The officer who shot Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta turns himself in.

Garrett Rolfe, the former Atlanta police officer who has been charged with murder and aggravated assault in the killing of a black man outside a fast-food restaurant last week, turned himself in to the authorities on Thursday.

Mr. Rolfe, who was fired from the police force the day after the shooting, faces a total of 11 charges in connection with the death of the man, Rayshard Brooks, which was captured on a widely circulated video. The killing prompted the resignation of Atlanta’s police chief and further inflamed the tensions over race and policing that are roiling the nation.

Prosecutors said on Wednesday in announcing the charges that Mr. Rolfe had declared, “I got him,” after firing the fatal shots at Mr. Brooks, and that as Mr. Brooks lay on the ground, Mr. Rolfe kicked him; Mr. Rolfe’s partner, Devin Brosnan, stood on his shoulder, prosecutors said.

The officers, both of whom are white, did not render any aid to Mr. Brooks for more than two minutes, said Paul L. Howard Jr., the Fulton County district attorney.

Officer Brosnan, who was charged with three counts, including aggravated assault and violations of oath, remains on the police force on administrative duty and is cooperating with prosecutors in the investigation.

Officials from the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, the union representing Atlanta officers, denounced the charges against both men. After the charges were announced, an unusually high number of officers in Atlanta did not show up to work evening shifts.

There were suggestions that the sickout protest by officers could continue on Thursday, and a union official described morale on the force as “terrible.”

In an effort to improve morale, the Atlanta Police Foundation, a nonprofit group, said on Thursday that it would distribute a $500 “bonus” to every officer.

The group, which finances programs to improve policing, support officers and reduce crime, said in a statement that it would also provide meals to officers who work 12-hour shifts and would pay to repair or replace more than 20 patrol cars damaged during recent protests.

In a Twitter post Thursday, the police department said it “was able to respond effectively to 911 calls” despite the absences.

The killing took place on Friday night, after the police were called to a Wendy’s restaurant where Mr. Brooks, 27, had fallen asleep in his car in the drive-through line, the authorities said. Officer Brosnan woke him up, and the encounter remained calm for some time, until the officers started to arrest Mr. Brooks after he failed a sobriety test. Video images of the encounter showed that at that point, he struggled with the officers, broke away and ran, and was shot twice in the back as he fled.

Minnesota lawmakers are at odds over changes to policing.

Minnesota legislators are struggling to find agreement on proposals to change policing after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, with the governor warning that lawmakers risk reaching the end of the Legislature’s special session on the issue this week with nothing to show.

Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, said on Thursday that proposals advanced by Republicans who control the State Senate were “weak sauce.” He encouraged them to incorporate proposals from the Democratic-controlled House that go farther to restrict police use of force and make it easier to punish officers who cross the line.

Mr. Walz said that there would be a “poetic justice” in signing new measures into law on Juneteenth, the holiday celebrating the end of slavery, which falls on Friday. But he said that failing to agree on a substantial bill by then would be a letdown for the thousands of people who have taken to the streets in Minnesota since Mr. Floyd’s death last month.

“The image of us and the Senate walking away from systemic change on Juneteenth adds to the legacy of what the rest of the world is looking at here,” Mr. Walz said. “It is unacceptable.”

Republicans have said the governor’s push to pass a bill this week is arbitrary and that Democrats are ignoring their proposals. They are also wary of handing more power over cases of police killings to the attorney general, Keith Ellison, as the Democratic legislation would do.

“We think he’s partisan, and we don’t think he’s the right guy to have more powers,” Paul E. Gazelka, the Republican Senate majority leader, said this week.

Governor Walz said he dreaded the prospect of the deadlock lasting until the election in November, but he acknowledged that it could happen.

“If it’s a choice, and we get to a dead end, that’s maybe what happens,” he said. “But here’s what I think about: Think about all of the bad that will happen between now and then. Think about this lost opportunity.”

In a news conference on Thursday, Minneapolis’s mayor, Jacob Frey, and the city’s police chief, Medaria Arradondo, called on state legislators to approve a proposed statute that would abolish the arbitration system that has often allowed police officers to return to work after being fired for using excessive force.

The measure would override police union contracts and any other mitigating policies, revoking the authority of arbitrators to reverse or lessen sanctions imposed by a police chief when it has been demonstrated that an officer provided an untruthful statement, did not report an incident involving the use of force, exercised unreasonable force, or failed to intervene when another officer did so.

Joined by the mayors of a number of surrounding communities, Mayor Frey said passing the legislation into law was a necessary first step toward changing the culture of policing, and ultimately uprooting systemic racism across the state.

“It’s been mentioned before that culture eats policy for breakfast,” Mayor Frey said. “To get the full structural change that we know we need in Minnesota and in cities throughout our state, we must also be focusing on a shift of culture.”

One statue goes, another gets a reprieve, as cities wrestle with history and symbolism.

Controversy over statues of figures associated with slavery and colonialism continued to simmer on Thursday. San Francisco took down a statue of Christopher Columbus, while a judge in Richmond, Va., indefinitely extended an injunction barring the governor from removing a statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee.

The Lee statue, one of a number depicting Confederate leaders on Monument Avenue in Richmond, has become a focal point for protesters in recent weeks, and its huge pedestal has been covered with graffiti demanding racial justice.

Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia said earlier this month that he planned to order the statue removed. But a man who says that his ancestors gave the land beneath the statue to the state filed a lawsuit seeking to keep it in place, and the judge in the case had issued a temporary injunction.

The judge, Bradley Cavedo of the Richmond Circuit Court, extended that injunction indefinitely on Thursday, and gave the plaintiff, William C. Gregory, three weeks to file a new complaint explaining his objections to removing the statue, according to The Associated Press.

Mayor Levar Stoney and all members of the City Council have pledged to remove several other Confederate statues on city land along Monument Avenue. A likeness of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, was toppled by protesters there last week.

City officials in San Francisco had the statue of Columbus that stood near Coit Tower removed and placed on storage on Thursday morning.

“At a time of great unrest and deep reflection by our country, we recognize the pain and oppression that Christopher Columbus represents to many,” Mayor London Breed and two members of the city’s Board of Supervisors, Catherine Stefani and Aaron Peskin, said in a statement. They said that the city’s arts commission and recreation and park commission would begin a public process to determine what should take the statue’s place.

The portraits of four House speakers who served in the Confederacy are taken down at the Capitol.

The portraits of four House speakers who served the Confederacy were taken down at the Capitol on Thursday, a day before the Juneteenth holiday celebrating the end of slavery in the United States. Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California ordered their removal earlier in the day.

Democrats in the Senate also took aim at other symbols of the Confederacy on Thursday. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey attempted through a procedural maneuver to win unanimous approval for legislation to remove statues of Confederate officials from Capitol Hill. His effort was blocked by a Republican who asked for more time to examine the issue.

“There is no room in the hallowed halls of Congress, or in any place of honor for memorializing men who embody the violent bigotry and grotesque racism of the Confederacy,” Ms. Pelosi wrote in a letter to the House clerk ordering that the portraits be taken down.

The portraits are of Robert M.T. Hunter of Virginia, Howell Cobb of Georgia, James L. Orr of South Carolina and Charles F. Crisp of Georgia. Mr. Crisp served in the Confederate army as a young man and went into politics in the 1870s; the others were in Congress before the Civil War, and then held high civilian office in the Confederacy.

In her letter, Ms. Pelosi pointed to remarks by Mr. Orr, who swore on the House floor to “preserve and perpetuate” slavery, as well as Mr. Hunter’s service as secretary of state in the Confederate government, as examples of why their portraits should be removed.

As Speaker, Ms. Pelosi has unilateral power over portraits in the House, but removing a statue from Capitol requires the approval of a bipartisan congressional committee.

That committee’s chairman, Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, was the senator who blocked Mr. Booker’s move. Mr. Blunt also chairs the Senate Rules Committee.

“It would have the effect of abandoning agreements that we have entered into with the states and the states have entered with us,” Mr. Blunt said of Mr. Booker’s proposal, citing a procedure that allows each state to select two statues to represent it on Capitol Hill. “This is a more complicated arrangement than the activity on the floor today would suggest.”

Mr. Blunt noted that several states were already moving to replace statues of Confederate officials or soldiers in the Capitol, without intervention by Congress. He said he understood Mr. Booker’s concerns and would be glad to hold discussions on his proposal.

An attempt at an ‘autonomous zone’ in Portland is cleared away by the police within hours.

The police in Portland, Ore., said on Thursday morning that they had successfully cleared out a small area of the city that protesters had occupied overnight in the hope of carving out an “autonomous zone” under their control, similar to the one in Seattle.

Several hundred protesters had gathered Wednesday evening outside Mayor Ted Wheeler’s condominium in the Pearl District, an affluent neighborhood known for art galleries and restaurants. They barricaded several streets with dumpsters, wooden pallets, trash cans and other material, and declared the area the “Patrick Kimmons Autonomous Zone,” after a black man who was killed by police officers in 2018.

A group called the Pacific Northwest Youth Liberation Front said it was demanding that the case surrounding Mr. Kimmons’s death be reopened, as well as the abolition of the Portland police. They referred to the city as “the stolen land we call Portland.”

By morning, though, the group had dwindled to about 50 people, according to the police. At 5:30 a.m., the police declared the occupation an unlawful assembly and instructed anyone who did not live in the area to leave or face arrest. The remaining protesters, who by that time were outnumbered by the authorities, left peacefully, the police said.

Texas lawmaker wants a federal inquiry into recent hangings.

Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat of Texas, is calling for a federal investigation into the recent hangings of a Hispanic man and a black teenager in the Houston area. Her request comes after a series of hangings across the United States that have attracted national attention, including some in which relatives are disputing initial rulings that the deaths were suicides.

“These cases must be thoroughly investigated and proven beyond a reasonable doubt,” Ms. Lee said in a statement.

The Houston police responded on Monday to a report that the body of a Latino man had been found hanged outside a store in the city’s Shady Acres neighborhood. The authorities initially said there appeared to be no signs of foul play. Chief Art Acevedo of the Houston Police said on Twitter that the man’s family had described him as suicidal.

On Tuesday, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office said a black teenager had been found hanged outside an elementary school in Klein, Texas, north of Houston. The Sheriff’s Office said the death appeared to be a suicide.

Ms. Lee, a Democrat who represents parts of the Houston area, noted that these deaths came at a time of heightened tensions following the killing of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis last month.

“People are on edge,” she told a Houston TV station. “They are nervous. This is a very troubling and challenging time for us.”

The families of two black men — Robert L. Fuller and Malcolm Harsch — who were found hanged from trees in Southern California in recent weeks are challenging preliminary rulings that their deaths were suicides.

The F.B.I. said on Monday that it was “actively reviewing the investigations” into the deaths of Mr. Fuller and Mr. Harsch, in conjunction with federal prosecutors. The sheriff of Los Angeles County, Alex Villanueva, said his office’s homicide bureau would lead the investigation into Mr. Fuller’s death.

Trump claims that he made Juneteenth famous.

President Trump said in an interview that “nobody had ever heard” of Juneteenth, the holiday celebrating the end of slavery, until he “did something good’’ and made it “very famous.”

He also acknowledged that his Twitter message about “shooting” looters was intended as a threat.

In the interview, conducted in the Oval Office on Wednesday and published Thursday by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Trump said he learned what Juneteenth was from a black Secret Service agent after his campaign scheduled a campaign rally — his first since the coronavirus pandemic began — for the date of the holiday, June 19.

The timing was instantly criticized, and so was the city chosen to host the rally: Tulsa, Okla., the site of a bloody 1921 massacre of black people, and destruction of their businesses, by white mobs.

Mr. Trump was urged by officials in Oklahoma and by black leaders to change his plans, which he did last week, rescheduling the Tulsa rally for the following day.

“I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous,” Mr. Trump told The Journal. “It’s actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it.”

He told the paper he had asked a number of aides if they were familiar with the holiday, and none said they were. Then he asked an adviser who was with him during the interview; the adviser noted that his administration put out a statement honoring the day in 2019.

“Oh really? We put out a statement? The Trump White House put out a statement?” Mr. Trump asked. “OK, OK. Good.”

Mr. Trump was asked about his tweet in response to protesters setting fire to the police station in Minneapolis where the officer charged with killing George Floyd, an unarmed black man, had worked.

The tweet included the sentence, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts!” — echoing a phrase used in 1967 by Walter Headley, the Miami police chief, as he began a crackdown on young black men during unrest in the city.

The Journal reported that Mr. Trump had no regrets about the tweet, which he has since said was meant as a factual observation that episodes of looting often lead to gunfire.

The president told The Journal that it could be read either as fact or as a threat, and when asked about his intention in writing it, he replied, “A combination of both.”

University of Florida drops a cheer over racist implications.

The University of Florida band and athletic teams will no longer use their “Gator bait” cheer because of its link to racist behavior, the university’s president said Thursday.

“While I know of no evidence of racism associated with our ‘Gator Bait’ cheer at UF sporting events, there is horrific racist imagery associated with the phrase,” the president, Kent Fuchs, wrote in an open letter.

The decision came during a national groundswell of protests over racial injustice, and at a time when college athletes have not hesitated to speak out around social issues.

For Florida athletics, whose teams are nicknamed the Gators, the phrase became a mainstay after Lawrence Wright, a defensive back on the school’s football team, led a cheer in the mid-1990s, declaring, “If you ain’t a Gator, you must be Gator bait!” But some historians contend that earlier in the 20th century, black children were used as bait for alligators.

“African-American babies being used as alligator bait really happened, and it happened to real people,” Ferris State University’s Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia wrote in 2013. “It doesn’t seem to have been a widespread practice, but it did happen.”

What was more common, the university said, were “images and objects showing caricatured African-American children as alligator bait.”

The announcement by Dr. Fuchs about dropping the cheer was perhaps the most conspicuous to sports fans, but it just one item in a lengthy proposal to ease tensions and concerns around the campus in Gainesville. Dr. Fuchs said he was “personally committed” to renaming or removing tributes to Confederate leaders from the campus, if the university has the authority to do so, and he announced an end to the use of inmate labor in the university’s agricultural operations.

Philadelphia and Portland have trimmed their police budgets.

Responding to calls from protesters to defund police departments, officials in Portland, Ore., and Philadelphia moved on Wednesday to reduce their police budgets and shift the money toward social programs and police oversight, among other initiatives.

In Philadelphia, the mayor and the City Council reached an agreement Wednesday to reduce funding for the police by $33.3 million, according to the Council. The Council said the budget deal also called for changes including the use of body cameras, implicit bias training for police officers, the creation of a police oversight commission, and $1.2 million in additional funding for the public defender’s office.

Also on Wednesday, the Portland City Council voted to adopt a budget that cut $27 million from the police, including $12 million that was part of across-the-board cuts in response to the coronavirus crisis, according to City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty.

The $15 million in additional cuts was far short of the $50 million that activists had demanded, as Ms. Hardesty acknowledged.

“I understand the disappointment that council did not get to the $50 million reduction,” she wrote on Twitter, “but I strongly believe that just because the reduction goal wasn’t reached it doesn’t mean the community wasn’t successful or didn’t have an impact.”

Saying that she never would have imagined that the city would cut so much so quickly from the police, she continued, “If it were not for the emails, calls, testimony, protests, and conversations with advocates, I truly do not believe we would have gotten to where we were today.”

Another commissioner, Chloe Eudaly, said in a statement in advance of the vote that she planned to vote no in solidarity with activists who had sought larger cuts.

Ms. Hardesty said the $15 million would be redirected to a program intended to reduce interactions between the police and homeless people, a leadership program for black youth, and other areas, including some yet to be determined.

Reporting was contributed by Mike Baker, Alan Blinder, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Emily Cochrane, Michael Crowley, Caitlin Dickerson, Richard Fausset, Emily Flitter, Maggie Haberman, Christine Hauser, Rick Rojas, Kate Taylor and Will Wright.