The killing of unarmed African-American man George Floyd by police has triggered the worst rioting seen in the US since the 1960s.
Floyd died last week after a police officer knelt on his neck during an arrest in Minnesota over an alleged fake $20 bill. Demonstrations, some of them violent, reached a crescendo this weekend.
• In the past six days, protests have taken place in 75 cities • Across the US, more than 4,400 people were arrested this weekend. Outside the White House, “police fired tear gas and stun grenades into a crowd of more than 1,000 chanting protesters”, the Associated Press reports.• More than 5,000 members of the National Guard, the US military reserve, have been “activated” in at least 18 states• Curfews have been imposed in 40 states, “but people have largely ignored them, leading to tense stand-offs”, says the BBC• As Floyd’s death causes outrage in other countries, a protest in London’s Trafalgar Square yesterday saw 23 people arrested “for a series of offences including breaches to coronavirus legislation”, CNN reports.
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Many of the protesters wore the slogan “I can’t breathe”, the phrase Floyd repeated in the moments before he died on Monday 25 May (Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty)
The day after the killing, protests began outside Hennepin County Government Plaza in central Minneapolis. The demonstrations started peacefully but soon turned violent. (Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty)
As tensions grew, riot police were drafted in to Minneapolis and several other US cities (Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty)
On Thursday, the third night of protests, a police precinct building in the southeast of Minneapolis was set on fire (Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty)
Police had fled the building before the fire took hold (Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty)
After the rioting began, the National Guard was mobilised in an attempt to restore order (Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty)
... but protests have continued. Here, a man is helped by fellow demonstrators after inhaling tear gas (Stephen Maturen/Getty)
Tear gas was also fired in Detroit, and in many other cities across the US (Seth Herald/AFP/Getty)
In Washington D.C., Donald Trump was briefly taken to a secure bunker on Friday night as protests outside the White House raged out of control (Eric Baradat/AFP/Getty)
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