Walz faces new scrutiny over 2020 riots: Was he too slow to send troops?

MINNEAPOLIS — The protests had turned into riots.

Two days after a police officer murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck, the mayor of Minneapolis called the governor, Tim Walz, asking for help. Police had lost control of the situation. The city needed the Minnesota National Guard.

That same Wednesday evening, May 27, 2020, the city’s police chief, Medaria Arradondo, sent an email to the state commissioner of public safety conveying a similar message, asking the National Guard for “immediate assistance with significant civil unrest.” He said 600 troops were needed.

It was not until that Thursday afternoon that Walz, a Democrat, signed an executive order activating the guard. That night, before large numbers of troops were deployed, rioters set a police station on fire. And it took until Saturday, five days after Floyd had died and three days after Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis had requested National Guard assistance, for the situation to begin to calm.

Ever since, the governor’s response to those requests has been under scrutiny, even more so now that Vice President Kamala Harris has selected Walz as her running mate.

Walz, a National Guard veteran, was in charge when his state became the center of a searing discussion about racism and police violence, and as it experienced some of the country’s worst unrest in a generation.

In that moment, he had to decide whether and how to use the military, providing insight into how he might perform during a global crisis as vice president or, possibly, as president and commander in chief.

A series of official reports about that week found failures at all levels of government, including some on the governor’s part.

Walz has said little recently about his response, and he declined to be interviewed for this article. But a reconstruction of the days after Floyd’s murder reveals that Walz did not immediately anticipate how widespread and violent the riots would become and did not mobilize the guard when first asked to do so. Interviews, documents and public statements also show that, as the violence increased, Walz moved to take command of the response, flooding Minneapolis with state personnel who helped restore order.

Monday, May 25 – Wednesday, May 27 — George Floyd is murdered

In 2020, Walz, a former high school teacher and member of Congress, was just over a year into his tenure as governor when COVID-19 began spreading widely in the United States. Like many governors, he shut down schools and required certain businesses to close. He told residents to stay home.

“These last few weeks have been difficult, but it’s only going to get harder,” Walz said in his April 2020 state of the state address, which he delivered virtually from home. “Long hours of darkness lie ahead of us.”

His words were prophetic. On Monday, May 25, outside a convenience store on the south side of Minneapolis, a white police officer knelt for more than nine minutes on the neck of Floyd, who was Black. Other officers helped hold Floyd down. Bystanders pleaded with them to stop.

Footage of the killing spread rapidly. Protesters demanded criminal charges against the officers. Some of them, later joined by a majority of Minneapolis City Council members, called for defunding or dismantling the police.

On Tuesday afternoon, the day after the murder, thousands of protesters converged at the spot where Floyd had been killed. Nearby at the Third Police Precinct building, where the officer who murdered Floyd had been assigned, demonstrators damaged fencing, broke windows, spray-painted squad cars and surrounded officers trying to respond to calls for service. On a commercial strip, looting was underway.

By Wednesday afternoon, the governor held a news conference. He discussed Minnesota’s latest COVID statistics and spoke emotionally about Floyd’s death. The video, he said, “made me physically ill.”

He condemned violence, but noted that many protesters were peaceful.

“They’re outraged,” Walz said of the demonstrators. “I don’t think they’re there to engage in the violence or to have that, and I think we need to be smart, make sure we don’t set up situations that cause those clashes.”

But looting spread across Minneapolis. The Third Police Precinct was once again under attack. Members of the Minnesota State Patrol, an agency that ultimately answers to Walz, arrived in larger numbers to assist with protecting the precinct.

That evening, as the unrest grew, Arradondo of the Minneapolis police called Frey, seeking the National Guard. Frey then dialed the governor.

Records and past public statements show that officials in City Hall described the governor’s initial response as noncommittal.

The mayor declined this month to rehash specifics of the timeline. That night, though, records obtained by The New York Times show, Frey considered sending out a news release detailing his request: “I’ve reached out to Gov. Walz to request the assistance of the Minnesota National Guard to help de-escalate and prevent any further conflict.”

But Walz did not agree to send the guard that night. Looting and arson continued. The mayor never sent that news release.

Thursday, May 28 — ­Walz calls in the National Guard

By the next morning, records and testimony show, Walz’s administration was preparing to deploy the guard.

Top-ranking officials in the Minnesota National Guard were told that morning to expect a mobilization. That afternoon, Walz signed an executive order activating soldiers.

But it took time for guard members to arrive from different parts of the state. As protests continued in Minneapolis, the Police Department abandoned its Third Precinct building, and protesters set it on fire.

“I think some of us, myself probably included, had an image of a whole bunch of folks in a barracks waiting to jump out of bed, pile in a Jeep,” said Melvin Carter, the mayor of St. Paul, who said he had called Walz requesting National Guard support that Thursday as rioting spread into his city.

He added, “I learned that that’s not the way the world works.”

Carter recalled that Walz had verbally approved the request on the phone but had asked for detailed information, in writing, about how the troops would be used. Guard members ultimately helped protect the State Capitol grounds and places such as the water treatment facility in St. Paul, allowing the police to focus on other tasks.

By the end of Thursday night, about 450 guard members were either on the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul or helping mobilize other troops, a fraction of the more than 7,100 guard members who would be deployed by that weekend.

In Minneapolis, there were also questions about how the guard would be used. State leaders were frustrated with limited details from city officials and sought more specific plans. There was also concern about whether sending uniformed troops into the streets would help calm tensions or inflame them further.

More fundamentally, as a report commissioned by the city later found, there seemed to be confusion about what constituted a formal request for guard assistance. With in-person work made more dangerous by the pandemic, communication between departments did not always follow existing emergency management plans.

Still, Walz’s initial delay in mobilizing the guard would become one of his most-scrutinized decisions.

Frey, a Democrat who supports Walz’s vice presidential bid, said in an interview that “when you’re seeking help, there’s always a level of impatience, especially when your city is going through the most trying circumstances it ever has.”

Paul Gazelka, who at the time led the Republican majority in the Minnesota Senate, said Walz should have sent the guard as soon as Frey made the request. A report compiled by the Republican-controlled state Senate in 2020 said Walz had failed in many aspects of his response and suggested that personal sympathy toward the protesters might have clouded his judgment. “In a crisis, he does not respond well — he froze,” Gazelka said of the governor.

And in a state legislative hearing in 2020 investigating the state’s response, a lawmaker asked Lt. Gen. Jon Jensen, who at the time was the Minnesota National Guard’s adjutant general, whether a speedier deployment might have brought the situation under control faster.

“If we had done things differently on Tuesday, as it relates to numbers, as it relates to tactics, could we avoided some of this?” Jensen said in response. “My unprofessional opinion as it relates to law enforcement is yes. My professional military opinion is yes.”

Friday, May 29 – Saturday, May 30 — The state takes charge

The activation of the guard brought no immediate relief.

Around midnight, as Thursday turned to Friday, President Donald Trump inflamed protesters with a post on social media. He wrote that he had just spoken to Walz “and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

Early Friday morning, a CNN crew in Minneapolis was arrested by state troopers on live television, an episode for which Walz quickly apologized and took responsibility.

Tensions between city and state leaders were also spilling into the open. As he described widespread lawlessness in a news conference Friday morning, Walz called aspects of the local government response “an abject failure.” The state, he said, would be taking the lead.

That day, state agents arrested the officer who had knelt on Floyd. Walz ordered a curfew in Minneapolis and St. Paul. State troopers used less-lethal munitions on a crowd.

Peace remained elusive. In the early morning hours of Saturday, Walz would say officials had been overwhelmed by crowds.

“Quite candidly, right now, we do not have the numbers,” Walz said in a news conference. “We cannot arrest people when we’re trying to hold ground because of the sheer size, the dynamics and the wanton violence that’s coming out there.”

A few hours later, he announced a full mobilization of the Minnesota National Guard, the first deployment of that scale since World War II. By Saturday night, the unrest began to wane.

Aftermath — Walz’s star rises; questions remain

When Walz ran for reelection in 2022, his Republican opponent tried to make his handling of the riots a major liability. It did not work.

Walz won a second term by 8 percentage points, and voters handed full control of the state Legislature to Democrats, giving them the ability to embark on an ambitious agenda of progressive lawmaking.

But while the conversation in Minnesota has moved beyond the riots, and while Walz’s political career has thrived, the governor has often been circumspect about his actions during those days.

When local journalists examined the sequence of events, his office sometimes opted to send a statement from a spokesperson rather than make the governor available for an interview. When asked at a recent news conference whether he wishes he could have changed anything about his response, Walz answered briefly and in general terms.

“I simply believe that we try to do the best we can,” Walz said.

In the years since the riots, opinions of the governor’s performance have hardened, often along partisan lines. Carter, a Democrat, described Walz during those days as present and responsive and said, “I cannot imagine going through that week without him as governor.”

State Sen. Warren Limmer, a Republican who helped lead the legislative investigation of the state’s response, said that “it was obvious to me that he froze under pressure, under a calamity, as people’s properties were being burned down.”

Trump has sought to make the riots a campaign issue and has claimed incorrectly that the guard was ultimately deployed under his authority rather than Walz’s. During a recent rally in Minnesota, Trump said, “I couldn’t get your governor to act.”

Trump seemed to have a more charitable take at the time. ABC News reported last week that it had obtained audio of the president telling a group of governors in early June, as Minneapolis was beginning to calm, that “I fully agree with the way he handled it the last couple of days.”

The defense secretary at the time, Mark Esper, wrote in his book, “A Sacred Oath,” that he recalled citing “the positive example of Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota — a Democrat — for the actions he took days earlier to calm things down in his state.”

In a statement, Teddy Tschann, a spokesperson for Walz, said that “Gov. Walz took action and deployed the National Guard to keep our city safe — Donald Trump did not.”

But no one could claim the week was a triumph of governance. A police officer murdered a Black man in the street. Looting, arson and chaos left residents terrified and businesses destroyed. For days, local and state officials struggled to adequately respond.

After-action reports commissioned by the city of Minneapolis, the Minnesota Department of Public Safety and the Minnesota Senate found widespread shortcomings by state and local officials. But a set of talking points circulated internally in Walz’s office, and posted online by the Minnesota Senate, offered perhaps the cleanest summary.

“There are few good options,” that memo read, “and the governor has weighed many difficult decisions.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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