June 14 Black Lives Matter protests

Our live coverage of the anti-racist protests has moved here.

Four-star General Robert B. Abrams, who commands all US forces in South Korea, has just banned the Confederate Battle Flag or its depiction within USFK work places, public areas, building exteriors, on personnel or on vehicles in a statement released today.

General Abrams goes on to say that as the senior military officer assigned to Korea, and the Commander of ROK US Combined Forces Command, United Nations Command, and US Forces Korea, “it is within my authority and responsibility to take reasonable, necessary and lawful measures to protect people…to ensure good.”

The statement says that effective immediately, all commanders are directed to identify and ensure the removal or display of the Confederate Battle Flag.  

A protester carries an injured counter-protester to safety, near the Waterloo station during a Black Lives Matter protest in London, on June 13.

The black man seen carrying an injured white man to safety during a chaotic scene at protests in the UK capital London on Saturday told CNN he did it to avoid catastrophe.

The image of Patrick Hutchinson’s selfless act has now spread across the globe. Hutchinson told CNN Sunday it was the first Black Lives Matter protest he attended, and he helped the white man because he didn’t want the main reason for the protests to be lost in one moment of violence.

Protesters in London and all over the world have taken to the streets calling for police reform after the deaths of black people at the hands of police. These deaths most recently include George Floyd in Minneapolis and Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta.

“My real focus was on avoiding a catastrophe, all of a sudden the narrative changes into ‘Black Lives Matters, Youngsters Kill Protesters.’ That was the message we were trying to avoid,” Hutchinson said.

Read the full story here.

Black transgender activist Raquel Willis stood on the deck of the Brooklyn Museum on Sunday and led thousands of protesters in a chant.

“I believe in my power,” she said, as people in the crowd echoed the words back. “I believe in your power. I believe in our power. I believe in black trans power.”

The Black Trans Lives Matter rally in New York, one of many nationwide, came after two black trans women – Dominique “Rem’Mie” Fells, 27, of Philadelphia, and Riah Milton, 25, of Cincinnati, Ohio – were murdered last week. 

There have been 14 reported murders of trans and gender non-conforming people – including Fells and Milton – since the start of 2020, according to the Human Rights Campaign. But the number of deaths of trans people are likely undercounted, the Human Rights Campaign said in its report on anti-transgender violence in the US in 2019.

Sunday’s protest also took place amid global demonstrations in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has surged in the wake of George Floyd’s death. 

It also followed the Trump administration’s announcement that it is eliminating an Obama-era regulation prohibiting discrimination in health care against patients who are transgender.

Read the full story:

Thousands rallied outside Brooklyn Museum in New York to support trans rights on Sunday, June 14, 2020.

Related article Thousands show up for black trans people in nationwide protests

Peaceful protests in East Meadow, New York turned contentious Friday night when police were seen on video shoving a black protester to the ground.

A video of the protest went viral on Twitter Saturday and shows Terrel Tuosto of West Hempstead, a nearby town on Long Island, walking alongside Nassau County police officers.

Tuosto is told repeatedly by officers to “move to the side” of the street and he responds, “we’ve got this whole street.” Officers are seen in the video again telling Tuosto and other protesters to remain on the southbound side of the street, and Tuosto responds, “I have the right to walk where I want to walk.” 

Tuosto continues to walk before an officer appears to stop abruptly in front of him, causing Tuosto to bump into the officer.

The officers are then seen restraining Tuosto and shoving him into the ground, the video shows. Protesters can be heard on the video yelling at police officers, defending Tuosto by saying he isn’t resisting arrest.

A press release from Nassau County Executive Laura Curran and Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder said three protesters were arrested for disorderly conduct and said that police repeatedly made attempts to keep protesters away from moving lanes of traffic. 

“This safety precaution was met with strong opposition and resistance which resulted in the arrests of these subjects,” the release said, adding that the arrests come after days of peaceful protests with very few arrests. 

Ryder also provided an emailed statement to CNN, in which he said the county police “has provided security for thousands of people at over 80 mostly peaceful protests over the past two weeks.” He also said in the statement that the department supports free speech.

Tuosto confirmed to CNN that he is the person in the video and said he sustained injuries to his knee – which had recently been operated on – as well as his back and neck. He claims officers held him down with a knee on both his back and his neck. Officers charged him with disorderly conduct, Tuosto said.

In case you missed it earlier, San Francisco Mayor London Breed discussed reducing funding in the Police Department on CNN’s town hall on race. Though the idea has been around for years, it’s received growing support in recent weeks.

With the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police and nationwide protests demanding reform, Minneapolis officials have announced their intent to defund and disband the city’s police force altogether.

Following on from that, Breed said that officials in San Francisco did make an announcement that they were going to reduce funding in the Police Department and redirect that money specifically to the African American community.

Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser

When asked by a viewer how she navigates her leadership role alongside stereotypes often imposed on African-American women, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser said that she and the other mayors who joined CNN’s Town Hall need to “move forward together without all of the bravado and ego that sometimes comes in politics.”

Mayor Breed: “We roll up our sleeves and get to work”: San Francisco Mayor London Breed said the four mayors who joined CNN are all trying to lead and take care of their constituents in “an absence of federal leadership,” an apparent dig at President Donald Trump’s decision not embrace the role of a national unifier, as many of his predecessors have done.

She continued:

In a preview of an interview airing Monday on CBS This Morning, Tomika Miller, the wife of Rayshard Brooks says she wants the officers to go to jail.

When speaking of her husband, Miller said, “Rayshard Brooks is everybody. Just like George is everybody. We are all the people, we are all God’s children.”

“We should feel the pain of those who lost their life to senselessness over authority being taken way overboard,” she said.

Miller’s interview will air on Monday on CBS This Morning.

An autopsy report released on Sunday by the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office said Brooks was shot twice in the back.

The report says that he died from organ damage and blood loss from the two gunshot wounds.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed

Ami Relf, a resident of Bellwood, Illinois, lost her brother Reginald to Covid-19. He was 50 years old, and he was turned away from an urgent care facility before he died.

Relf asked the following:

Here’s how San Francisco Mayor London Breed responded:

During the early days of the pandemic, Breed said public officials put together an “equity team” that focused on outreach and education in communities unlikely to have access to good healthcare or testing – she mentioned by name the Tenderloin and Bay View-Hunter’s Point.

She said they provided educational resources in multiple languages and food for those who lost their jobs and may not have been eligible for unemployment benefits.

Protesters marching through downtown DC.

Protesters in Washington DC have shut down part of Interstate 395, a major highway in the nation’s capital.

The small group had continued to march through downtown DC. Some leaders said they were intending to take over a bridge or roads, but it was unclear if they have a specific one in mind. The area where they are marching remains reasonably empty, meaning the protest is not disrupting a lot of vehicular traffic.

Protesters march through a tunnel which leads to a highway in DC. 

March leaders emphasized to the demonstrators that it was going to be a peaceful protest telling them not to confront police.

Protesters in Washington have shut down part of Interstate 395, a major highway in the nation’s capital.

The city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, said her city is used to peaceful demonstrations and will support them.

Protests and the coronavirus: Bowser said city authorities are “very concerned,” however, about the possibility of the novel coronavirus spreading among protesters.

But Bowser also said it’s important that “we not just look to protests that we might be seeing spikes across the country.”

Bowser said that some spikes had predated the protests, including places that held big celebrations for Memorial Day at the end of May.

When asked about growing calls to defund police departments across the country, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said that it’s important to place more investment in marginalized and underrepresented communities, especially those of color.

“The status quo has failed everyone,” she said. “We have to do better to invest in communities and we should not be investing here and there based upon race or ethnicity,” she added.

Lightfoot said it’s clear that people across the country feel “that it is way past time that we invest in black and in brown communities; that we invest in a system that shrinks health care gaps; that we invest in a system that eliminates life expectancy gaps; that we make sure that we’ve got good healthy food choices; jobs that you can raise a family on; all the things that have been absent from communities, because we haven’t spent the time and the energy and the resources and focussed on them.”

What about San Francisco?

Mayor London Breed said in San Francisco, authorities are “going to reduce funding in the police department and redirect the money specifically to the African-American community.”

Read more about what the calls to defund the police mean:

TOPSHOT - A Police officer charges forward as people protest the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police in front of the White House in Washington, D.C. on May 31, 2020. - Thousands of National Guard troops patrolled major US cities after five consecutive nights of protests over racism and police brutality that boiled over into arson and looting, sending shock waves through the country. The death Monday of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, at the hands of police in Minneapolis ignited this latest wave of outrage in the US over law enforcement's repeated use of lethal force against African Americans -- this one like others before captured on cellphone video. (Photo by Samuel Corum / AFP) (Photo by SAMUEL CORUM/AFP via Getty Images)

Related article There's a growing call to defund the police. Here's what it means

Crystal Cornelius, an oil and gas analyst from Houston, asked Atlanta’s Mayor Bottoms the following:

Mayor Bottoms recalled a similar experience – she said that her husband was detained for shoplifting while he was browsing in a store while wearing a hoodie.

She said in Atlanta that up until Friday – when Rayshard Brooks was shot and killed by police – “I thought we were doing it right.”

“We have implicit bias training in this city. We require people to go to the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. We have housing for our police officers in many of our communities in which they are serving in. But yet, still it is not enough.”

Bottoms said police departments may not be able to train their way out of the situation, because the biases are still there.

The first question in CNN’s Town Hall was asked by Bre Gamble, whose partner, Javier Ambler, died while being arrested last year.

The video of Ambler’s arrest was only released recently.

Here’s what Gamble asked:

Here’s how some of the mayors answered:

Mayor Bowser of Washington:

Mayor Breed of San Francisco:

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms told CNN since a police officer shot and killed 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, it has been “really been difficult for me to put aside my own anger and sadness during this time and really be able to articulate what our communities need to hear, because the reality is that, what can you say?”

Bottoms said in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, officials in Atlanta had convened an advisory committee to look at police use of force later – just three days before Brooks was killed.

CNN’s Mayors who Matter: A CNN Town Hall on Race and Covid-19 has begun.

Four black female mayors are joining. They are:

Protesters attempted to march onto the Interstate 85/75 connector in Atlanta Sunday, video from CNN affiliate WGCL shows. 

Protesters gathered outside the Wendy’s where Rayshard Brooks was fatally shot by police Friday. A group of demonstrators are seen walking onto the highway near the fast food outlet and chanting at oncoming traffic. 

At least one officer is seen trying to get the group off the road, WGCL video shows. 

Moments later, the crowd begins to run away from the highway and someone on a megaphone yells “tear gas,” according to WGCL video. It is not clear from the video whether tear gas was used. 

A group of men carry an injured man away after he was allegedly attacked by some of the crowd of protesters, as police try to intervene on the Southbank near Waterloo station in London on June 13.

Patrick Hutchinson, the Black Lives Matter protester seen in the viral image carrying an injured white man to safety during protests Saturday in the UK capital London, has told CNN that he would like to see “equality for all races and people.”

In an interview with CNN on Sunday, Hutchinson said that when he saw the man, lying on the stairs in a fetal position surrounded by protesters he know he had to do something. CNN has not been able to identify the man or independently verify what he was doing at the protest before the incident.

Hutchinson said that he and his friends formed a cordon around the man, allowing Hutchinson to scoop him up to take him directly to the police. Adding that while they were marching, the man could still feel people trying to hit him.

“I am carrying him, my friends are protecting myself and the man on my shoulder. He was still receiving blows, you can feel people trying to hit him,” he said. “There were people trying to protect him at the same time carried him over to the police and I said here you are. One of them said ‘thank you – you did a good thing there.’”

Hutchinson said that this was his first Black Lives Matter protest he has attended as “history was in the making,” adding that it was a “no brainer” to support what is happening.

Hutchinson said he would like to break down the race barriers and for people to realize, “we are all one race.”

Atlanta police are looking for the people responsible for starting the fire at Wendy’s Saturday night during protests over the death of Rayshard Brooks, who was fatally shot by police in the parking lot of the fast food restaurant on Friday night.

People walk around Seattle's Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone on Sunday, June 14.

The area around Seattle’s downtown precinct is now occupied by protesters, some of whom are calling it the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ.

Police boarded up the East Precinct building in the Capitol Hill neighborhood and left it unoccupied during protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The mood inside CHAZ is joyous. It’s like a block party or festival for much of the day with parties and performance art at night and in the early morning.

Every day there’s more infrastructure – including medics, guards at the barricades, a “No Cop Co-Op” that’s giving away vegetables, a hot dog truck, and a booth offering free supplies that have been donated.

Protesters have also hung signs on the East Precinct, some of which read “Seattle People Department” and “The Property of the People,” according to CNN affiliate KOMO.

People have pitched tents in Cal Anderson Park.

In the park, some people have created gardens and are planting crops. Couches have been used to create a “conversation corner,” where people can talk about racism, Black Lives Matter and other topics.

Most people wear masks during the day. But at night, a lot come off. People burn sage and incense. 

Protesters in the area plan to stay as long as it takes to affect change, according to KOMO. Many said they want to defund the police department.

In a news conference on Wednesday, Assistant Police Chief Deanna Nollette said officers are still responding to emergency calls in the area. Nollette said police had received reports that protesters allegedly set up barricades, “with some armed individuals running them as checkpoints into the neighborhood.”