Walz opponents criticize the governor’s 2020 riot response
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Vice President Kamala Harris’ choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate has Republicans renewing their attacks on the DFL governor for his response to the 2020 Twin Cities riots. Protests and civil disobedience in the days after the police murder of George Floyd soon turned into three nights of rioting.
Immediately after news broke of Harris’ choice, the Trump campaign’s X account, tweeted “INEXCUSABLE: Rioters burned Minneapolis to the ground for days. Tim Walz was nowhere to be found.” And former president Donald Trump’s vice presidential candidate JD Vance made similar comments at a rally in Philadelphia.
“Tim Walz was the guy who let rioters burn down Minneapolis and then Kamala Harris was the one who bailed the rioters out of jail, so there’s an interesting team in that sense,” Vance said.
The U.S. senator from Ohio was referring to a Harris tweet from 2020 in which she urged people to “chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.”
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The nonprofit Freedom Fund helps people held in pretrial detention who can’t afford to post bail. The group said previously that four-year-old Tweet was the extent of Harris’ support.
Most of the people arrested for looting — and police caught about three dozen in Hennepin County — were charged with burglary. As first-time offenders, most got probationary sentences. Another three dozen were cited for curfew violations.
Federal prosecutors handled all of the arson cases from that week, and cash bail is almost never used in Minnesota’s federal courts. Judges sentenced 13 of the 16 defendants to prison terms of between two and 10 years. Three received sentences of probation or home confinement.
Last month, Trump falsely told supporters at a rally in St. Cloud that he, and not Walz, called in the National Guard.
“I couldn’t get your governor to act,” Trump said. “He’s supposed to call in the National Guard or the Army and he didn’t do it. I couldn’t get your governor so I sent in the National Guard.”
MPR News’ coverage from that week and official after-action reports years later show that it was clear Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and public safety officials did not expect unrest on such a large scale, and they took days to respond.
Floyd was killed on Memorial Day in 2020, a Monday. Protests started that Tuesday and remained generally peaceful. Then on Wednesday, looters hit the Lake Street Target and arsonists set fire to the adjacent Autozone. The situation deteriorated quickly. It was that day when Frey first called Walz and requested the National Guard. The mayor later told the Star Tribune that the governor hesitated.
But a review that the city commissioned found that city leaders were unfamiliar with the process for requesting the guard’s help. Chad McGinty with the consulting firm Hillard Heintze told the Minneapolis City Council in 2022 that the city did not initially give the guard a detailed action plan.
“The information that’s required by the Guard that’s required to activate personnel, to put them into a civilian situation such as what was occurring in Minneapolis, the information simply wasn’t there on the first day the request was made,” McGinty said.
Walz called up the first contingent of soldiers on Thursday, May 28, but not in time to keep rioters from overrunning the Third Precinct police station that night. By Friday evening, military vehicles were a visible presence, with many of the soldiers assigned to protect firefighters.
At a 1:30 a.m. news conference on Saturday, Walz conceded that he’d underestimated the size of the crowds and their level of aggression.
“Quite candidly right now, we do not have the numbers. We cannot arrest people when we’re trying to hold ground because of the sheer size, the dynamics, and the wanton violence,” Walz said in 2020.
That morning, Walz announced the deployment of another 1,000 soldiers, bringing the total to 1,500. It was the largest Minnesota National Guard deployment since World War II.