By Sunday evening, more than 786 people had been arrested in New York City, according to John Miller, the city’s counterterrorism chief. Early Sunday morning, the police said 33 officers had been injured and 47 police vehicles had been damaged or destroyed, several of them set on fire. More than a dozen stores in Lower Manhattan were also looted.

At a news conference on Sunday, the mayor called for an investigation, but also took pains to try to explain the officers’ actions, saying that the situation “was created by a group of protesters blocking and surrounding a police vehicle, a tactic that we had seen before in the last few days, a tactic that can be very, very dangerous to everyone involved.”

He added: “And we’ve seen direct attacks on police officers, including in their vehicles.”