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Peaceful protesters defied curfews but clashes with the police appeared to slow.

Protesters returned to the streets on Tuesday from California to Pennsylvania, while the nation’s capital sizzled with tension a day after a highly criticized episode outside the White House in which law enforcement officers used tear gas on peaceful protesters in order to clear a path for President Trump.

The public spectacle on Monday and the arrival of dozens of military vehicles on Washington’s streets on Tuesday seemed to underscore the president’s latest threat — to use the military to crack down on violence and looting — as it emerged that it was Attorney General William P. Barr who ordered officers to clear Lafayette Park on Monday in time for Mr. Trump to walk to a historic church and have his picture taken there.

On Tuesday night, more than 1,000 protesters remained near the park after a 7 p.m. curfew, facing police officers across a tall chain-link fence erected overnight.

“You’re in the cage now!” one protester yelled. Another said, “Our tax dollars at work.”

But the crowd remained peaceful in a mood that appeared to be taking hold in other cities, too. When a few demonstrators began to rock the fence, they were quickly stopped. “Use your words,” two women yelled. “Don’t do that.”

The tensions earlier in the day in Washington reflected a nation on edge, ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic, skyrocketing unemployment and now a public reckoning with systematic racism and police brutality.

Daily protests have spread to at least 140 cities, in a sprawling expression of anger and frustration after the killing in Minneapolis last week of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black security guard, who died after his neck was pinned under a white police officer’s knee for nearly nine minutes. The officer has been charged with murder.

Though planned protests have largely been peaceful, the national unrest has also come with escalating tensions, including attacks on law enforcement, injuries and deaths of protesters and others on the streets, and widespread looting and destruction. Police officers in several cities have been fired or disciplined for using excessive force.

Officials across the country remained on guard Tuesday for another night of chaos. Here is the latest from around the country.

• Philadelphia: Hundreds of protesters gathered outside City Hall by Tuesday afternoon, after a night of explosive tension. Mayor Jim Kenney defended a decision to use tear gas on protesters Monday but condemned a group of largely white men who had been seen patrolling the largely white neighborhood of Fishtown holding baseball bats. “Armed vigilantism will not be tolerated moving forward,” he said. However, no arrest has been made after the owner of a South Philadelphia gun shop opened fire early Tuesday morning on four men who smashed through the front door of his business, killing one of the men.

• Atlanta: Police and military personnel used tear gas to disperse a large crowd gathered near Centennial Olympic Park shortly after the city’s 9 p.m. curfew, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The crowd broke up soon after the confrontation.

• New York: Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that an 8 p.m. curfew would be imposed all week after a night of looting in Manhattan. He acknowledged that the previous 11 p.m. curfew had failed to quell the violence that marred the peaceful protests of previous days. After an hourlong standoff between the police and demonstrators at the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge, the protesters were eventually allowed to cross back to Brooklyn.

• Charlotte, N.C.: Protesters and police skirmished in the city center after the authorities ordered the crowds to disperse. Video showed police officers surrounding demonstrators and using stun grenades and pepper spray and pepper pellets, which was criticized by a black state lawmaker who represents Charlotte. The police said that they would conduct an internal review of the episode, but that officers were hit by bottles and rocks, and that a protester threw what they called a chemical agent at an officer on a bicycle. One protester who was arrested was in possession of a military-style rifle and two 30-round magazines, the police said.

• California: Protesters filled the streets of Hollywood with chants of “Black lives matter,” a crowd of protesters gathered along a beach in San Francisco and the city of Santa Monica enacted among the strictest curfews in the nation, starting at 2 p.m. local time. The Los Angeles Police Department made hundreds of arrests throughout the city Tuesday night, said a spokesman, Officer Tony Im.

• St. Louis: President Trump tweeted his condolences to David Dorn, a retired police captain whom the police said was shot by a looter at a pawnshop on Monday night. Mr. Dorn died the same night four active-duty police officers were shot during protests.

The Times has reporters on the ground. Here’s what they are seeing.

Tim Arango

Los Angeles

They tried to keep the gathering as secret as possible. No announcements, no social media. Don’t talk to strangers, don’t talk to the press; police spies could be anywhere.

“I guarantee you there are agents in your midst,” said Melina Abdullah, a professor at California State University, Los Angeles, and a Black Lives Matter leader.

About 200 protesters were called to a small park in Koreatown on Tuesday afternoon by the leaders of Black Lives Matter L.A. The plan: Walk the 15 minutes to Getty House, the official residence of Mayor Eric Garcetti, and then fire up social media.

“When you get there, livestream away,” Ms. Abdullah said.

The demonstration outside the gates of the mayor’s mansion quickly swelled to hundreds as word spread around the city, and protesters waving placards streamed down some of the city’s fanciest residential streets, past mansions and manicured lawns.

The location was chosen to highlight the group’s demand that the mayor reduce the police budget. The mayor himself was at City Hall, preparing to give his daily news conference.

As the 6 p.m. curfew approached, some protesters started leaving, but many stayed behind, vowing to hold the streets — “Our streets!” they chanted.

Karen Weise

Seattle

A crowd of more than a thousand people marched to the city’s emergency operations center, demanding to speak with Mayor Jenny Durkan. After some of the group’s leaders were invited inside, Ms. Durkan stood on the building’s steps and addressed protesters for the first time since demonstrations erupted in the city last week.

The mayor agreed to work with protesters to reform the Police Department, which is under a federal consent decree. When pressed for a specific timeline, Ms. Durkan responded, “What are you doing tomorrow?”

They agreed to meet at 3 p.m.

The protest leaders asked people to submit their ideas for change to a new Gmail account they had established, yelling out the address letter by letter through a loudspeaker.

Ms. Durkan, gripping a blue medical mask in her hand, stopped short of agreeing that police officers would not use tear gas again Tuesday evening, as the department had the previous night. “I am not going to stand up and make a promise I am not going to keep,” she said.

After Ms. Durkan left, the protesters began marching through downtown, stopping at one point to take a knee. The group split at an intersection, with marchers shouting above the noise of chanting and helicopters, debating whether to join another group of demonstrators near where the police used tear gas on Monday evening.

Alejandra Rosa

San Juan, P.R.

Police officers used pepper spray on Tuesday in Puerto Rico as more than 200 protesters wearing gas masks broke a 7 p.m. curfew. The protest, organized by Colectiva Feminista, demanded a stop to racism and police brutality in the island.

“Where are the anti-racist people? We are here,” hundreds chanted on the cobblestone streets. “And we are not afraid.”

Protesters blamed local officials for black lives lost.

“Don’t tell us you don’t see racism here,” Gloriann Sacha Antonetty, 39, said. “Because we don’t only see it. We feel it in our skin.”

Thomas Gibbons-Neff

Washington, D.C.

On Tuesday afternoon, less than two hours before Washington’s 7 p.m. curfew went into effect, U.S. troops positioned military vehicles across the city.

The crowd of protesters in Lafayette Square was at least twice the size from the day prior and swelling.

Following the arrival of the troops and the use of helicopters to suppress protesters on Monday night — a tactic fitting for battles with insurgents but now applied to American citizens — some in the crowd whispered that more soldiers were on the way.

Alec, a 32-year-old protester who spent two deployments in Afghanistan, said he had seen things over the past two days that he never expected to see in his own country.

“There are real problems here,” Alec said, declining to give his last name because he works for the government, “and no amount of uniforms or soldiers are going to fix them.”

“They’re only going to get worse,” he said.

President Trump this week responded to the unrest roiling the nation by visiting two religious sites and calling for more military intervention. On Tuesday, both moves were greeted with criticism from many of his rivals, as well as some of his sometime allies.

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the likely Democratic nominee for president, said during a speech in Philadelphia that the nation was “crying out for leadership.” And Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, wielding her own Bible and quoting from the Book of Ecclesiastes, criticized Mr. Trump for being a “fanner of the flame” of division.

Two Republican senators, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Tim Scott of South Carolina, and some moderate Democrats in conservative-leaning districts joined in the criticism. Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, a former C.I.A. officer, called his response the type of action “undertaken by authoritarian regimes throughout the world.”

Mr. Trump was also criticized by Christian leaders after visiting two religious sites in Washington — on Monday he posed holding a Bible outside St. John’s Church, and on Tuesday he and his wife spent about 10 minutes inside the St. John Paul II National Shrine.

“I find it baffling and reprehensible that any Catholic facility would allow itself to be so egregiously misused and manipulated in a fashion that violates our religious principles, which call us to defend the rights of all people, even those with whom we might disagree,” Archbishop Wilton Gregory of Washington wrote in a statement.

And the Rev. Gini Gerbasi, an Episcopal priest who had been on the patio of St. John’s when nearby protesters were sprayed with tear gas, said in an interview, “They took what literally had been holy ground that day and turned it into a literal battleground.”

Following President Trump’s vow on Monday to “dominate” demonstrators, the federal government has mobilized its law enforcement agencies across the country, from border agencies and the Drug Enforcement Administration to F.B.I. hostage rescue teams, working alongside local law enforcement, the military police and the National Guard.

Nowhere is the show of force as strong as in Washington, where Mr. Trump is seeking to flood the city’s downtown with agents from the F.B.I., the Bureau of Prisons, the U.S. Marshals, Customs and Border Protection and several other agencies, along with the military, turning the nation’s capital into a heavily armed federal fortress.

Even Transportation Security Administration officers have been called out of the airports to help protect federal property in the “national capital region,” the agency said.

The Justice Department on Tuesday confirmed that Attorney General William P. Barr is managing the federal law enforcement response. It was Mr. Barr who ordered federal officers to clear peaceful protesters out of Washington’s Lafayette Park on Monday so that President Trump could walk to a historic church and have his picture taken there, according to a Justice Department official who was not authorized to discuss the matter.

In warnings that echoed the threats issued by Mr. Trump, Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said Tuesday that the federal government would control the protests “at any cost.”

“D.H.S. and its partners will not allow anarchists, disrupters and opportunists to exploit the ongoing civil unrest to loot and destroy our communities,” Mr. Wolf said.

The Pentagon announced late Tuesday that a battalion of combat troops from an Army quick-reaction force based at Fort Bragg, N.C., had moved into the Washington area, as well as a military police headquarters unit from Fort Bragg and a military police battalion from Fort Drum, N.Y.

In all, about 1,600 troops were being deployed to the Washington area, the statement said, noting that they would be stationed initially at nearby bases outside of the District of Columbia. In a statement, the Pentagon called the troop movements “a prudent planning measure.”

Law enforcement officers have been targeted in attacks in cities across the country in recent days, with officers wounded in gun battles in St. Louis and Las Vegas and others injured when they were run over by cars in New York City and Buffalo.

But officers also have been charged, or fired, in several states by police and government leaders trying to preserve and defend demonstrators’ right to protest while also restoring order after days of violence and lawlessness. The swirl of emotions and instructions and events, Manny Fernandez of The Times reports, have made it a volatile time to be a police officer in America.

The Las Vegas police on Tuesday identified both a man who was killed by officers and an officer who was gravely wounded in two separate shootings the night before. The officer, Shay K. Mikalonis, 29, was in grave condition after being shot in the head, and a 20-year-old suspect was arrested. In another shooting, the Las Vegas police killed Jorge Gomez, 25, who they said raised a pistol at officers after they had hit him with “low lethal” shotgun rounds.

In St. Louis, four officers were struck by gunfire in a shootout between gunmen at a protest and the police. The officers’ injuries were believed to be “non-life threatening,” Chief John Hayden of the St. Louis Police Department said at a news conference.

In New York, an officer was in stable condition after being run over by a black sedan early Tuesday in the Bronx, and in Buffalo the driver of an S.U.V. was arrested after speeding through a line of law enforcement officers in riot gear and injuring two of them in an episode that was caught on video. The driver now faces several felony charges.

But the police also have been the subject of complaints about their actions.

Officials in Atlanta said arrest warrants had been issued for six police officers after video footage showed them Tasing and assaulting two college students in a car while enforcing a curfew. In Richmond, Va., the Police Department apologized and said it would discipline officers who used tear gas on protesters on Monday. And in Denver, an officer was fired after sharing a photo of himself and two other officers in riot gear on Instagram on Monday with the caption “Let’s start a riot.”

In Louisville, police officials said a restaurant owner killed on Saturday had fired a gun before he was fatally shot, by either a police officer or a National Guard soldier. On Tuesday, Mayor Greg Fischer and police commanders held a news conference to release images from two security cameras. Neither camera gives an unobstructed view of what happened, and neither has sound.

The restaurant owner, David McAtee, 53, was killed shortly after midnight on Monday, and has been cited as an innocent victim of the violent turmoil rocking the country. Before the day was over, Mr. Fischer dismissed the city’s police chief because the officers at the scene had not activated their body cameras.

Former President George W. Bush on Tuesday praised peaceful protesters and called for empathy for people seeking justice after George Floyd’s death, saying “achieving justice for all is the duty of all.”

Mr. Bush rarely comments on developing events, and has generally avoided anything that could be construed as criticism of President Trump.

“Laura and I are anguished by the brutal suffocation of George Floyd and disturbed by the injustice and fear that suffocate our country,” Mr. Bush said in a statement, referring to his wife.

“It remains a shocking failure that many African Americans, especially young African-American men, are harassed and threatened in their own country,” Mr. Bush said.

Mr. Bush, who condemned the looting that has taken place in several cities, is a flawed messenger on the subject of race. His administration’s failures during and after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 primarily affected black residents in New Orleans and Louisiana.

But by recognizing that the “doctrine and habits of racial superiority, which once nearly split our country, still threaten our Union,” Mr. Bush offered a stark contrast to Mr. Trump, who has emphasized law and order but said nothing about systemic abuses against black people by law enforcement.

“We can only see the reality of America’s need by seeing it through the eyes of the threatened, oppressed and disenfranchised,” Mr. Bush said.

“Many doubt the justice of our country, and with good reason,” he said. “Black people see the repeated violation of their rights without an urgent and adequate response from American institutions.”

Minnesota is investigating the Minneapolis police over racial discrimination.

The state of Minnesota has started a human rights investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department, citing evidence of systematic discrimination against people of color, particularly black people, state officials announced on Tuesday.

The state Department of Human Rights made a formal charge of discrimination against the police force based in part on the May 25 death of George Floyd, which has sparked demonstrations across the country.

The charge referred to a pattern of incidents in Minneapolis dating back at least 10 years that demanded investigations into the Police Department’s training and policies, and its “use-of-force protocols.”

“There is sufficient information to investigate whether the respondent utilizes systemic discriminatory patterns or practices towards people of color, specifically black community members, on the basis of race,” the charge stated.

Investigations by the Department of Human Rights do not lead to criminal charges, but if investigators find wrongdoing, state officials can attempt to force changes in the Police Department’s practices, which could include the state’s suing the police force.

Also Tuesday, the Minneapolis school board voted unanimously to end its contract with the Police Department, a pointed response to the death of Mr. Floyd.

The school district is believed to be the first in the nation to sever its relationship with a police department, one advocacy group said, marking a significant victory for activists who have long argued that allowing officers in schools contributes to the school-to-prison pipeline that channels black and Hispanic students into the penal system at disproportionately high rates.

“This is the systemic change that this moment calls for,” said Judith Browne Dianis, the executive director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization that has worked to get the police out of schools. “There can be convictions of the police officers, but at the end of the day we know that we need structural change. And the school board’s decision gives us that type of victory.”

In a unanimous vote during a special meeting held virtually on Tuesday, the board adopted a resolution saying that the actions of the Minneapolis police officers involved in Mr. Floyd’s death “run directly counter to the values the district seeks in partners.” The decision means that the school resource officers the department provides will no longer be present in schools.

In Paris, demonstrators linked George Floyd’s death with a local killing by police.

Anger at George Floyd’s killing has rippled far beyond the United States to many world capitals, where crowds have gathered to denounce police violence and racism.

An estimated 15,000 people in Paris defied police orders to gather at the city’s main law court on Tuesday. Demonstrators, most of them young, waved signs reading “No justice, no peace” or “I can’t breathe,” in direct reference to Mr. Floyd’s death.

The protests were led by the family of Adama Traoré, a 24-year-old black man who died near Paris in 2016 after having been tackled by the police. Shouts of “Justice for Adama” regularly punctuated the clapping and chanting of the crowd.

“We protest for George Floyd, for Adama, for all the others and for the next ones,” said Anne-Sophie Kiminou, a 28-year-old office manager.

The Paris police said in the afternoon that the demonstration was forbidden during the country’s public health emergency, which bans any public gathering of more than 10 people. Paris is one of the last areas of France where the coronavirus is still considered active, and many protesters wore masks.

Lolly Nzamba, 18, said France had a two-tier justice system that ignored the daily suffering of black people. “Personally, I’m afraid when I go out in the street and come across the police,” she said. But she added that Mr. Floyd’s death had changed people’s understanding and would help raise awareness.

“There will be a before and an after,” Ms. Nzamba said.

Also Tuesday, thousands gathered for a march in Sydney, Australia, and chanted “Enough is enough” while kneeling outside the American consulate. In London and Rio de Janeiro, demonstrations of solidarity have also prompted soul searching over local racial divisions.

Reporting was contributed by Tim Arango, Emily Badger, Mike Baker, Kim Barker, Katie Benner, Julie Bosman, John Branch, Helene Cooper, Joe Coscarelli, Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura, Caitlin Dickerson, Catie Edmonson, John Eligon, Tess Felder, Manny Fernandez, Thomas Fuller, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Russell Goldman, Maggie Haberman, Miriam Jordan, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Constant Meheut, Sarah Mervosh, David Montgomery, Jack Nicas, Elian Peltier, Richard Perez-Pena, Adam Popescu, Austin Ramzy, Frances Robles, Katie Rogers, Rick Rojas, Alejandra Rosa, Marc Santora, Anna Schaverien, Eric Schmitt, Dionne Searcey, Megan Specia, Jennifer Steinhauer, Daniel Victor, Neil Vigdor, Karen Weise and Mihir Zaveri.