Emails reveal how Walz struggled to deal with unrest, reach consensus with critics after police killings

By Jessica Lussenhop, ProPublica, and Michelle Griffith, Madison McVan and Deena Winter, Minnesota Reformer

This story was originally published by ProPublica.

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In the spring of 2021, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz faced multiple crises.

The trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd was coming to a close. As the one-year anniversary of Floyd’s death approached, authorities were preparing for the kind of unrest that had damaged or destroyed long stretches of the city in 2020. Meanwhile, a package of police reform bills was stalled in the divided Minnesota state Legislature.

Then, on April 11, 2021, a police officer shot and killed 20-year-old Daunte Wright during a traffic stop in the northern Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center, touching off a fresh round of protests, clashes with the police, and criticism of Walz after he sent in hundreds of officers and armored vehicles that had been readied in anticipation of the trial’s aftermath.

In the midst of all this, Walz still saw an opening to bring police reform to Minnesota and provide a national model for systemic change. He feared the 2021 session would be his last, best chance to do so. But he told the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who made repeated trips to Minneapolis during the upheaval after Floyd’s death, that local politics were getting in the way.

“I wish I could report more on our progress,” Walz told Jackson in a call transcribed by a staff member. “Both you and President Obama mentioned that Minnesota should be the state that could get this right. That’s a responsibility that we have in Minnesota.”

The clamorous close of the 2021 legislative session, and Walz’s role in trying to enact police reform in response to the police killings of Floyd and Wright, plays out in a cache of thousands of internal emails from the Walz administration obtained by ProPublica and the Minnesota Reformer. The emails were requested that summer by independent journalist Tony Webster, but the administration only recently finished turning them over. Webster shared them with the news organizations.

Though the emails are limited, covering about 11 weeks from April to June 2021, they provide a closer, more detailed look at how Walz tried to leverage his influence on the legislative process. They reveal a politician who seems to be a careful listener in one-on-one conversations with grieving mothers and Black activists, freely giving out his personal cellphone number and invitations to the governor’s mansion.

And they show how Walz struggled to balance the need for order in the streets against his credibility with activist allies, while simultaneously trying to bridge the ideological divide between progressives in his party and pro-law-enforcement conservatives.

“He likes being liked,” former state Rep. Patrick Garofalo, a Republican, said of how Walz operates. “He’s thinking about political survival, and it’s nothing more complicated than that. The guy’s not an ideologue.”

Since Vice President Kamala Harris selected Walz to be her running mate, the governor has rocketed to national prominence, praised by Democrats for his progressive “Midwestern dad” image while labeled a “dangerously liberal extremist” who wants to defund the police by Harris’ opponent, former President Donald Trump. Walz has never advocated defunding the police.

The Trump campaign has also tried to cast Walz’s response to the 2020 unrest as weak and ineffectual, despite the fact that, at the time, Trump praised Walz for deploying the National Guard, calling it a “beautiful thing to watch.”

In the end, Walz emerged from the 2021 special legislative session with a compromise bill on police reform that seemingly satisfied no one. For some Democrats, it didn’t go far enough. Many called the bill a disappointment. Some Republicans felt it went too far. The next year, facing reelection, Walz received no major law enforcement endorsements.

“He is not a radical,” said Michelle Phelps, a University of Minnesota sociology professor and author of “The Minneapolis Reckoning.” “He is, I think, a sort of a vanguard of what a more progressive, but still centrist, liberal Democratic wing of the party could look like.”

In response to questions, Teddy Tschann, a spokesperson for Walz, said in a statement that the governor “is committed to bringing people with different views and backgrounds together to find common ground and get things done.”

After Wright was killed, as demonstrations escalated outside the Brooklyn Center police station, texts streamed into Walz’s phone.

“Can you please get those cops out of there and send in the national guard?” one Democratic lawmaker texted him.

That night residents, protesters and journalists in Brooklyn Center met with members of Operation Safety Net, an aggressive coalition of Minnesota National Guard soldiers, state troopers and local police who used tear gas and flash-bangs to clear the streets. A prominent union leader texted Walz less than 24 hours later: “Escalating with tanks and national guard is not helping. You can calm the situation, but this isn’t the way.”

An attorney representing 30 national and local media organizations would later write to Walz with a detailed list of documented abuses the group said journalists were subjected to at the hands of law enforcement, warning that the state agencies under Walz’s control seemed to have no regard for the First Amendment.

Despite renewed tension and unrest, emails from Walz staffers document his outreach to members of Black activist groups and the families of people killed by police in Minnesota. On April 20, the day a jury found Chauvin guilty of murdering Floyd, Walz staff logged phone conversations with the Floyd family, the Rev. Al Sharpton and former President Barack Obama. In one phone conversation on the anniversary of Floyd’s death — a day on which Walz called for 9 minutes and 29 seconds of silence acknowledging the length of time Chauvin pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck — Walz reflected on his own “inherent racial bias.”

“I wanted to be thoughtful and be intentional around race and the murder of George Floyd. I am trying to learn this year,” he said, according to a staffer’s transcript of a call with the leader of a local foundation. “If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a lot of villages to raise a governor.”

With Walz, some advocates felt acknowledged in a way that was initially refreshing.

“The governor looked me in my eyes and said, ‘John, I need you to get me some legislation,’” said Johnathon McClellan, president of the Minnesota Justice Coalition, a racial equity nonprofit that advocates for social justice reform. “He understood the protests. He understood what the people were asking for.”

Walz received a flood of advice and opinions on what the next legislative steps should be, some from less-expected entities. The Minnesota Business Partnership, a group representing the CEOs of companies like 3M and Cargill as well as other business leaders, urged Walz to advocate for training policy changes and measures to make it harder to hire police officers who’d engaged in misconduct, while stressing that the group was broadly pro-law enforcement.

“Minnesota’s reputation matters,” said Charlie Weaver, the partnership’s executive director at the time. “If we had a reputation as a hostile environment for minority workers, that’s a big problem for our large companies.”

The Walz administration leapt at the chance to arrange a meeting between lawmakers and Weaver, a former chief of staff for Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty. “We need their help pushing key issues in the Senate,” wrote one policy adviser.

But the leadership of the Republican-controlled Senate criticized broader reform efforts as “anti-police.” Behind the scenes, according to an internal memo, the Senate agreed to just three of the dozens of proposals the Democrat-controlled House had advanced and Walz had supported.

“I wasn’t going to take things that I knew would hinder a good police officer from doing their job, and also hinder us from getting quality police in the future,” said then-Senate majority leader Paul Gazelka in an interview.

In response, Walz brokered a meeting between Gazelka and Families Supporting Families Against Police Violence. The group’s founder, Toshira Garraway, lost her fiance in 2009 after he was chased by the St. Paul police and later found dead in a bin at a recycling facility. She wanted to advocate for a bill eliminating the statute of limitations on wrongful death suits against police. (Garraway did not respond to requests for comment.) Gazelka said that the request for the meeting, coming straight from Walz, was unusual.

“I certainly was willing to do that, and did listen to them,” Gazelka said.

That meeting took place on June 3, 2021, the same day that a U.S. Marshals Service task force shot and killed Winston Smith Jr. in a parking garage in Minneapolis while trying to arrest him on an outstanding warrant. Walz’s office once again put the National Guard on notice and made repeated requests to the Biden administration to address its role in the incident and ease pressure on local authorities.

“DOJ in DC is a hard ‘no’ on doing a press conference,” staffers wrote in the days after Smith’s death. A spokesperson for the Department of Justice declined to comment.

Walz couldn’t avoid blowback, even from prominent local activists with whom he shared a cordial relationship. A letter sent by Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney and the founder of the Racial Justice Network who was in contact with the administration throughout the spring, demanded that Walz create an independent entity to investigate Smith’s death, criticizing the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension as hopelessly biased. Staff from both Walz’s office and the Minnesota Department of Public Safety wrote a draft of a response that said the BCA, which investigates incidents where police kill people, had the administration’s “utmost trust and confidence.” Although Levy Armstrong could not confirm that she got the reply, the BCA retained control of the case.

Protests over Smith’s death continued until a drunk driver plowed into a group of demonstrators, killing one woman and injuring others. The next day, on June 14, the Minnesota Legislature entered a special session with no movement on police reform and the threat of a government shutdown looming over negotiations. Roughly 38,000 potential layoff notices had already been sent to state employees, and Walz and Senate and House lawmakers had two and a half weeks to come to an agreement. Republicans were particularly eager to pass a bill that would end Walz’s COVID-19-era emergency powers.

“It was very nerve-wracking,” said House Speaker Melissa Hortman, a Democrat. “There were two pressures coming for a shutdown: the Republicans were interested in shutting down the government if the governor didn’t give up his emergency powers. My caucus was interested in shutting down the government if we didn’t have some public safety reforms.”

After the first day of the special session, Walz staffers noted that Senate Republicans had “retracted policy concessions” and seemed “withdrawn from negotiations.” Around the same time, Walz policy advisers were also doing damage control after sending an email that erroneously announced that the Minnesota Justice Coalition and Families Supporting Families Against Police Violence had pared down their list of desired legislation from nine bills to four, prompting an angry press release from the groups: “WE WANT TO MAKE IT CRYSTAL CLEAR THAT WE MADE NO SUCH AGREEMENT.” Kristin Beckmann, then Walz’s deputy chief of staff, admonished the policy advisers for speaking out of turn.

“This is a major set back in that trust. It’s really frustrating,” she wrote. Beckmann did not respond to requests for comment.

The emails end in mid-June with Walz’s schedulers batting away invitations and meetings to allow for all-day negotiation sessions while staffers tried to craft messaging for increasingly anxious state employees. “We’re getting a lot of internal pushback that we haven’t been able to provide enough information,” one state communications worker wrote.

Reform advocates had been urging Walz for weeks to take a hard-line stance during the final budget negotiations, even allowing the government to shut down to force more sweeping changes. But the governor made it clear that was a line he would not cross, according to staff notes on the conversations.

Walz said that he “had concerns over shutting down the government and that this hurts many of the people the administration is trying to help. He said he was hopeful on a few items passing this year,” according to the summation of a phone call with McClellan, the president of the Minnesota Justice Coalition. “He made it clear it was unlikely that everything he’s pushing for will pass.”

The notes proved prophetic. Three days before the deadline, Walz, Gazelka and Hortman announced a deal. The final bill included new restrictions on no-knock warrants, a law requiring 911 operators to alert mental health crisis teams under certain circumstances, and the creation of a kind of warrant that doesn’t require police to take suspects into custody. The package also included salary increases for state law enforcement, money for body cameras and enhanced penalties for the attempted murder of officers.

Through an executive action, Walz also directed state law enforcement agencies to turn over body camera footage from deadly police encounters to the affected families within five days.

Garraway’s bill to eliminate the statute of limitations on wrongful death suits against the police hit the cutting room floor, as did bills that would disallow police from making a number of equipment-related traffic stops, like ones for expired registration tags, and a bill that would form a civilian oversight board. In an interview with The Washington Post, Walz said he felt he’d “failed” Garraway.

At the end of one of Walz’s last press conferences that session, Jaylani Hussein, the executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and one of the people the Walz administration had kept in close contact with that spring, pushed through reporters to ask Walz to veto the compromise bill, saying it actually provided more cover for police. Walz, looking tired, listened, addressed Hussein by his first name and said he would not veto the bill.

“This is the challenge of democracy,” Walz said. “There are going to be a lot of people in this moment [who] see this as not acceptable. I understand that.”

Tony Webster contributed reporting to this story.