Demonstrators comforted one another during a protest in Los Angeles on Saturday.Credit…Bryan Denton for The New York Times
The protest on Los Angeles’s affluent West Side began peacefully on Saturday and stayed that way for nearly three hours. Activists handed out water and food, and a crowd marched on Beverly Boulevard, chanting slogans against police brutality and waving placards.
And then it took a violent turn.
Suddenly a police car was smashed and on fire, black smoke billowing into the blue sky. A young man threw a skateboard at a police officer, and frightened men and women rushed away in every direction. Police helicopters hovered overhead, and convoys of police S.U.V.s raced to the scene.
As tensions rose on the fourth day of protests in Los Angeles over the death of George Floyd, Mayor Eric M. Garcetti declared an 8 p.m. curfew.
“Go home,” Mr. Garcetti said. “Let us put the fires out. Let us learn the lessons. Let us re-humanize each other.”
But later in the evening, looting was reported at a Nordstrom store at The Grove, an upscale mall near the area of the protest, and a small fire was burning outside.
In San Francisco, a march drew about 1,000 people but remained peaceful, The San Francisco Chronicle reported. In Oakland, Mayor Libby Schaaf called on demonstrators to stay home after violent demonstrations on Friday.
In Sacramento, police officers surrounded the State Capitol as protesters pelted them and their horses with oranges and water bottles.
Before the mayhem started in Los Angeles on Saturday afternoon, several hundred people reflecting the diversity of the city — white, black, Latino, Asian-American — had protested peacefully.
The death of Mr. Floyd and the unrest it has provoked has tugged at painful memories in Los Angeles of the Rodney King beating in 1991 and the riots that occurred the next year after the acquittal of the four police officers involved in the case.
