After Minneapolis police used exorbitant amounts of tear gas to break up hundreds of protesters rallying in the name of George Floyd, an unarmed black resident who was killed by a police officer on Memorial Day, protesters across the country returned on Wednesday with a vengeance. Chaos boiled over in the streets of Minneapolis, where hundreds more protesters gathered and clashes with police intensified. On the same night, a peaceful protest was held in Memphis, where demonstrators chanted “no justice, no peace” and held signs memorializing Floyd, but were ultimately broken up by riot police. In Los Angeles, demonstrators stopped traffic on the 101 Freeway, where one person suffered injuries during the protest.
The Minneapolis chief of police swiftly fired the four officers who were at the scene of Floyd’s death, which occurred outside a deli after cops were called in on a forgery suspicion, and which was recorded in a now viral video. But no arrests have been made. The FBI is investigating the incident, and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey has called it “wrong at every level,” adding, “Being black in America should not be a death sentence.”
The Minneapolis protest received the most national attention, as the night’s devolving chaos resulted in buildings set on fire, looting stores, and one shooting death after a pawnshop owner allegedly opened fire on a purported looter, according to the Star Tribune. “The facts of what led up to the shooting are still being sorted out,” said a Minneapolis police spokesperson. “We are truly in the infancy of this investigation.”
Floyd’s death marked a boiling point in America after weeks of sustained racist and violent incidents, several of which were record on cell phones and spread far and wide on social media. In the seven-minute clip of Floyd’s detainment, the 46-year-old can be heard saying, “I can’t breathe…please stop.” In what has been described as a “modern-day lynching,” Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old unarmed black man, was shot multiple times and killed in late February after a white father and son armed themselves after seeing him jogging in their Georgia suburb and chased him down in their truck. The case initially received little media attention and was nearly swept under the rug by local authorities until a video of the shooting, taken by one of the men pursuing Arbery, was released and caught fire on social media. On March 13, Breonna Taylor, a black Louisville EMT, was shot at least eight times by police and killed in her Kentucky home after officers used a “no-knock” search warrant to ram her door down in the middle of the night, even though the suspect they were looking for had been arrested hours prior. There is no video of the shooting, as none of the involved officers were wearing body cameras, but the reported facts alone have caused a national uproar.
In another viral incident, Christian Cooper, a black man who was bird-watching in Central Park on Memorial Day, was threatened by Amy Cooper, an unrelated white woman, after he requested that she follow the park’s rules and use a leash to walk her dog. “I’m taking a picture and calling the cops. I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life,” the woman said in a video of the incident filmed by Christian Cooper, who explained that he recorded the exchange because “we live in an era with things like Ahmaud Arbery, where black men are seen as targets. This woman thought she could exploit that to her advantage, and I wasn’t having it.”