US police used flashbang grenades, pepper spray and tear gas as protesters marched in cities across the country amid a wave of public anger over US President Donald Trump’s planned “surge” of federal agents into major metropolises.
The demonstrations against racism and police brutality — sparked by the death in Minneapolis, Minnesota, of unarmed African-American George Floyd on May 25 — come as the US president faces an increasingly tough battle for re-election, and is campaigning heavily on a platform of “law and order.”
Protesters marched in Austin, Texas, as well as Louisville, Kentucky; New York City; Omaha, Nebraska; Oakland and Los Angeles in California; and Richmond, Virginia — where riot police fired chemical agents at a Black Lives Matter march, US media reported.
Photo: AFP
In Seattle, the sounds of repeated small detonations rang out in some streets, and smoke rose from an area where demonstrators had set fire to trailers by a construction site for a youth detention facility, an Agence France-Presse reporter saw.
Protesters slashed car tires and smashed trailer windows.
Police in riot gear faced off against the protestors, some holding umbrellas against falling pellets of pepper spray.
Seattle police late on Saturday said 45 people were arrested in connection with the demonstrations, which they designated a riot, according to the force’s Twitter account.
Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best implored people to “come in peace to the city,” and castigated the demonstrations.
“The rioters had no regard for the community’s safety, for officers’ safety or for the businesses and property that they destroyed,” local media reported her as saying.
The latest violence came after police and federal agents fired tear gas and forcefully dispersed protesters further south in Portland, Oregon, early on Saturday, also in anger over Trump’s heavily criticized surge of security forces.
The city has seen nightly protests against racism and police brutality for nearly two months, initially sparked by Floyd’s death.
Saturday’s demonstration began peacefully, with crowds playing music and dancing, blowing soap bubbles and attaching red roses to the barricades, but it ended with tear gas fired after protestors attached ropes to barricades surrounding the city’s courthouse in an attempt to pull them down.
Portland police declared the area a riot, ordering protestors to leave, before they were joined by federal officers to clear the area.
The inspector general of the US Department of Justice on Thursday opened an official investigation into the federal crackdown, but an Oregon federal judge on Friday rejected a legal bid by the state to stop agents from detaining protestors.
Trump last week announced a “surge” of federal agents to crime hotspots including Chicago, following an increase in violence in the nation’s third-largest city.
Agents deployed there would partner with local law enforcement, not riot control forces as seen in Portland.
Local officials have said that they would draw the line at any Portland-style deployment.
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