Protesters Clash with Police outside White House (+Video)

Sporadic clashes are taking place amid a heavy police presence in the area.

DC police and Security Service agents established a wider perimeter outside the White House on Sunday compared to Saturday. Protesters demanded to be allowed to march, RT reported.

Loud bangs seemingly from police using flashbangs could be heard in the wider area around the White House complex.

Closer to the focus of US executive power, police used shield and pepper spray to keep protesters outside.

According to the Washington Post, the third day of protests in the nation’s capital over George Floyd’s death began with bent knees, raised fists and pleas that this night, unlike the last, would remain peaceful. And in those first moments on Sunday, the more than 1,000 people who marched to Lafayette Square across from the White House listened.

Then came darkness, and with it, another night of mayhem. American flags and parked cars and buildings were lit ablaze — including St. John’s Church, a historic landmark opened in 1816 and attended by every president since James Madison. Firefighters quickly extinguished the basement fire, which police said was intentionally set.

Much like Saturday night, the worst violence didn’t erupt until police pushed demonstrators out of Lafayette Square and into the city’s streets. Downtown, baseball bats bashed through windows at coffee shops, banks and one office building after another. Looters roamed throughout the city, targeting dozens of businesses well after the mayor’s 11 p.m. curfew began.

The confrontations at Lafayette Square followed a weekend of intense, often violent clashes between heavily armored law enforcement officers and outraged activists, some of whom looted stores and set buildings ablaze in Washington and its neighboring suburbs.

People spent the afternoon in downtown Washington, Georgetown and elsewhere hammering plywood boards outside retail shops and restaurants in the hopes their businesses would escape the attacks that others a day earlier did not. For some, those images, paired with the racial tension gripping dozens of cities across the country, conjured memories of the riots that ensued in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

On Sunday, as the city and region braced for another night of choas, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) ordered the citywide curfew and activated the DC National Guard.