George Floyd’s memorial gives way to a 10th night of protests. UPDATES

Hundreds gather for George Floyd memorial in Minneapolis

After 10 tumultuous days across the United States, hundreds of people gathered at a private memorial service Thursday afternoon in Minneapolis for George Floyd, whose death in police custody has sparked widespread protests against police violence and systemic racism.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, president of the civil rights organization National Action Network, took the stand at the service to call Floyd’s death emblematic of the oppression black Americans have faced since the nation’s founding.

“George Floyd’s story has been the story of black folks,” Sharpton said. “What happened to Floyd happens every day in this country — in education, in health services and in every area of American life. It’s time for us to stand up in George’s name and say, ’Get your knee off our necks.’ ”

 

Mourners of all races — African American, white, Latino, Asian and Native American — gathered to show support for Floyd’s family. The ceremony in Minneapolis kicks off a four-day “celebration of life” touching all of the places Floyd called home. Additional services are planned in North Carolina and Houston over the coming days.

A somber and defiant memorial for George Floyd in Minneapolis gave way to a 10th night of protests on Thursday as thousands of demonstrators again poured into the nation’s streets, crowding outside City Hall in Seattle and marching across the Brooklyn Bridge.

The tone at many protests on Thursday was largely mournful, after more than a week of crowds burning with grief and anger over the death of Mr. Floyd and other black Americans whose deaths have spurred calls for criminal justice reform.

 

Fueling the anguish on Thursday, an investigator in the death of Ahmaud Arbery, a black man who was fatally shot while being chased by three white neighbors in suburban Georgia, said that one of the suspects had used a racial slur after the shooting.

The developments came as officials from Louisville, Ky., to Seattle have been lifting nightly curfews, after protests there had become largely peaceful in recent days.

• New York: Crowds gathered Thursday outside Gracie Mansion, the Upper East Side mayoral residence, and snarled traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, ahead of a nightly curfew that will remain in effect until June 8. [Follow our live coverage of the protests in New York.]
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• Nashville: The Black Lives Matter movement held a protest at the Bicentennial Mall. Demonstrators marched to the National Museum of African American Music, which is scheduled to open later this year. The procession made its way to the state capitol.
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• Boston: In Jamaica Plain, a silent vigil was held on Thursday afternoon to protest racial injustice. The city’s mayor, Marty Walsh, led a moment of silence for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, which was how long the Minneapolis police order charged in the killing of George Floyd kept his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck.
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• Washington: Mayor Muriel Bowser said there would be no curfew on Thursday night, despite President Trump encouraging shows of force from the military and law enforcement to crack down on protesters,
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• Santa Monica, Calif.: In Los Angeles County, a nightly curfew that had been widely criticized was lifted on Thursday. The decision came after more than 3,000 people had been arrested in the nation’s second-largest city since the protests began last week. Most of the arrests were for curfew violations, with offenders issued citations and released. There were demonstrations in several places in the county, including Santa Monica.
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• Salt Lake City: A man who pointed a bow and arrow at demonstrators and brandished a knife during a protest last week was charged with two felony weapons counts and one count of aggravated assault, the county’s district attorney said. The man, Brandon McCormick, drove his car into the crowd and said, “Yes, I’m American. All lives matter,” a video of the altercation showed. The crowd beat him up and set his car ablaze.

• In his most extensive comments on the civil unrest gripping the country, Attorney General William P. Barr defended law enforcement’s aggressive, militaristic response to protests while acknowledging the “long-standing” concerns with police that were exposed by the death of Floyd.

• President Trump’s former chief of staff John F. Kelly defended former defense secretary Jim Mattis on Thursday over Mattis’s criticism of the president’s handling of nationwide protests. Kelly also dismissed Trump’s assertion that the president fired the retired general in 2018.
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• In a major break with Trump, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) said Thursday that she is struggling with her support for her fellow Republican president and praised Mattis for a statement in which he sharply criticized Trump.

New US unemployment claims reached 1.9m last week despite rate of increase slowing

• ‘The figures are so high that it’s hard to grasp the reality’
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• New filings down for ninth consecutive week
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• Another 1.9 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week as the total number of claims passed 42 million since the coronavirus pandemic hit the US.The pace of layoffs has slowed dramatically from its peak of 6.6m at the start of April as states start to relax quarantine orders and last week was the ninth consecutive week of declines. But the scale of layoffs remains staggeringly high. In the worst week of the last recession “just” 665,000 people filed for unemployment.Jason Reed, professor of finance at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, said the numbers may be coming down, but “this is unprecedented. The figures are so high that it’s hard to grasp the reality.”

Two Buffalo police officers are suspended after shoving a protester.

Two Buffalo police officers 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 authorities said.

Mayor Byron Brown said the man was in serious but stable condition. A video showed the man motionless on the ground and bleeding from his right ear.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York condemned the actions of the officers in a statement late Thursday night.

As coronavirus took jobs or workers fell ill, teen children have toiled full-time, becoming lifelines

As the pandemic took jobs or workers fell ill, teens have toiled full time, becoming lifelines

With parents in quarantine or unemployed, teens have had to forgo schooling to become family breadwinners, working jobs in grocery and big-box stores and keeping links in the nation’s food supply intact while eschewing almost everything about being a teenager.

Few police and a relaxed atmosphere at a Brooklyn vigil.

People assembling for a 7 p.m. Black Lives Matter vigil at McCarren Park in Brooklyn were almost indistinguishable from regular parkgoers, until an air horn and a round of applause on a plaza between two ball fields signaled the start — and suddenly hundreds of people who had been lounging on the grass, playing catch and listening to reggae from a sound system on a vintage school bus turned to face a small band of speakers and organizers.

“This seems more chill,” Emily Engle, 26, of Bushwick said before the start of the vigil as she sat on a park bench. She wanted a relaxed gathering, she said, after seeing the mayhem firsthand in SoHo on Sunday night. “We felt the rage,” Engle said. She didn’t condemn it, or its connection to what became a night of looting that led to a citywide curfew. “It’s an important time to take physical action because it’s easy to just post something online,” Engle said. But she added that it’s “a tough question” of how far to take it.

The McCarren vigil seemed unlikely to test limits. There was virtually no visible police presence, a fact one speaker, a woman, referenced in call-and-response opening remarks delivered through a bullhorn to a predominantly white crowd.

“We acknowledge our privilege to assemble without police violence,” she said. Demonstrators then knelt or sat for 30 minutes of silence, which fell over the park.

 

Manhattan judge denies Legal Aid request to free hundreds of George Floyd protesters held more than 24 hours

A Manhattan judge sided with police on Thursday by denying Legal Aid lawyers’ request for the immediate release of hundreds of prisoners held in custody for days after their arrest amid George Floyd protests.

The emergency lawsuit filed Tuesday against the NYPD called for the release of 108 New Yorkers “detained illegally” in violation of New York state’s 24-hour arrest-to-arraignment requirement.

As of the Thursday afternoon hearing, the number of people arrested in Manhattan who have been waiting to see a judge in cramped cells for more than 24 hours had climbed to 202, according to an NYPD lawyer.

After lengthy arguments from Legal Aid and city lawyers — who all appeared via video — Manhattan Supreme Court Judge James Burke denied the request, saying the police processing of the cases is “a crisis within a crisis."

Burke elaborated, saying he saw “a civil unrest crisis within the overarching Covid-19 crisis.”

"To that end, the entire police department has been deployed and the entire Manhattan DA’s office is, quote, all hands on deck and working to relieve the problems which we are currently addressing,” Burke said.

“It is simply a fact that virtual parts [remote hearings] slow down the pace of arraignments, including but not limited to technical issues," Burke said. He also noted that the volume of cases before the courts and police has increased.

This male is arrested on the corner of W. 14th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan on Tuesday, June 2. (Sam Costanza/for New York Daily News)

Burke said in this case, an exception the 24-hour rule could be made because of the unusual circumstances.

[More New York] 14-year-old boy pleads guilty to robbery in connection to Tessa Majors’ murder, prosecutors drop murder charge »

 

Legal Aid Society lawyers said they’d monitor the situation and would appeal “if necessary.”

“We are also disheartened, however, because the overwhelming number of people held illegally are those accused of charges that should have resulted in their automatic release,” the society said in a statement.

"Motivations aside, the NYPD is fully responsible for the hundreds of New Yorkers who are currently languishing in cages, deprived of their due process rights and at an increased risk of contracting COVID-19.”

[More New York] MTA pulls newest subway cars after two trains come unhitched in tunnel while carrying passengers »

 

Social distancing is nearly impossible in holding cells, NYPD Assistant Deputy Commissioner Janine Gilbert said in court. “But I might add that these protesters are not social distancing when they’re out in the street,” she said.

There are many disorderly people — looters and rioters — who are fighting with the police, throwing bottles at the police, throwing Molotov cocktails at their vehicles, setting several ablaze, throwing flaming garbage and Molotov cocktails at vehicles with officers inside them.”

The NYPD said cops have provided masks to suspects not wearing them when they were arrested, but said there is no hand sanitizer dispensers in holding cells as prisoners were making weapons out of them.

Senior staff attorney for Legal Aid Marlen Suyapa Bodden lambasted the NYPD’s narrative, claiming the NYPD has ample resources to handle the caseload and is delaying the processing on purpose.

“They have 38,000 police officers, so they have plenty of police officers to do their policing work. The fact is, the police department is not doing its job,” she said.

"The NYPD is one of the wealthiest police departments in the world. They have access to the best technology and that’s why they can run around surveilling people, wiretapping people, doing all sorts of things.

“But now, when it comes to processing protesters, people who are asserting their First Amendment rights, oh, all of a sudden, because they’re protesting police brutality, now we’re back to the days of carrier pigeon.” 

VOX

Rubber bullets can seriously mess you up

The dangers of “nonlethal” police weapons — like rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades, and tear gas — explained.

Around the country, police and law enforcement agents are responding to the protests against police brutality with ... brutality.

Standard crowd-control weapons — including rubber bullets, chemical irritants, flash-bang grenades, and contraptions that combine aspects of all three — are being deployed against protesters and the journalists covering them to disperse crowds, sometimes seemingly unprovoked, and against peaceful protesters.

While these riot-control weapons are said to be “nonlethal” or “less lethal” by police and their manufacturers, they can still cause significant harm. In some cases, they can kill or cause lasting disability.

“These weapons are supposed to be used as a last resort, if there’s really an uncontrollable level of violence that threatens public safety,” Rohini Haar, an emergency room physician who has studied the impact of crowd-control weapons, tells Vox. “Without that level, that threshold, the use of weapons against unarmed civilians is pretty unjustified.”

Here are three of the more common crowd-control weapons being used on protesters. Let’s walk through them.

Rubber bullets are bullets. Bullets can kill.

Rubber bullets are not always made out of rubber. Technically, they are called “kinetic impact projectiles.” Some are made out of hardened foam or plastic. Others contain a metal core. Some are more like beanbags shot out of a rifle. Wooden bullets also are grouped into this category, and they are also dangerous and have been used against protesters in recent days.

Regardless of their composition, these projectiles are shot out of guns at speeds comparable to that of a typical bullet, and when they hit their target, they can maim, blind, or even kill. The rubber bullets are meant to be “nonlethal” or “less lethal” and used in crowd control. But research shows how brutal these bullets can be.

“It sounds like a Nerf gun or something, but it’s definitely much more dangerous than that,” Haar says. “From our research, we find that there’s really no safe way to use rubber bullets.” The group found 26 studies on the use of rubber bullets around the world, documenting a total of 1,984 injuries. Fifteen percent of the injuries resulted in permanent disability; 3 percent resulted in death. When the injuries were to the eyes, they overwhelmingly (84.2 percent) resulted in blindness.

These weapons can also cause internal bleeding in the abdominal region, concussions, injuries to the head and neck, and skin and soft-tissue damage. Furthermore, these weapons are unwieldy and hard to aim at specific targets.

“At short range, they come out of the gun as fast as a bullet,” Haar says. “And so they can break bones. They can fracture skulls. If they hit the face, they can cause permanent damage and disability. At long distances, they ricochet, they have unpredicted trajectories, they bounce, and they’re quite indiscriminate. So they can’t possibly target either an individual or a safe body part of an individual.”

Flash-bangs, a.k.a. stun grenades, can burn and damage hearing

Rubber bullets are hardly the only problematic “nonlethal” weapon used against protesters. Flash-bang grenades, or stun grenades, are another tool being deployed by police that explode with a bright light and incredibly loud sound to get people to scatter from an area. How loud? 160 to 180 decibels, according to Physicians for Human Rights.

These noise levels are “not safe for any period of time” according to the American Speech-Language Hearing Association. They can damage the eardrums and cause temporary deafness. The light can temporarily blind a person. Pieces of the grenade may fly off as shrapnel, injuring a person. These grenades can also burn people at close range. The North Carolina Supreme Court has even declared them a weapon of “mass death and destruction.”

Tear gas is illegal in warfare, yet it can be used by police

Finally, there’s tear gas, or chemical irritants that affect the eyes, nose, mouth, lungs, and skin (there are several types of chemicals that fall under the “tear gas” category). These chemicals are banned internationally in warfare, yet they are still legal for domestic police forces — including in the US — to use to disperse crowds.

They cause immediate irritation to the eyes and lungs, but their long-term effects are less well understood.

“It’s still questionable what kinds of respiratory damage tear gas does,” Anna Feigenbaum, a journalism professor and the author of a book on the history of tear gas, told Vox’s Jen Kirby.

“We don’t really know what its impacts are in terms of different kinds of asthma and lung disease,” she continued. “What we do know is that for people who have any kind of preconditions, it’s incredibly dangerous for them to be in spaces that are tear-gassed. For anyone who’s very young or very old, it has increased dangers.”

Putin’s Favorite Ex-Congressman Dana Rohrabacher Is Now Pitching a Cure for COVID

Former Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) has booked his first lobbying client, a company promising a COVID-19 cure and led by a California businessman who’s been collaborating with Rudy Giuliani on a documentary on Joe Biden and Ukraine.

The company, Linear Therapies, is seeking to develop drugs that can both prevent people from getting the virus and cure them if they do. And Rohrbacher’s role is pretty simple: use his political connections to pitch Vice President Mike Pence’s office, which is playing a leading role on the White House coronavirus task force.

But while Linear is one of many companies turning to K Street for help to pitch its COVID remedies to federal legislators and regulators, the cast of characters behind it—from Giuliani to Rohrabacher to Tim Yale, the Orange County Republican who leads the company—makes it a notable entrant in an industry where political connections can mean a financial windfall.

Yale said Rohrabacher’s tenure on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, as well as his particular “network of skills,” made him a natural advocate for the company.
Rohrabacher began plotting his move to K Street just weeks after he was defeated in 2018 at the hands of Democrat Harley Rouda. In February 2019, less than a month after leaving office, Rohrabacher’s new firm, R&B Strategies, signed its first client, a Kuwait-based company fighting what it says is that country’s political prosecution of one of its Russian-born executives.

During his thirty years in Congress, Rohrabacher had a quixotic reputation and ideological streak. He was ahead of the curve in his advocacy for medical cannabis, and though Linear was incorporated on 4/20 this year, Yale told PAY DIRT that it’s not doing any work in that space.

Rohrabacher also had a famously friendly relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin, so friendly in fact that the FBI warned the congressman in 2012 that the Kremlin considered him a potential intelligence source. In 2017, he attempted to broker a deal whereby the U.S. would pardon Assange in exchange for evidence that Russia was not, in fact, behind the hacking of Democratic email accounts during the 2016 presidential election.

China, Iran hackers are targeting presidential campaigns, Google says

The company said the efforts so far to hack staffers’ Gmail accounts have failed.

By Matt Viser, Josh Dawsey and Ellen Nakashima ●  Read more »

y Robert Klemko ●  Read more »

 

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Protesters Hail New Charges Against Police but Seek Broader Change

Minnesota officials charged three more former police officers on Wednesday in the death of George Floyd and added an upgraded charge against the former officer who pressed his knee to Mr. Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes.

From coast to coast, protesters had a consistent reaction to the announcement: It’s great news, they said — and it’s not nearly enough. There need to be convictions. There needs to be systemic change.

“I think it’s going to be a really long fight, not just in Minnesota but in cities around the country,” said Izzy Smith, an educator from the South Side of Minneapolis who was among those demonstrating at the site where Mr. Floyd was arrested last month.

 Some protesters expressed disappointment that action against the other officers was not taken sooner.

“It’s about damn time,” said Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights lawyer and protest organizer in Minneapolis. If not for the outrage that had rocked the country, she said, “these officers never would’ve been charged.”

Riot police descend on a crowd in Brooklyn.

For more than two hours on Wednesday night, hundreds of protesters marched through Downtown Brooklyn peacefully, with cyclists helping to direct traffic and organizers calming anyone who tried to confront the police.

The group stopped at courthouses and chanted for justice, altering their path to avoid a direct confrontations with officers who could be seen in the distance blocking access to the Manhattan Bridge.

It was 8:45 p.m., almost an hour past curfew, when the group marched to Cadman Plaza.

A single line of riot police confronted the crowd, which numbered in the hundreds, at Cadman and Tillary Street. The protesters stood peacefully, their hands up, chanting for justice.

Behind them, police cars swarmed in and hundreds of officers in riot gear poured onto the plaza. By the time organizers tried to turn the protesters around to leave, they were surrounded.

At around 9 p.m., officers holding shields and batons moved in from all sides. The protesters, tense but composed, held up their hands. “Don’t shoot,” they chanted

The standoff quickly devolved into chaos as officers began to pushing the crowd backward out of the plaza and into another line of police. Swinging their batons, they struck one woman on the knee. A young man’s head bled profusely after he was hit. His hands shook as he reached for the back of his skull, and saw how bloody it was.

Two nurses and a medic tugged the injured people to the edges of the crowd, seeking shelter in a small groove of a concrete building as the police advanced. One woman began to lose consciousness, and her friends called desperately for an ambulance.

Then the police surged again.

The protesters screamed that people were bleeding and needed help, but the officers did not acknowledge them and began to swinging their batons again. They struck protesters and shoved them around, sending the young man with the bleeding head to the ground.

The police continued to push through the plaza, and scuffles broke out as protesters fell backward. A downpour started, and the protesters who were left cleared out in seconds.

 

By 9:20 p.m., the plaza was empty.

Ali Watkins

 

✔@AliWatkins

 

 

More later, but this is a moment after cops, unprompted as far as I can tell, charged protestors, including a sheltered group of nurses and medics trying to tend to bleeding, injured people who got struck by batons. They had just called an ambulance.

 

 

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9:31 PM - Jun 3, 2020

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Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, posted a video that showed the police moving protesters off the plaza forcefully, with some officers doing so with shoves and batons.

“I can’t believe what I just witnessed & experienced,” he wrote on Twitter. “The force used on nonviolent protesters was disgusting. No looting/no fires. Chants of ‘peaceful protest.’”

Jumaane Williams

 

✔@JumaaneWilliams

 

 

I can't believe what I just witnessed & experienced. The force used on nonviolent protestors was disgusting. No looting/no fires.Chants of "peaceful protest"@NYPDnews was simply enforcing
an ill advised curfew
What happened was completely avoidable

I'm so ashamed of @NYCMayor

 

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Many protesters defied the curfew, and the police made dozens of arrests.

As a citywide curfew fell on New York Wednesday for a third night, large numbers of protesters flouted the requirement that they clear the streets by 8 p.m. Defiance of the curfew had increased since Tuesday, when several large groups continued to demonstrate long past the deadline.

The crowds in Brooklyn and Manhattan who were demonstrating against police brutality and systemic racism on Wednesday were bigger. And the police were quicker to enforce the clampdown than they had been before, moving swiftly to disperse demonstrators from rainy city streets and to arrest those who failed to clear out.

In Downtown Brooklyn, officers hemmed in demonstrators on Cadman Plaza, then charged at them with seemingly little provocation, according to New York Times reporters at the scene.

In Manhattan’s East Midtown area, officers shoved protesters onto sidewalks and arrested those who would not disperse.

Terence A. Monahan, the Police Department’s chief of department, explained the tough approach while speaking to reporters in Midtown. “When we have these big crowds, especially in this area, especially where we’ve had the looting, no more tolerance,” he said. “They have to be off the street. An 8 o’clock curfew — we gave them to 9 o’clock. And there was no indication that they were going to leave these streets.”

The police’s approach appeared to be even more robust that the one they employed on Tuesday, when they managed to tamp down the kind of looting and vandalism that broke out in Manhattan and parts of the Bronx on Sunday and Monday.

As of 9:30 p.m., Chief Monahan said, no looting had been reported in the city.

“This is love”: New Yorkers found solace and solidarity in Wednesday gatherings.

Rallies across the city during the afternoon and early evening were once again mostly by calm gatherings of New Yorkers clamoring for change.

Demonstrators in Long Island City, Queens; on Roosevelt Island; in Crown Heights, Brooklyn; and on Staten Island preached peace, used silence to drive home the depths of their pain and brought along young family members in tow to hear the calls for justice.

Roughly 200 people assembled in Queensbridge Park, forming ragged concentric circles for a 7 p.m. vigil. The protesters took a knee and chanted the names of black people who had died in police custody, including George Floyd, whose killing in police custody in Minneapolis touched off the protests in New York and elsewhere.

Then, much like at Gracie Mansion miles away, the Queens group fell silent.

“If you are hurting, say, ‘Yeah!’” a woman shouted after the silence ended. The crowd roared in response.

Today’s Activism: Spontaneous, Leaderless, but Not Without Aim

Welcome to 21st-century activism, where social media is the strongest organizer. At the core is an egalitarian spirit, a belief that everyone’s voice matters.

Spontaneous and leaderless movements have been defined by their organic births and guided on the fly by people whose preferences, motivations and ideas may not always align.

But the absence of organized leadership does not mean the movements — from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter — are rudderless.

Leveraging technology that was unavailable to earlier generations, the activists of today have a digital playbook. Often, it begins with an injustice captured on video and posted to social media. Demonstrations are hastily arranged, hashtags are created and before long, thousands have joined the cause.At the core is an egalitarian spirit, a belief that everyone has a voice, and that everyone’s voice matters. 

But leaderless movements have their challenges.

It can be difficult to keep protests from spilling out of control, and difficult to maintain a clear and focused message. Disputes over the best strategies can easily emerge.

“I think it is detrimental that we lack that kind of structure, organization,” said Dame Jasmine Hughes, 33, standing at a makeshift memorial for Mr. Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis police officer pinned Mr. Floyd’s neck to the ground with his left knee for nearly nine minutes.

“Organizations show power,” Ms. Hughes continued. “There’s power in clarity. There’s power in structure, especially when people are hurting.”

Though organized structure might be loose, traditional civil rights groups, churches and newly minted activist organizations have provided guidance and tactical and practical support to activists around the country.

Carmen Means, a pastor who has led a mostly online congregation since 2015 and is the director of the Central Area Neighborhood Development Organization in Minneapolis, said her congregants helped set up a memorial for Mr. Floyd. They have received food donations and they turned a nearby building into a food bank, where there was recently a long line of residents.

And she has led discussions outside Cup Foods — the corner store near where the fatal encounter between Mr. Floyd and the police took place — where people talked about how Mr. Floyd’s death has affected them.

“They were weeping,” she said. “You could see the trauma that was in their eyes.”

More than emotional support, Pastor Means and her fellow activists also try to help strategize the demonstrators’ next moves.

 

She said she has convened daily meetings for “strategic thinking, planning because we understand that this is not a sprint. This is a marathon, right?”

“We do tell them that it is their right to protest and be angry. That’s something courageous,” said Shanene Herbert, a member of Pastor Means’s congregation who helps youth in the community.

“But we want them to understand what their rights are,” added Keeya Allen, another congregant. “Understand that they have a life to live. So it’s not about, are you going to die for the cause? Or are you going to live for the cause every day?”

 

These days, social media is the strongest, most prominent leader. Young activists announce the location of an action or protest on Twitter or Instagram, and within an hour, scores of people are there.

“I think it kind of does make it hard to manage because you don’t know who’s coming,” said Maryan Farasle, a 17-year-old high school senior who lives in the Minneapolis suburbs and is an activist organizer. “You don’t know the people showing up and what their intentions are.”

But at the same time, she added, “I think it is a way to get a lot of people together quickly.”

The young generation of activists also uses social media to police one another and help keep everyone safe. On Thursday night, after protesters set fire to the Third Police Precinct headquarters in Minneapolis, one Twitter user warned people to leave the area.

Tensions on the streets in Minneapolis and elsewhere have simmered in recent days, amid a tough law enforcement crackdown and passionate pleas from Mr. Floyd’s family to keep the peace.

But today’s young activists also avoid singular leaders. “We’ve seen what happens to people in the past when they’re the lead of anything,” Ms. Farasle said, referring to civil rights leaders who have been slain.

Tay Anderson, a 21-year-old organizer in Denver, has found himself facing that danger — and walking a tightrope.

As the protests in Denver tipped into violence and vandalism, he spoke out against looting and rioting while police officers shot projectiles and launched tear gas at the crowd. He once helped negotiate a stand-down with officers to defuse tensions, and some activists accused him of working with the police, he said.

After days of speaking through a megaphone to sign-waving crowds about police killings and systemic racism, Mr. Anderson said that chilling online messages forced him to pull back from the crowds on Monday.

He was doing online searches of his name to fact-check news articles that quoted him when Google’s “related searches” showed a disturbing list: “Tay Anderson shot.” “Tay Anderson shot in head.” “Tay Anderson shot in back of head.”

Minneapolis police release personnel files on the four officers charged.

The Minneapolis Police Department late Wednesday released 235 pages of personnel records for the four former officers charged in George Floyd’s killing on May 25, all of whom were fired after video of his death emerged the next day.

 

Three of the officers, Thomas Lane, 37, J. Alexander Kueng, 26, and Tou Thao, 34, were charged on Wednesday with aiding and abetting second-degree murder, court records show. Mr. Kueng was in custody on Wednesday. The authorities said they were in the process of arresting Mr. Lane and Mr. Thao.

The fourth officer, Derek Chauvin, 44, who was arrested last week, now faces an increased charge of second-degree murder.

Many of the pages of the personnel files were heavily redacted, but they revealed details of the officers’ lives before joining the department and during their time on the force.

Derek M. Chauvin

Mr. Chauvin appears to have been reprimanded and possibly suspended after a woman complained in 2007 that he needlessly removed her from her car, searched her and put her into the back of a squad car for driving 10 miles an hour over the speed limit

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Mr. Chauvin was the subject of at least 17 misconduct complaints over two decades, but the woman’s complaint is the only one detailed in 79 pages of his heavily redacted personnel file. The file shows that the complaint was upheld and that Mr. Chauvin was issued a letter of reprimand.

“Officer did not have to remove complainant from car, Could’ve conducted interview outside the vehicle,” read the investigators’ finding.

In one part of the records, the discipline imposed is listed as “letter of reprimand,” but Mr. Chauvin was also issued a “notice of suspension” in May 2008, just after the investigation into the complaint ended, that lists the same internal affairs case number.

 

In applying to the Minneapolis Police Department, Mr. Chauvin said he had served as a member of the U.S. Army, working for a time as a member of the military police. He also said he had worked as a security guard and as a cook for McDonald’s.

J. Alexander Kueng

Mr. Kueng had been an officer with the department for less than six months. He joined the force as a cadet in February 2019 and became an officer on Dec. 10, 2019, his personnel records show. He had previously worked as a community service officer with the department while he earned his bachelor’s degree in sociology at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

He also worked as a security guard at a Macy’s and stocked shelves at a Target, and graduated from Minneapolis’s Patrick Henry High School in 2012.

Otherwise, most of his personnel file was blacked out, including basic details like whether he had a driver’s license, whether he lived in Minneapolis.

Thomas K. Lane

Mr. Lane did not graduate from high school, his files shows, but he went on to get his G.E.D., then an associate degree from Century College, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota in criminology.

He was accepted to the police academy in January 2019 but started working in the criminal justice system in 2017 as a probation officer. Mr. Lane previously worked a series of different jobs, from restaurant server to Home Depot sales associate. He volunteered at Ka Joog tutoring, working with Somali youth in Cedar Riverside.

Tou Thao

Mr. Thao held jobs at McDonald’s, at a grocery store as a stocker and as a security guard before being hired in 2008 as a community service officer in Minneapolis. But he worked there less than two years before being laid off in late 2009 because of budget cuts. Almost two years later, in 2011, he was recalled, then hired as a police officer in 2012.

Mr. Thao graduated in 2004 from Fridley High School and attended North Hennepin Community College, where he studied for an associate degree in law enforcement but never graduated, according to his file.

Mr. Floyd had the coronavirus weeks before his death, an autopsy report shows.

George Floyd had the coronavirus in early April, nearly two months before he died, according to a full autopsy released by the Hennepin County medical examiner on Wednesday.

 

Dr. Michael Baden, a former New York City medical examiner who was among two doctors who conducted a private autopsy for Mr. Floyd’s family last week, said county officials did not tell him that Mr. Floyd had tested positive for Covid-19.

“The funeral director wasn’t told, and we weren’t told, and now a lot of people are running around trying to get tested,” Dr. Baden said. “If you do the autopsy and it’s positive for the coronavirus, it’s usual to tell everyone who is going to be in touch with the body. There would have been more care.”

The four police officers who arrested Mr. Floyd should also get tested, as should some of the witnesses, Dr. Baden said. “I’m not angry,” he said. “But there should have been more care.”

Dr. Baden said the full autopsy included information he did not have access to, such as the toxicology results showing Mr. Floyd had fentanyl in his system.

Lawrence Kobilinsky, a forensics expert at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said he was struck by the difference between the county’s official autopsy and the results of Dr. Baden’s private autopsy. The county’s report does not refer to any hemorrhaging near the carotid, as the private autopsy did.

Mr. Kobilinsky said defense lawyers could make a point of the amount of fentanyl in Mr. Floyd’s body. Although the amount required to be lethal varies from person to person, fentanyl can stop a person’s heart and breathing, he said. “It’s high enough where a defense attorney would argue that this kind of predisposes him to heart failure, when you are on a drug like this,” he said.

Dr. Baden acknowledged that the amount of fentanyl in Mr. Floyd’s body was “considerable,” which would be particularly important if he had never used the drug before.

“He has enough that could be a cause of death if he had never had immunity or tolerance to the drug,” Dr. Baden said. But there was nothing in the full autopsy that made him change his medical opinion. “Restraint is what caused the death,” he said.

‘He tries to divide us.’ Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis offers sharp critique of President Trump.

Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, in his harshest criticism of the president since he resigned in protest in December 2018 over Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from eastern Syria, offered a withering criticism on Wednesday of the president’s leadership.

 

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try,” Mr. Mattis said in a statement. “Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership.”

The statement came hours after the current Defense Secretary, Mark T. Esper, said he did not think the current state of unrest in U.S. cities warranted the deployment of active-duty troops to confront protesters. Mr. Esper’s comments directly contradicted President Trump, who has repeatedly raised the possibility of the Insurrection Act to do exactly that.

A man in Vallejo, Calif., was kneeling when he was fatally shot by a police officer.

A police officer in the Bay Area shot and killed a kneeling man after mistaking a hammer in the man’s pocket for a gun, the authorities said on Wednesday.

The shooting, which took place in Vallejo, Calif., early Tuesday, further incensed residents who have been protesting the death of George Floyd.

The man, Sean Monterrosa, who was Hispanic, was trying to flee a Walgreens that was being looted early Tuesday, said the city’s police chief, Shawny Williams. Mr. Monterrosa, 22, a San Francisco resident, ran toward a car that had earlier rammed into a police cruiser and injured a different officer, Chief Williams said.

Mr. Monterrosa appeared to be running toward the car “but suddenly stopped, taking a kneeling position and placing his hands above his waist, revealing what appeared to be the butt of a handgun,” the chief said. “Investigations later revealed that the weapon was a long, 15-inch hammer.” Chief Williams said the officer, whom he did not name, believed that Mr. Monterrosa posed a danger.

“Due to this perceived threat, one officer fired his weapon five times from within the police vehicle through the windshield” he said. Mr. Monterrosa was hit once and died.

The Solano County District Attorney’s Office and the Vallejo Police Department are conducting criminal investigations into the use of deadly force by the officer.

 

‘Winning a conviction will be hard,’ the Minnesota attorney general says.

Minnesota’s attorney general Keith Ellison asked the public for patience and cautioned that history showed the challenges of prosecuting police officers.

“Trying this case will not be an easy thing,” he said. “Winning a conviction will be hard.”

In Minnesota, second-degree murder requires prosecutors to prove either that Mr. Chauvin intended to kill Mr. Floyd or that he did so while committing another felony. A court filing indicated that prosecutors planned to take the latter approach. Third-degree murder does not require an intent to kill, according to the Minnesota statute, only that the perpetrator caused someone’s death in a dangerous act “without regard for human life.”

Under Minnesota law, second-degree murder comes with a maximum sentence of 40 years in prison, and accomplices can be eligible for the same penalties as the primary defendant.

But if they are convicted, it is likely that the officers could get far less than that, under standard sentencing guidelines that suggest the equivalent of 12 years in prison for the typical second-degree murder case, said Richard Frase, a professor of criminal law at the University of Minnesota.