George Floyd protests: more than 3,000 arrested in Los Angeles county

More than 3,000 protesters have been arrested in Los Angeles county during the demonstrations against the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, police said, the overwhelming majority of them for non-violent offenses.

In the city of Los Angeles alone, officers have arrested about 2,700 protesters since Friday, the Los Angeles police chief, Michel Moore, said in a police commission meeting on Tuesday. About 200 of those arrests were for looting and acts of vandalism, while 2,500 were for failure to disperse or breaking curfew.

In Santa Monica, police made more than 400 arrests, according to the police chief, and in Long Beach, police arrested 73.

Related: Minnesota charges three more officers over George Floyd killing and elevates Chauvin murder charge

Arrests from the protests apparently numbered enough in Los Angeles that police used the Jackie Robinson baseball stadium at the University of California, Los Angeles, to process those in custody. University professors and staff wrote a letter to the chancellor and provost objecting to police using the stadium for such a purpose.

“As UCLA faculty, we refuse to allow our university to serve as a police outpost at this moment of national uprising and at any other time,” the letter reads. “As a public university, we serve the public and our students, and this in turn requires dismantling the mechanisms of punishment that have historically caused undeniable harm to communities in Los Angeles.”

With more protests planned throughout the country over police brutality and systemic racism, cities across California continue to impose unprecedented curfews. Alex Villanueva, the Los Angeles sheriff, told local TV station KTLA that “the curfew will continue on a daily basis until the organized protests are gone”.

Protests in southern California began late last week, with thousands taking to the streets and blocking freeways to bring attention to the black lives lost to police violence. Los Angeles imposed a curfew on Saturday, with some of the county’s rich suburbs like Beverly Hills enacting stricter ones.

The weekend’s demonstrations saw looting and vandalism that prompted the Los Angeles mayor, Eric Garcetti, to call in the national guard and California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, to declare a state of emergency in the county. Monday and Tuesday’s actions drew the same massive numbers, but protesters stuck mostly to marching, kneeling, raising their fists in the air and chanting, even as many expressed anger at and defied the curfew.

Villanueva called the curfew, which Los Angeles softened by four hours on Wednesday, an “advantage” for law enforcement.

“If you’re just a static presence as law enforcement in uniform, all you end up doing is you become a target for people to just start throwing things at you,” he said. “The curfew gives us the advantage because then anyone who is present we have the probable cause to arrest, and we are making arrests by the hundreds.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of southern California has warned that the curfews “give police too much discretion over whom to arrest”.

“Combined with the aggressive show of military force and the troubling accounts of police using batons and rubber bullets not just in response to threatened force but against peaceful protesters, these approaches repeat the very problems at the root of the protests,” said Hector Villagra, the executive director of the ACLU of southern California.