Killing of Unarmed Black Man: Peaceful protests continue in US

Calls for deep police reforms gained momentum as Minneapolis city council members pledged late Sunday to dismantle and rebuild the police department, after the death in custody of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests about racism in law enforcement.

Demonstrations have swept a country slowly emerging from the coronavirus lockdown in the two weeks since Floyd, an unarmed black man, 46, died after choking out the words "I can't breathe" under the knee of a white police officer.

Though there was violence in the early days, the protests have lately been overwhelmingly peaceful. They have deepened a political crisis for President Donald Trump, who repeatedly threatened to order active duty troops onto the streets.

Trump took to Twitter around midnight to lash out at the boss of the National Football League, America's biggest sport, who, in a sign of a cultural shift, swung behind protesting players and adopted their slogan "Black Lives Matter".

Huge weekend crowds gathered across the country and in Europe. The high-spirited atmosphere was marred late on Sunday when a man drove a car into a rally in Seattle and then shot and wounded a demonstrator who confronted him.

"I have cops in my family, I do believe in a police presence," said Nikky Williams, a black Air Force veteran who marched in Washington on Sunday. "But I do think that reform has got to happen."

The prospect that Minneapolis could abolish its police force altogether would have seemed unthinkable just two weeks ago. Nine members of the 13-person city council pledged on Sunday to do away with the police department in favour of a community-led safety model, though they provided little detail.

"A veto-proof majority of the MPLS City Council just publicly agreed that the Minneapolis Police Department is not reformable and that we're going to end the current policing system," Alondra Cano, a member of the Minneapolis council, said on Twitter.

US congressional Democrats plan to unveil a sweeping package of legislation to combat police violence and racial injustice.

The proposal is expected to ban police chokeholds and racial profiling, require nationwide use of body cameras, subject police to civilian review boards and abolish the legal doctrine known as qualified immunity, which protects police from civil litigation, according to congressional sources.

"It is time for police culture in many departments to change," Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman Representative Karen Bass, told CNN on Sunday.

In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters he would shift some funds out of the city's vast police budget and reallocate it to youth and social services as the biggest civil rights protests in more than 50 years demanded a transformation of US criminal justice.

He said he would take enforcement of rules on street vending out of the hands of police, accused of using the regulations to harass minorities.

Curfews were removed in New York and other major cities including Philadelphia and Chicago.

After online fury and intense criticism from many New York Times staffers, the paper's editorial page head has resigned in controversy after publishing an op-ed by a US senator who urged military force against protestors nationwide.

James Bennet -- the editorial page editor since May 2016 -- faced intense backlash after initially defending the column headlined "Send in The Military" by Republican US Senator Tom Cotton.

The hardline op-ed -- which Bennet initially defended as an example of the newspaper's commitment to ideological diversity -- was met with both internal and external outrage, reports AFP.

Cotton's essay encouraged an "overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers" as anti-racism protests rage across the United States.

TRUMP FIRES BACK

Trump said on Twitter he ordered the National Guard to start withdrawing from Washington DC "now that everything is under perfect control".

Trump has used the Black Lives Matter protest movement as a foil for years to promote himself as a law-and-order candidate.

When black football players knelt during the national anthem to protest against police brutality in 2016, Trump denounced them with an expletive and the NFL effectively took his side, telling players to stand or stay off the field for the song.

Over the weekend, the NFL issued a video of Commissioner Roger Goodell apologising for failing to listen to black players: "We, the NFL, believe Black Lives Matter," Goodell said.

Trump fired back overnight: "Could it be even remotely possible that in Roger Goodell's rather interesting statement of peace and reconciliation, he was intimating that it would now be O.K. for the players to KNEEL, or not to stand, for the National Anthem, thereby disrespecting our Country & our Flag?" he tweeted.

The "Black Lives Matter" protest slogan was also embraced on Sunday by Trump's predecessor as Republican candidate for president, Senator Mitt Romney, who marched alongside evangelical Christians in Washington.

Romney told the Washington Post that he wanted to find "a way to end violence and brutality, and to make sure that people understand that black lives matter".

Former US President Barack Obama also addressed the protests in a YouTube speech for 2020 high school and college graduates. The demonstrations "speak to decades of inaction over unequal treatment and a failure to reform police practices in the broader criminal justice system," Obama said.

The British government yesterday denounced the toppling of a slave trader's statue during anti-racism protests, urging campaigners to use democratic means for change rather than breaking the law.

Demonstrators pulled down the 18-foot (5.5-metre) bronze monument to Edward Colston in the southwest English city of Bristol and threw it into the harbour on Sunday.