on Friday for declaring during a speech on the economy that it was “great day” 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 drew immediate condemnation from former vice president Joseph R. Biden, the president’s Democratic challenger. “George Floyd’s last words: ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe’ have echoed all across this nation and frankly around the world,” Mr. Biden said in a speech on Friday. “And for the president to try to put any other words in the mouth of George Floyd I frankly think is despicable.”
Mr. Biden said that Mr. Floyd “was brutally killed by an act of needless violence and by a larger tide of injustice that has metastasized on this president’s watch as he’s moved to split us based on race and religion, ethnicity.”
The president’s 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.”
Mr. Trump’s comments on Mr. Floyd were delivered 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.”
But his comments drew outrage from those who were appalled 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 Mr. Biden Jr., 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.
Facebook said it removed accounts of hate groups urging followers to infiltrate protests.
Facebook said on Friday that it had removed nearly 200 social media accounts connected to far-right hate groups that had tried to rally followers to infiltrate the George Floyd protests.
The social network said it removed 80 Facebook accounts and 50 Instagram accounts associated with the white supremacist group American Guard, and 30 Facebook accounts and 30 Instagram accounts linked to the Proud Boys, another hate group.
Both groups had previously been banned from the company’s networks, but such bans are hard to enforce because new accounts can crop up — often under aliases — as quickly as old ones are removed. Facebook said the two groups had re-emerged on social media and were calling for people to join protests against racism and police violence, sometimes with weapons.
“These groups were planning to rally supporters and members to physically go on the ground to the protests, in some cases preparing to go with weapons,” Brian Fishman, Facebook’s director for counterterrorism and dangerous organizations, said on a call with reporters.
Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, said the site had also removed a third batch of accounts that included those of users masquerading as members of Antifa, the loose-knit, far-left antifascism activist movement.
Mr. Gleicher said that third group of accounts was linked to an account that Twitter took down on Monday, a move reported earlier by NBC News. The owner of that account posed as an Antifa member aiming to incite violence during the protests.
Facebook said it had not seen foreign interference on its site related to the protests, even as its security teams were actively scouring the social network for signs of meddling. Attorney General William P. Barr had said on Thursday that the federal government had seen evidence of “foreign actors playing all sides to exacerbate the violence.”
On Breonna Taylor’s birthday, social media users raise the visibility of her case.
While the death of George Floyd has unleashed a wave of protests across the country, fury over the police killing of Breonna Taylor, an African-American emergency room technician, in Louisville, Ky., in March continues to grow.
On Friday, what would have been Ms. Taylor’s 27th birthday, people on Twitter used the hashtag #SayHerName to remember her and raise awareness about her case.
“Her life was tragically taken by police and we will not stop marching for justice until it’s served for her and her family. #SayHerName,” Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, said on Friday.
Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California, said on Twitter that Ms. Taylor’s life was “horrifically” taken by officers who had not been charged 84 days after her killing. “Keep up the calls for justice. #SayHerName,” Ms. Harris said.
Shortly after midnight on March 13, Louisville police, executing a search warrant, used a battering ram to crash into Ms. Taylor’s apartment. Her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who has said he was worried someone was breaking into the apartment, shot and wounded an officer. The officers then returned fire and shot Taylor at least eight times.
The “Say Her Name” movement also brings awareness to other black women who have died at the hands of police officers, but whose stories may not have garnered as much national attention, including Tanisha Anderson and Atatiana Jefferson.
“Say Her Name attempts to make the death of black women an active part of this conversation, by saying their names,” Kimberlé Crenshaw, an activist and creator of the hashtag, told ABC on Friday. “If black lives really do matter, all black lives have to matter. That means black lives across gender have to be lifted up.”
Two Buffalo police officers are suspended after injuring a protester.
Prosecutors are investigating the actions of two Buffalo police officers who were suspended without pay on Thursday night after a video showed them shoving a 75-year-old protester, who was hospitalized with a head injury.
The video taken by WBFO, a local radio station, shows the man, identified on Friday as Martin Gugino, approaching a group of officers during a protest stemming from the death of George Floyd. He was identified by the Western New York Peace Center, a nonprofit that said in a Facebook post that he was a member and a peace activist.
After the video shows Mr. Gugino stopping in front of the officers to talk, an officer yells “push him back” three times; one officer pushes his arm into Mr. Gugino’s chest, while another extends his baton toward him with both hands. Mr. Gugino flails backward, landing just out of range of the camera, with blood immediately leaking from his right ear.
An officer leans down to examine him, the video shows, but another then pulls the first officer away. Several others are seen walking by him, motionless on the ground, without checking on him.
On Friday, the Erie County district attorney’s office said in a statement that prosecutors were investigating the incident. It said Mr. Gugino was unable to provide a statement to investigators on Thursday night at the Erie County Medical Center, where he was taken for treatment for the head injury.
He was still in serious but stable condition on Friday, the Erie County executive, Mark Poloncarz, wrote on Twitter. He said an official at the medical center told him that Mr. Gugino was “alert and oriented.”
The video added to a growing body of recordings from across the nation that showed officers responding to protests against police violence with more police violence. Fury among online supporters of the protests was heightened by the Police Department’s initial claim that Mr. Gugino “tripped and fell,” a description at direct odds with the video. A police spokesman could not be reached on Friday.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York condemned the officers’ conduct late Thursday. “The incident in Buffalo is wholly unjustified and utterly disgraceful,” Mr. Cuomo said in a statement. “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 Guard troops from other states. It is not clear what legal authority Mr. Trump has to deploy Guard units from other states to Washington.
Ms. Bowser said in a letter to the White House on Thursday 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.
“I have ended the state of emergency in the District of Columbia related to demonstrations,” Ms. Bowser wrote. “Therefore, I am requesting that you withdraw all extraordinary federal law enforcement and military presence.”
Mr. Trump said on Twitter on Friday that he would “bring in a different group of men and women” to the city. He said that Ms. Bowser was “fighting with the National Guard.”
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.
New York City police are surrounding peaceful protesters to arrest them, not allowing them to disperse.
New York City police officers have resorted repeatedly to the tactic of “kettling” peaceful after-curfew demonstrators in recent days, penning them in even when they offer to disperse, and then charging them to make arrests, often using force in the process.
That approach, witnessed several times by reporters around the city and attested to by protesters, marks a more aggressive approach by the Police Department and has produced hundreds of arrests at a time. Demonstrators say it has abetted the use of excess force by officers in the past week, which has sparked a political backlash against the department and Mayor Bill di Blasio.
On Wednesday night, about 45 minutes after the city’s 8 p.m. curfew, hundreds of peaceful protest marchers in downtown Brooklyn encountered a formation of officers in riot gear. Minutes later, they tried to retreat, only to find that the police had formed another human barricade behind them. They were surrounded.
Officers charged the demonstrators, many of the officers swinging batons, as the scene turned into a melee.
In the Bronx on Thursday night, officers began surrounding a group of demonstrators before the curfew began, and started making arrests by 8:02 p.m.
The tactic of penning crowds in can be used to defuse tension, with officers allowing people to leave a few at a time. Instead, the New York police have used it as a way to prevent people from leaving and facilitate mass arrests.
Mr. di Blasio and Police Commissioner Dermot F. Shea have called kettling necessary to deter looters who ransacked parts of Manhattan over the weekend, but since Monday, protests have gone off with far less violence and destruction.
“I don’t want to see protesters hemmed in if they don’t need to be,” the mayor said in an interview on WNYC radio on Friday. But he added “that sometimes there’s a legitimate problem and it’s not visible to protesters.
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.
Reporting was contributed by Davey Alba, 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, Matt Furber, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Katie Glueck, Erica L. Green, Christine Hauser, Shawn Hubler, Thomas Kaplan, Sarah Mervosh, Katie Rogers, Marc Santora, Anna Schaverien, Eric Schmitt, Derrick Taylor, Neil Vigdor and Daniel Victor.
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