Thousands of people showed up over the weekend to protest the killing of George Floyd—the unarmed black man who died in police custody—in what were reported to be largely peaceful demonstrations, a departure from the violent attacks that unprovoked police have waged on protesters and journalists in recent days. The Washington Post reports a crowd of more than 10,000 people demonstrating throughout Washington, D.C. on Saturday, where police, allowing protesters to spread throughout the city, finally got tactics right. “Their freedom to roam, unimpeded by police, was by design,” the Post writes, noting that according to a city official, “almost all D.C. officers were working or on call” but “stayed away from demonstrators as much as possible.” Blocking off part of downtown from traffic “made it simpler for police to monitor the demonstrations and easier for protesters to get around,” the Post reports.
Visually, the Post adds, D.C. “no longer felt as if it was being occupied by its own country’s military,” with the retreat of “10-ton, sand-colored tankers in front of Lafayette Square and the legions of officers braced behind riot shields” who, in past days, had often screamed at protesters to keep their distance. As my colleague Eric Lutz wrote, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser demanded Donald Trump withdraw federal law enforcement and military presence from the city in a letter, citing such personnel as “inflaming demonstrators and adding to the grievances of those who, by and large, are peacefully protesting for change and for reforms to the racist and broken systems that are killing Black Americans.”
The mayor also had the words BLACK LIVES MATTER painted in giant yellow letters on the section of 16th street in front of the White House, an intersection she officially renamed “Black Lives Matter Plaza.” The gesture was criticized by Black Lives Matter DC as a “performative distraction from real policy changes … to appease white liberals while ignoring our demands. Black Lives Matter means defund the police,” the chapter wrote on Twitter. Protesters added “Defund the Police” to Bowser’s mural, something the mayor was asked about in a Sunday appearance on ABC’s The Week. Bowser refused to commit to whether or not she would remove the addition. “It’s not a part of the mural and we certainly encourage expression, but we are using the city streets for city art,” the mayor said. When pressed by ABC anchor Martha Raddatz, Bowser said she had not “had an opportunity to review it.”
Bowser addressed protestors on Saturday, per Deadline. “If you are like me, on Monday, you saw something that you hoped you would never see in the United States of America: Federal police moving on American people, peacefully protesting in front of the People’s House,” Bowser said, adding that “if he can take over Washington, D.C., he can come for any state and none of us will be safe. So today we pushed the Army away from our city. Our soldiers should not be treated that way, should not be asked to move on American citizens.”
And New York City marches were also said to have ended peacefully on Saturday, as the New York Times reports police allowing protesters to continue demonstrating well past the 8 p.m. curfew on Saturday, a regulation they had aggressively enforced, often with unprecedented violence, on recent nights. According to the Times, “there were no reports of major confrontations or mass arrests as of 1 a.m.,” and Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Sunday morning that “effective immediately,” the curfew, previously set to end at 5 a.m. on Monday, would be lifted. “Yesterday and last night we saw the very best of our city,” he wrote in a Twitter post.