U.S. Protests Continue as Unions Pledge to Join

Date: 07 September 2020 - 22:07

News ID: ۸۲۵۶۰

PORTLAND, Ore. (Dispatches) -- Police arrested another 15 people in Portland after protests were held overnight on Sunday near a police precinct as the Oregon city has crossed 100 days of demonstrations that have at times turned violent.
Protesters set fire on some mattresses that were put out eventually by firefighters, Portland police said in a statement.
The police said there were no injuries, adding they arrested 15 people on charges like interfering with a peace officer, disorderly conduct, possession of a dangerous device and reckless burning.
The development came a night after Portland police arrested 59 people and used tear gas late on Saturday as protesters threw rocks and fire bombs at officers.
Portland has seen nightly protests for over three months that have at times turned into violent clashes between demonstrators and officers, as well as between right- and left-wing groups.
Demonstrations erupted around the United States following the death in May of George Floyd, a Black man, after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.
President Donald Trump signed a memo on Wednesday that threatens to cut federal funding to "lawless” cities, including Portland. His Democratic challenger in the Nov. 3 presidential election, Joe Biden, has accused Trump of stoking violence with his rhetoric.
The vast majority of the thousands of Black Lives Matter protests this summer have been peaceful, with more than 93% involving no serious harm to people or damage to property, according to a new report tracking political violence in the United States.
But the U.S. government has taken a "heavy-handed approach” to the demonstrations, with authorities using force "more often than not” when they are present, the report found.
And there has been a troubling trend of violence and armed intimidation by individual actors, including dozens of car-ramming attacks targeting demonstrators across the country.
The results of the study present a stark contrast to claims made by the Trump administration, and widely circulated by Fox

News and other rightwing media outlets, that the U.S. is being overrun by violent leftwing protesters and "domestic terrorists”. In Washington, Black Lives Matter supporters marched through Shelton on Sunday afternoon to denounce police brutality. The group was quickly met by other protesters - one group pro-Trump and the other pro-police. There were no reports of physical violence or arrests but there was a lot of shouting, with both sides trying to drown each other out.
A group of demonstrators gathered outside the Hays County Historic Courthouse to march to Texas State’s University Police Department and protest racism affecting the Black community. Unions representing millions of workers, from teachers to truck drivers, have pledged to ramp up protests in the lead-up to the presidential election, with walkouts aimed at forcing local and federal lawmakers to pass police reform and address what they described as systemic racism. In a statement first shared with The Associated Press on Saturday, labor leaders from America’s biggest public and private sector unions said they would organize walkouts for teachers, autoworkers, truck drivers and clerical staff, among others. "The status quo — of police killing Black people, of armed white nationalists killing demonstrators, of millions sick and increasingly desperate — is clearly unjust, and it cannot continue,” says the statement from several branches of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the Service Employees International Union, and affiliates of the National Education Association. "The reality of America today is what we have seen over generations and, frankly, since our inception, which is we do have two systems of justice in America,” Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris told CNN in an interview that aired Sunday on "State of the Union”. She made the remarks in response to U.S. Attorney General William Barr’s comments that there are not two systems of justice for Black and white Americans. "There’s no question that we have seen an unacceptable incidence for generations of unarmed Black men being killed. Nobody can deny that,” she said.