Here’s what you need to know:
- Majority of the Minneapolis City Council pledges to dismantle the Police Department.
- Trump sends National Guard troops home.
- New York’s mayor pledges to cut police funding and spend more on social services.
- Democratic lawmakers push for accountability, but shy away from calls to defund the police.
- Barr says he sees no systemic racism in law enforcement.
- Romney joins protesters in Washington.
- Protesters march through Manhattan, calling for an end to police violence.
Majority of the Minneapolis City Council pledges to dismantle the Police Department.
Nine members — a veto-proof majority — of the Minneapolis City Council pledged on Sunday to dismantle the city’s Police Department, promising to create a new system of public safety in a city where law enforcement has long been accused of racism.
Saying that the city’s current policing system could not be reformed, the council members stood before hundreds of people who gathered late in the day on a grassy hill, and signed a pledge to begin the process of taking apart the Police Department as it now exists.
For activists who have been pushing for years for drastic changes to policing, the move represented a turning point that they hoped would lead to a complete transformation of public safety in the city.
“It shouldn’t have taken so much death to get us here,” Kandace Montgomery, the director of Black Vision, said from the stage at the rally. “We’re safer without armed, unaccountable patrols supported by the state hunting black people.”
The pledge in Minneapolis, where George Floyd died 13 days ago after being pinned to the ground by a white police officer’s knee, reflected calls across America to completely rethink what policing looks like. Protesters have taken to the streets with demands to shrink or abolish police departments, and “defund the police” has become a frequent rallying cry.
Officials in other cities, including New York, have begun to talk of diverting some money and responsibilities from police forces to social services agencies, but no other major city has yet gone as far as the Minneapolis officials promised to do.
Council members said in interviews on Sunday that they did not have specific plans to announce for what a new public safety system for the city would look like. They promised to develop plans by working with the community, and said they would draw on past studies, consent decrees and reforms to policing across the nation and the world.
Protesters who gathered at the rally, with a view of Powderhorn Lake, said what mattered most was that elected officials had finally committed to a sweeping overhaul of policing, even if they had yet to offer specifics for how such a dismantling would work.
“There needs to be change,” said Paola Lehman, a 23-year-old actor and educator in Minneapolis.
Though the City Council controls the police budget, the department answers to Mayor Jacob Frey, who can veto the council’s actions. Council members said they had enough votes to override a veto by Mr. Frey, who was booed out of a rally by hundreds of people on Saturday after he said he did not believe in abolishing the Police Department.
The pledge “signals a strong and clear direction about where this is going,” said Councilwoman Alondra Cano, the chair of the council’s Public Safety Committee.
Trump sends National Guard troops home.
President Trump said on Sunday that he had ordered National Guard troops to begin withdrawing from the nation’s capital, retreating after a week of relentless criticism over his threat to militarize the government’s response to nationwide protests — including criticism from within the military establishment.
Three former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff harshly condemned Mr. Trump on Sunday for sending troops to deal with domestic protests, and warned that the military risked losing credibility with the American people.
Announcing his order on Twitter, Mr. Trump said the National Guard soldiers would withdraw “now that everything is under perfect control.”
“They will be going home, but can quickly return, if needed,” he wrote. “Far fewer protesters showed up last night than anticipated!”
(In fact, the daylong protests in Washington on Saturday appeared to draw larger crowds than earlier rallies.)
The announcement capped a tumultuous week in which federal authorities violently cleared away peaceful protesters outside the White House to make way for a photo opportunity by Mr. Trump; National Guard helicopters flew low over demonstrators to scatter them; and active-duty troops were summoned to positions just outside the capital.
Those actions and a threat by the president to send the military into states to control protests over the death of a black man in police custody prompted unusually public dissent from former military leaders, and discord even in Mr. Trump’s administration.
On Sunday, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser of Washington called the Trump administration’s deployment of troops to the capital area “an invasion.” And the retired military commanders said the troops should never have been there in the first place.
“We have a military to fight our enemies, not our own people,” retired Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, who was the top military adviser to Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, told “Fox News Sunday.”
He said putting troops into domestic demonstrations risked the trust the Pentagon had worked to regain with the American people after the upheaval of the Vietnam War.
“In very short order, should we get into conflict in our own streets, there’s a very significant chance we could lose that trust that it’s taken us 50-plus years to restore,” Mr. Mullen said.
In a telephone call with reporters on Sunday, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy said about 5,000 National Guard troops in Washington would withdraw over the next three days because the protests had “become peaceful in nature.” About 1,200 troops from the District of Columbia National Guard will remain on duty “in the coming days,” he said, supporting civilian law enforcement.
On Saturday, The New York Times reported that Mr. McCarthy and other top Pentagon officials had ordered National Guard helicopters to use what they called “persistent presence” to disperse protests in the capital. The loosely worded order prompted a series of low-altitude maneuvers that human rights organizations quickly criticized as a show of force usually reserved for combat zones.
Officials said the Army had opened an investigation into the episode.
In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that the California National Guard would depart the city on Sunday evening.
New York’s mayor pledges to cut police funding and spend more on social services.
Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged on Sunday to cut the budget for the New York Police Department and spend more on social services in the city, following 10 nights of mass protests against police violence and mounting demands that he overhaul a department whose tactics have drawn widespread criticism.
It was the first time Mr. de Blasio has promised to cut the force’s budget, and it came as calls have intensified across the country to “defund the police,” a broad term that has included similar proposals to trim police budgets and redistribute the money to social programs.
The move was a reversal for Mr. de Blasio, who expressed skepticism about cutting police funding as recently as Friday. He did not specify which social services he wanted to spend more on.
He also declined to say precisely how much money he planned to divert from the Police Department, which has an annual budget of $6 billion, representing more than 6 percent of Mr. de Blasio’s proposed $90 billion city budget.
“We’re committed to seeing a shift of funding to youth services, to social services, that will happen literally in the course of the next three weeks, but I’m not going to go into detail because it is subject to negotiation, and we want to figure out what makes sense,” Mr. de Blasio said.
Many protesters and observers have accused the police of using unnecessarily violent tactics to enforce the city’s curfew, which began last Monday and was lifted Sunday.
The mayor of Boston, Marty Walsh, said in a televised interview on Sunday that his city should consider a similar reallocation of money now budgeted for policing.
Democratic lawmakers push for accountability, but shy away from calls to defund the police.
Democrats in Congress are preparing sweeping legislation that would make it easier to prosecute police misconduct and recover damages from officers found to have violated civil rights. But some architects of the bill are stopping short of explicitly embracing what many protesters across the country are demanding: to “defund the police.”
“I don’t believe that you should disband police departments,” Karen Bass, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said Sunday on the CNN program “State of the Union.” “But I do think that in cities and states, we need to look at how we are spending resources and invest more in our communities.”
The legislation, which is scheduled for formal release on Monday, would significantly change federal law and require states and municipalities to make modifications of their own, such as instituting mandatory bias training to qualify for federal funds, according to a draft summary obtained by The New York Times.
The bill would also create a national registry to track police misconduct, and it would ban certain chokeholds and other tactics that police officers have used in confrontations that left black Americans dead.
Protesters have embraced “defund the police” as a rallying cry, with some activists painting the phrase alongside the new yellow “Black Lives Matter” message on a street near the White House in the center of downtown Washington.
But what the cry means has not always been clear, with the term seeming to sweep in everything from trimming police budgets and redistributing the money to social programs, to completely abolishing police departments.
Alicia Garza, one of the activists who helped found the Black Lives Matter movement, explained the slogan as a call to examine how “we reorganize our priorities, so people don’t have to be in the streets during a national pandemic, a global pandemic.”
“I understand clearly the sentiment and substance behind the slogan,” said Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, though he added that “it’s not a slogan I will use.” Still, he warned against dismissing it outright.
Speaking on the NBC program “Meet the Press,” he reflected on his time as mayor of Newark, when police officers questioned why they were being used to deal with the “fragility and vulnerability of our society.”
“We are overpoliced as a society,” Mr. Booker said. “We are investing in police, which is not solving problems, but making them worse. We should be a more compassionate country, a more loving country.”
Barr says he sees no systemic racism in law enforcement.
Attorney General William P. Barr said on Sunday that he believed racism is not a systemic problem in policing, though there is racism more generally in the United States.
“I don’t think that the law enforcement system is systemically racist,” Mr. Barr said on the CBS program “Face the Nation.” “I think we have to recognize that for most of our history, our institutions were explicitly racist.”
Mr. Barr said that he understood why black people in the United States distrust law enforcement, given “the history in this country,” but said that he believed that work done since the 1960s to reform institutions more broadly to make sure they are in sync with laws that ban inequities “is working, and progress has been made.”
While Mr. Barr flatly denied there was systemic racism in policing, he later compared law enforcement to the military, which he said “used to be an explicitly racist institution.”
“Now I think it’s in the vanguard of bringing the races together and providing equal opportunity,” Mr. Barr said. “I think law enforcement has been going through the same process.
Mr. Barr’s comments mirrored those made on Sunday by Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Mr. Wolf said on the ABC program “This Week” that he did not believe “systemic racism” was an issue in American law enforcement, and that tragedies like the death of George Floyd were caused by individual officers abusing their power.
“I think painting law enforcement with the broad brush of systematic racism is really a disservice to the men and women who put on a badge, the uniform, every day — risk their lives every day to protect the American people,” Mr. Wolf said.
Mr. Barr said that he did not support any measures that would reduce the legal immunity police officers are given when someone dies in their custody, because that would “result certainly in police pulling back.”
Protests Over Racism and Police Violence
Protests have erupted in at least 140 cities across the United States in the days after George Floyd, a black man, died in police custody. Some of the demonstrations have turned violent, prompting the activation of the National Guard in at least 21 states.
Protests since Wednesday
National Guard activated
Seattle
WASH.
Portland
N.D.
MINN.
Eugene
Mich.
Minneapolis
Boston
WIS.
S.D.
St. Paul
Hartford
Salt Lake
City
New York
Reno
Cheyenne
Des Moines
Phila.
PA.
Neb.
Nev.
Chicago
OHIO
Lincoln
Oakland
Indianapolis
Washington
UTAH
Denver
COLO.
ILL.
Las Vegas
MO.
Lexington
Kansas City
CALIF.
Norfolk
KY.
Santa Fe
Tulsa
N.C.
Fayetteville
TENN.
Okla. City
L.A.
Columbia
Atlanta
Phoenix
Memphis
San Diego
Tucson
GA.
TEX.
Dallas
Jacksonville
Austin
New Orleans
Orlando
Honolulu
Anchorage
Houston
Tampa
FLA.
Miami
Seattle
WASH.
Great Falls
Portland
ME.
MONT.
N.D.
Eugene
MINN.
ORE.
Minneapolis
Boston
MICH.
S.D.
Buffalo
N.Y.
WIS.
Sioux Falls
Hartford
Detroit
WYO.
Madison
New York
Reno
Salt Lake City
Des Moines
Phila.
NEB.
PA.
Chicago
OHIO
NEV.
Lincoln
IND.
Oakland
Washington
Indianapolis
Denver
UTAH
Kansas City
Richmond
Fresno
COLO.
ILL.
VA.
Hampton
KAN.
MO.
Las Vegas
CALIF.
Lexington
Norfolk
KY.
Santa Fe
Tulsa
N.C.
Fayetteville
Memphis
TENN.
ARIZ.
L.A.
Okla. City
S.C.
OKLA.
Columbia
Atlanta
Albuquerque
Phoenix
San Diego
ARK.
N.M.
GA.
ALA.
Tucson
Dallas
Jacksonville
TEX.
LA.
Austin
New Orleans
Orlando
ALASKA
Honolulu
Houston
Tampa
Fla.
Anchorage
HAWAII
Miami
Romney joins protesters in Washington.
Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, marched with protesters in Washington toward the White House on Sunday, appearing to be the first Republican senator to join the thousands across the country protesting the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police.
Mr. Romney told a Washington Post reporter that he had joined the march to show that “we need to end violence and brutality, and to make sure that people understand that black lives matter.”
On Capitol Hill and on Twitter, Mr. Romney has been vocal in condemning the circumstances surrounding Mr. Floyd’s death, saying earlier in the week that “the George Floyd murder is abhorrent.”
He had also reflected how his father, George Romney, participated in a Civil Rights march in the 1960s when he was governor of Michigan, quoting him on Twitter and sharing a photo of him at the protest.
Several Republicans have been vocal in condemning the police officers who have ben charged in connection with Mr. Floyd’s death, but few have publicly joined protesters marching across the county.
Earlier in the week, Representative Will Hurd of Texas, the lone black Republican in the House, joined a peaceful protest, marching alongside his constituents and Mr. Floyd’s family.
“What we are showing you today in Houston is that we can be outraged by a black man getting murdered in police custody,” Mr. Hurd, who is retiring, said in a video on Twitter. “We can be united for change in our society, and we can be thankful that law enforcement is enabling our first amendment rights.”
Protesters march through Manhattan, calling for an end to police violence.
“All loud voices come to the front!”
That call from a woman leading the demonstration set thousands of protesters in motion on Sunday, marching through Manhattan from their assembly point in Union Square to protest police violence.
As they headed west on 14th Street, the protesters invoked the names of black people killed by police officers in Louisville and Minneapolis: “Breonna Taylor, say her name!” “Say his name, George Floyd!”
It was one of several marches and protests that are taking place across New York City on Sunday. Earlier, Mayor Bill de Blasio had announced that he was canceling the curfew that he imposed on Monday.
As of 7 p.m. on Sunday, there were no reports of major confrontations or mass arrests as the protests continued peacefully.
For Divya Gunasekaran, 31, who works in the technology division at a New York City hospital, the Union Square march was her sixth protest since Mr. Floyd was killed.
“The curfew never should have been put in place,” Ms. Gunasekaran said. “He’s patting himself on the back, but never acknowledged that the police have contributed to the violence we’ve seen during the protests.”
Ms. Gunasekaran said she had been calling and emailing members of the City Council, asking them to redirect money from policing to youth, health and homeless services.
“A lot of those programs have been completely slashed while the N.Y.P.D. has been untouched,” she said. “We need social services more than ever.”
Natasha Campbell, a medical assistant from East Flatbush, Brooklyn, emerged from an urgent care clinic on 14th Street wearing a white hazmat suit and an N95 mask. When she raised her fist in solidarity with the protesters, they erupted in cheers and applause.
Ms. Campbell, who is black, recalled being in the streets of her neighborhood in 2013 to protest the killing by police officers of a black teenager, Kimani Gray. Back then, the protesters were overwhelmingly black, she said. On Sunday, she marveled at the diversity of the marching crowd.
“Before, I was was so angry, seeing the video” of Mr. Floyd’s killing, she said. “But seeing everyone taking a stand — it’s not just black people. I feel warmth. I feel love. I feel unity.”
The protest reached Columbus Circle just before 4 p.m. As the demonstrators approached the Trump International Hotel and Tower there, they turned their anger to the president, yelling, “Vote him out!” The protesters collectively took a knee and raised their fists, observing a minute of silence before rising and marching up Central Park West.
Biden will meet with the family of George Floyd in Houston.
Joseph R. Biden Jr. plans to travel on Monday to Houston to meet with the family of George Floyd and offer his condolences.
Mr. Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, will also record a video message for Mr. Floyd’s funeral service on Tuesday, according to an aide. Mr. Biden is not expected to attend the service; given his Secret Service protection, there were concerns about the disruption his presence might create, according to people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Biden’s trip to Texas is his first beyond his home state of Delaware and nearby Philadelphia in almost three months. It comes as Mr. Biden seeks to draw a sharp contrast with President Trump over race, leadership and character at a moment of extraordinary national unrest.
Mr. Biden, the former vice president, has spoken out passionately about the need to heal racial divisions in the country, and he has pushed for several measures to overhaul policing.
He has also been sharply critical of Mr. Trump, who has tried to paint himself as a “law and order” president. Mr. Trump has called demonstrators “thugs” and “terrorists,” and threatened last week to deploy the military to overpower them.
The view from above: aerial images of protests across the country.
On the ground, the passion and determination driving thousands to take to the streets day after day are palpable. When viewed from above, the individual fades as the crowd comes into focus. Images from the 12th day of national protests offer a bird’s-eye view of the expressions of solidarity.
A Confederate statue is pulled down during a protest in Virginia.
A statue of a Confederate general was pulled down from its pedestal Saturday night during demonstrations in Richmond, Va., as monuments to the Confederacy continue to draw the ire of protesters who see them as enduring symbols of white supremacy.
The statue of William Carter Wickham, a cavalry commander, was erected in Monroe Park in 1891. Videos taken on Saturday night showed the statue, with ropes attached, lying on the ground near its pedestal, which was marked with graffiti.
It was not immediately clear whether the people who toppled the statue were protesters. Demonstrations at the park and throughout the city were otherwise peaceful, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported.
Confederate statues and monuments in Norfolk, Va., Raleigh, N.C., and Birmingham, Ala., among other places, have also been targeted. Some have been defaced, and protesters have tried to topple others.
Tensions over the monuments have run been particularly high in Richmond, which was the capital of the Confederacy. Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia said last week that the city’s Robert E. Lee statue would be removed, and Mayor Levar Stoney said he would propose an ordinance to remove several other monuments.
A Confederate statue in Alexandria, Va., that had been scheduled for removal next month was taken down last week.
Monuments to white supremacists have also attracted ire overseas. A statue of Edward Colson, a 17th century slave trader and politician, was toppled on Sunday by protesters in Bristol, England.
Global protests against racism gain momentum.
The global protests denouncing racism and police brutality showed no sign of slowing down this weekend, with crowds gathering on Sunday in Rome, London, Madrid, Barcelona and other cities.
Chanting “Black lives matter” and “No justice, no peace,” thousands of people swelled the Piazza del Popolo in Rome to protest racism in the United States and in Italy.
“As many of you know, there is a very serious problem with state-condoned violence” in the United States, Fatimah Provillon, a New Jersey native who has lived in Rome for 13 years, told the crowd of mostly young Italians. “But it’s not just a U.S. problem — it’s happening all over the world.”
Thousands of people filled the streets outside the U.S. Embassy in London on Sunday, chanting George Floyd’s name and “Black lives matter,” “Let us live” and “No justice, no peace.” And when the protesters took to their knees, a protest gesture often seen in anti-racism campaigns, cries were heard of “The U.K. is not innocent.”
“We came to protest the injustice of the justice system and the deaths and killings of black people everywhere,” said Iyanah Gordon, one of a group of 18-year-old friends from South London who were at the protest. “Injustices like George Floyd’s death happen here.”
Jamal Marcano, 23, from West London, said he had been stopped by the police recently because of racial profiling. “In the U.S. the racism is more blatant, in the U.K. it is more subtle,” he said.
London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, also offered support to the weekend’s demonstrations, writing on Twitter on Sunday: “Londoners of all ages, races and backgrounds joined millions of people around the world yesterday to come together peacefully. I stand with you.”
A few thousand protesters gathered on Sunday in Spain’s two largest cities — Madrid and Barcelona — chanting “I can’t breathe” and calling for an end to police racism. Those who gathered in Madrid did so in defiance of an order from the authorities, who have permitted gatherings only if they are limited to 200 participants because of the coronavirus.
The Madrid protest started near the U.S. embassy but soon spread, and turned instead into a march that ended at the Puerta del Sol, a main square in the heart of the Spanish capital. In Barcelona, about 3,000 demonstrators took over Sant Jaume square, home to the regional government and the city administration. Many held up photos of Mr. Floyd, as well as signs reading “Black Lives Matter” and “Black is Beautiful.”
In Rome, Karima 2G, an Italian singer of Liberian descent who hosted the protest, spoke of “solidarity with African-Americans” even as migrants from Africa struggle to get a footing in Italy and across Europe.
She said in interview later that she was pleased to see a big turnout in Italy, where children of residents of African descent are often not considered Italian.
“That’s a form of racism, too,” she said.
An officer shot an anti-bias expert who was trying to end a clash at a protest in San Jose, Calif.
A California man who has worked to help improve relations between the San Jose Police Department and people of color learned that he may not be able to have children after an officer shot him with a rubber bullet during a protest.
While attending a protest in San Jose on May 29, the man, Derrick Sanderlin, worked to prevent rising tensions and calm demonstrators and the police alike, he said in an interview this weekend.
After seeing officers shoot people with rubber bullets, he moved to stand between the officers and said he had asked them to stop. One video shows him with his hands up as officers appear to shoot at others behind him. Another video shows Mr. Sanderlin then being hit by one of the shots. He said that it had struck him in the groin and that he had to have emergency surgery.
Chief Eddie Garcia said in a statement that the San Jose Police Department would investigate.
Mr. Sanderlin, whom Chief Garcia called a “leader in our communities’ efforts to reduce bias and discrimination through dialogue,” has worked in recent years on training programs for the Police Department.
He said it did not appear that officers had embraced that training during the demonstrations.
“It’s like it all just sort of flew out the window,” Mr. Sanderlin said. “I’m frustrated.”
Reporting was contributed by Mike Baker, Katie Benner, Audra D.S. Burch, Helene Cooper, Kimiko de Freytas-Kamura, Tess Felder, Thomas M. Gibbons-Neff, Russell Goldman, Emily Cochrane, Isabella Grullon Paz, Lara Jakes, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Michael Levenson, Raphael Minder, Elisabetta Povoledo, Monika Pronczuk, Neil Reisner, Marc Santora, Anna Schaverien, Eric Schmitt, Dionne Searcey, Sabrina Tavernise, Marc Tracy, Anjali Tsui and Mihir Zaveri.
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