In Seattle, police said protesters set fire to a construction site for a juvenile detention facility. In Portland, protesters broached a federal courthouse.
SEATTLE — Protests in several major cities across the country turned violent this weekend, as weeks of civil unrest and clashes between activists and authorities boiled over, sending thousands of people teeming into public squares demanding racial justice.
From Los Angeles, to Richmond, to Omaha, police and protesters clashed in another tumultuous night that saw scores arrested after demonstrators took the streets and police in some cities dispersed crowds with tear gas and pepper spray.
In Austin, a man was shot and killed in the midst of a downtown rally. In Richmond, a truck was set ablaze outside police headquarters. Outside of Denver, a Jeep sped through a phalanx of people marching down an Interstate, when a shot was fired injuring a protestor, police said.
The focal point of the protests continued to be in the Pacific Northwest, where a week of clashes between activists and federal agents in Portland, Ore. pumped new energy into a movement that began in the wake of George Floyd’s death in police custody in Minneapolis over Memorial Day weekend.
In Portland, the authorities declared a riot after protesters breached a fence surrounding the city’s federal courthouse building. The “violent conduct of people downtown” created a “grave rise of public alarm,” the Portland police wrote on Twitter.
Early Sunday morning, federal agents and local police demanded that protesters leave the area and used teargas to try to disperse them. But the activists stood their ground, blocking intersections. Several people were arrested.
A Marriott hotel in downtown Portland was shut down Sunday morning, and guests were asked to leave after hundreds of protesters demonstrated outside Saturday night because it was believed that federal agents were staying there. The crowd waved signs with messages such as “No more brutality!” as they stood on the riverside parkway outside the hotel and chanted: “Kick them out, Marriott!” A manager at the hotel said after the demonstration that the building had sustained some “minor damage,” including graffiti on exterior walls.
In Seattle, police declared a riot on Saturday afternoon and used pepper spray and flash grenades in an attempt to disperse a crowd of roughly 2,000 people in the Capitol Hill neighborhood marching in the city’s largest Black Lives Matter protest in more than a month.
Nightly protests since Floyd’s killing had dwindled in recent weeks in Seattle. But they were reinvigorated in the wake of federal action in the Portland protests and after Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, tweeted that President Trump had sent federal law enforcement agents to the city.
“For a month, the President threatened to send federal forces to ‘clean up’ Seattle. The President has made good on his threats in Portland, and continues to exacerbate the situation on the ground, endanger communities, and jeopardize the work of local officials,” Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, a Democrat, said Wednesday in a statement. “The President unilaterally deploying paramilitary-type forces into American cities should concern all Americans. His blatant disregard for the constitution – and for the safety and well-being of our residents – is textbook despotism.”
Portland’s Democratic Mayor Ted Wheeler, who was teargassed last week as he joined protesters, has described the agents an “occupying force.
