Absolutely not the case

Tim Walz Was No Protest Leader

“It’s absolutely not the case that the governor encouraged the rioters.”

Eamon Whalen

Earlier this month, Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance made a bold claim about his new opponent: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vance said, “is a guy who says he stands for public safety but actively encouraged the rioters who burned down Minneapolis.” 

This has become a common talking point. Walz’s Republican opponent during his reelection campaign in 2022 made a similar pitch. And since the Minnesota governor’s selection as Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, the claim has gone national.

In this case, it was made in Vance’s usual exaggerated tone (a mode the nation has come to know well in the last few weeks of trollish comments). But, even beyond Vance, there are many on the right who say that, as governor, Walz allowed—or even “encouraged”—rioting in Minneapolis in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. The assertion is that Walz hesitated to activate the National Guard, and by the time troops arrived in Minneapolis, numerous buildings had burned—including the 3rd Precinct police station.

“It’s absolutely not the case that the governor encouraged the rioters,” said Michelle Phelps, a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and author of The Minneapolis Reckoning, a new book about the politics of policing in the city before and after George Floyd’s murder. Such an assertion is a hackneyed ploy, Phelps says, to “affiliate Governor Walz with the most extreme end of the people who were in the streets in 2020.” (Vance did not return a request for comment.)

What Walz actually did after Floyd’s murder made Minnesota the epicenter of a national reckoning on racism and police violence, and is more interesting and complicated. He left many disappointed, on the left and right.

As protests began to escalate in the days after Floyd’s murder, Walz was conflicted about how to respect the right to protest while maintaining order. “The ashes are symbolic of decades and generations of pain and anguish unheard, much like we failed to hear George Floyd as he pleaded for his life,” Walz said the morning after the precinct burned. “But I’m asking you to help us…get the streets to a place where we can restore the justice so that those that are expressing rage and anger and demanding justice are heard. Not those who throw firebombs into businesses.”

As Robert Samuels recently reported in the Washington Post, Walz became close with Philando Castile’s mother, Valerie. They worked together on Minnesota’s now-famous universal school lunch policy. Philando was a beloved cafeteria supervisor at J.J. Hill Montessori School in Saint Paul, not far from the governor’s mansion. As far back as 2017, when Walz was preparing his run for governor, Castile warned him of a massive uprising barring action against police killings: “Mark my word, if it keeps on going in this direction, something really bad is going to happen.” 

In the days after Floyd’s murder, with Castile’s words likely in mind, Walz tried “to appeal to the centrist Democrat watching the protests from [the suburbs] who were incredibly relieved when the National Guard was called in, and the people living in Minneapolis, some of whom at that moment were fervently calling for police abolition,” said Phelps. Walz stepped in to send troops but also let much of the authority (or, you could say, blame) stay with local leaders.

Initially, the challenge for a state leader like Walz was whether to override Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and then–Police Chief Medaria Arradondo. In this conflict, the right has latched on to minor infighting among two Democrats hoping to distance themselves from the worst of the protests. 

On May 26, the day after Floyd’s death, protests began outside the corner store where he was murdered. The protesters then marched 2 miles to the 3rd Precinct station where Derek Chauvin worked. MPD officers, soon accompanied by state troopers, awaited them on the roof and began to fire tear gas and less-lethal rounds at protesters, some of whom responded by throwing rocks and water bottles back at officers. In what could be called the iron law of 21st-century protests (cops are called in, their actions lead to bigger protests), videos of the suppression spread widely and brought even more people into the streets the next day.

On the evening of May 27, parts of the crowd began to set fire and loot stores like the Target across the street from the precinct. According to the Star Tribune, that evening Frey called Walz and made a verbal request for the National Guard, and Arradondo emailed state Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington with a request from the MPD. On the morning of May 28, Frey made an official written request. That afternoon, Walz issued an Emergency Executive Order authorizing the deployment of the Minnesota National Guard. 

By nightfall, National Guard members were on the streets of the Twin Cities assisting firefighters and protecting critical infrastructure, but were not involved directly with protesters at the precinct. Frey decided to abandon the precinct to protesters that night, saying “the symbolism of a building cannot outweigh the importance of life.” 

In the waning hours of Thursday night, Walz announced that the state would take control of the response. Early on Friday morning, the National Guard and a consortium of law enforcement agencies rolled in and secured the precinct area.

From there, the dispute between Frey and Walz spilled over into the public domain. After speaking in a private call with him Friday morning, Walz sharply rebuked Frey at a press conference by calling the city’s response “an abject failure.” Frey pushed back, and said that after their call on the evening of May 27, Walz had hesitated to activate the National Guard. The governor’s office hit back, saying the requests were made informally, with directives that were too vague.

Soon after, Walz—like many politicians scrambling to get a handle on the situation—began speaking of “outside agitators.” He falsely claimed that 80 percent of those responsible for the discord were from out of state, and that the protests had taken on a new character. They were no longer about justice for George Floyd, but about “attacking civil society, instilling fear and disrupting our great cities,” he said, before activating the state’s entire National Guard. 

This helped paste over the conflict between a Democratic governor and mayor—and allowed Walz to seal off complaints from a wider coalition of voters. He could be sympathetic to the streets without endorsing their conduct; he could crack down for the suburban voters without alienating the good people marching. As journalist Alyssa Oursler recently put it, in these moments Walz sounded less like the jovial Midwestern Dad that Democrats have come to love over the last month, and more like the 24-year veteran of the National Guard he is.

These conflicts were minor and mostly ignored during the maelstrom of 2020. But now they are being relitigated without much context.

The groundwork for the recent smears on Walz was laid in an October 2020 report authored by the then-Republican-controlled state Senate. In it, senators claimed Walz “failed to act in a timely manner to confront rioters with necessary force due to an ill-conceived philosophical belief that such an action would exacerbate the rioting.” This suggestion to use “necessary force”—call it the Tom Cotton Option—ignores the fact that the Minneapolis Police Department’s response inflicted at least 16 traumatic brain injuries and knocked out several people’s eyeballs, including the journalist Linda Tirado, who is now in palliative care due to complications from her injuries sustained in the protests.

“It felt as if MPD had gone to war with their citizens,” said Robin Wonsley, a longtime organizer turned City Council member who was compelled to run for office after the protests and whose ward overlaps with the areas of Minneapolis most affected by the unrest. “I really can’t even imagine what additional military would’ve done had they been called in immediately, outside of just deepening the grief, trauma, betrayal, and justifiable anger amongst residents.”

In addition to the risk of even greater harm to civilians, the strategy would have likely failed on its own terms of restoring order. “When police come in aggressively, particularly at protests about police violence, that can actually exacerbate the chaos and disorder,” said Phelps. “It’s not clear to me that that harm and damage both by rioters and by the police, would have been minimized had the city or the state come in with more force [right away].”

As the story has been pored over in the national press, the conflict between Frey and Walz has taken a back seat, despite its central role. Walz has avoided specifics. Frey has been diplomatic. “During one of the city and state’s most difficult moments, we collectively tried our best to navigate unprecedented times and to do so quickly,” Frey said in a statement provided to the Washington Post. “Governor Walz is a friend, an excellent governor, and I am proud to support him as Vice President.”

The call for an immediate National Guard deployment also ignores the after-action reports commissioned by the city and state. Both say the problem was not necessarily the need for more police, or troops, but instead a better organized and more humane law enforcement response. 

Violent responses from Minneapolis police, the reports say, contributed to the situation spiraling out of control. The state’s report lays plenty of the blame on law enforcement for escalating the violence. Lawful and unlawful protesters both got beaten, tear-gassed, and hit with less-lethal munitions. In the first few days of unrest, a business owner successfully dissuaded protesters from breaking the windows of a building, but then “it became increasingly hard to do any of that kind of intervention because there was so much tear gas, grenades [distraction devices], and [less-lethal munitions].”

The city’s report—authored by several retired cops at an out-of-state risk management firm—details an “ad-hoc” police response plagued by an inability to follow emergency protocol, vast lapses in communication, a lack of clarity in the command structure, and inconsistent rules of engagement when firing the less-lethal munitions. 

The portrayal of Walz as overly sympathetic toward the protests sounds “laughable” and “totally baseless” to Sheila Nezhad, the development and operations director at the abolitionist organization Interrupting Criminalization, who treated injuries during the protests as a street medic. Nezhad went on to challenge Mayor Frey in the 2021 election, ultimately coming in third after ranked-choice votes were tabulated. “In my campaign, the moments that people remembered the most from 2020 and that were the most traumatizing, was having [military vehicles] roll down their blocks,” said Nezhad. While there were many in the city who felt the situation necessitated a military presence, Nezhad maintains that the National Guard was “absolutely a sore spot for a lot of people.” 

Nezhad also laments that the response to protests did not meaningfully improve after 2020. “Walz didn’t significantly change policing. Instead, he learned how to create a police superpower,” she said. 

In anticipation of the Derek Chauvin trial in 2021, public safety officials from throughout the state introduced Operation Safety Net, a multi-agency law enforcement initiative hatched to prevent a repeat of what happened in 2020. For twelve weeks throughout March and April 2021, thousands of national guard troops and police officers (some of whom came from Ohio and Nebraska) were stationed across the Twin Cities. 

When a police officer shot and killed a young Black man named Daunte Wright during a traffic stop in the midst of the trial, Operation Safety Net was redeployed on the protests in Brooklyn Center, the Minneapolis suburb where Wright was killed. In a standoff outside of the police station, law enforcement made mass arrests and detained journalists without cause while continuing indiscriminate use of less-lethal munitions and tear gas on protesters. A coalition of more than 40 progressive political organizations, including the state’s ACLU chapter, wrote a letter to Walz urging him to immediately disband Operation Safety Net. Later, an investigative series by MIT Technology Review reported that the task force continued long after the Chauvin trial, expanding into “an immensely powerful surveillance machine.”

“This idea that Republicans are hammering away at—that [Walz] is a far-left radical—is really funny in some ways, because the far left radicals in the Twin Cities see him as having done exactly the thing that Republicans are calling for,” said Phelps.  

In fact, ABC News unearthed a conference call from June 2020 that undermines the basic premise of the attack on Walz coming from the Trump campaign. “What they did in Minneapolis was incredible. They went in and dominated, and it happened immediately,” Trump said on June 1, 2020, in a conference call that included Walz. “You called up big numbers and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins,” Trump continued.  “I was very happy with the last couple of days, Tim.” 

Despite this turbulent first term in office, Walz was reelected in 2022 and presided over a historically progressive legislative session that he rode to national stardom culminating in a vice presidential nomination. But that session, Wonsley, the Minneapolis City Council member, argued, wouldn’t have been possible without a grassroots movement that was injected with new energy after the Floyd protests. 

“Peers of mine went on into positions in the state capitol, and translated their experience into legislative victories that Governor Walz now gets to rave about as he’s campaigning across the country,” said Wonsley. While Wonsley is a Democratic Socialist who does not affiliate with the Democratic Party, she reminded me that throughout American history, social movements have always sought to win concessions from imperfect politicians. “Governor Walz might not have responded in the way that some of us wanted him to in the events following George Floyd’s murder, but I think he has the opportunity to look at the great work that his legislature produced and to carry that forward.”