Los Angeles police fire teargas to disperse crowds at Trump protest

The Guardian

10 hours ago

Los Angeles police moved aggressively to disperse the last of the crowds at Saturday's otherwise peaceful anti-Trump protest downtown, using officers on horseback to clear an area around a federal building with batons and wooden sticks. They fired tear canisters and foam rubber bullets when some of the demonstrators started to regroup.
Hours after the main part of the protest had concluded and most of the participants and organizers had left, a crowd of a few dozen people congregated outside a federal office building, away from the approved protest zone, and began shouting at a line of stone-faced US marines standing guard outside the plate-glass entrance.
'Leave LA! Leave LA!' they chanted at the soldiers, ordered into the city by Donald Trump to the fury of California's political leadership and many ordinary Angelenos.
As the standoff intensified, the marines stepped forward with riot shields to stop the protesters from climbing a set of steps leading up to the entrance. The Los Angeles police issued a dispersal order, which some in the crowd appear not to have heard, declaring the protest to be an 'unlawful assembly'.
The horses arrived at about 4pm, and the teargas started flying shortly after.
While the many hours of officially sanctioned protest earlier had been overwhelmingly joyful, with music and chanting and little evident police presence besides a helicopter hovering above, the tail end felt immediately more confrontational.
The hostility towards the marines stood in contrast to earlier scenes of demonstrators shaking hands with national guard troops stationed outside a federal courthouse, offering them water and taking selfies.
The change in atmosphere was reminiscent of the late afternoon of the first big protest in the same part of the city last Sunday, when a minority of protesters, many of them heavily masked, threw bottles and charged at police lines and ended up throwing rocks at police cruisers and setting cars on fire.
Some of the demonstrators who regrouped after the afternoon's initial dispersal had umbrellas to fend off police projectiles. Others wore helmets and gas masks. The confrontations kept going for at least an hour and spilled over from the area outside the federal building and a nearby federal courthouse back towards city hall, where the earlier rally and march had begun.
Jim McDonnell, the Los Angeles police chief, told a news briefing earlier in the day that his officers would do everything they could to safeguard people's right to protest peacefully but would not hesitate to make arrests if people broke the law.
Last Tuesday, Mayor Karen Bass instituted a nightly curfew in downtown Los Angeles, starting at 8pm, after days of vandalism and violence on the fringes of otherwise peaceful protest.
Ahead of the day's 'No Kings' protests, Bass had warned of the potential political consequences of failing to remain peaceful.
'Please, please do not give the administration an excuse to intervene,' she told the early morning news briefing. 'Let's make sure we show the world the best of Los Angeles and our country. Let's stand in contrast to the provocation, escalation and violence.'
Los Angeles' civic leaders did not immediately comment on the late afternoon trouble or provide arrest numbers.
The LA Times reported one protester receiving stitches after being shot in the nose with a rubber bullet and another with a broken finger. Some demonstrators told the paper they had scaled a chain-link fence to get away from police officers chasing them.