When the Twin Cities Burned, Tim Walz Dithered by Ryan Mills
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/when-the-twin-cities-burned-tim-walz-dithered/
It was 6:29 p.m. on the last Wednesday in May 2020, when Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey phoned Minnesota governor Tim Walz. Riots had erupted the day before over the police killing of George Floyd, and the city was overwhelmed.
Frey pleaded with Walz to call in the National Guard.
Less than three hours later, the city made a written request to Walz’s office for 600 guardsmen to help quell the chaos that was engulfing the Twin Cities.
Rioters were burning buildings. They were shooting at police officers and attacking them with Molotov cocktails, fireworks, bricks, and bottles filled with cement. At least three people died during the riots.
Faced with one of the most serious public emergencies in Minnesota history, Walz froze.
“He did not say yes,” Frey said of his request to Walz. “He said he would consider it.”
The far-left governor did not agree to call in the Guard until late the next day, according to a blistering postmortem, the Review of Lawlessness and Government Responses to Minnesota’s 2020 Riots, released in October 2020 by the Minnesota senate.
Instead of sending in the 600 guardsmen that Minneapolis had requested, Walz sent in only 100 late that Thursday. The Guard wasn’t fully mobilized until Saturday, four days after the first building burned, according to the senate review.
Four years after those riots caused over $500 million in property damage in Minnesota, Kamala Harris on Tuesday selected the 60-year-old Walz to be her running mate in a November faceoff with former president Donald Trump. For many, the 2020 riots, which began in Minnesota but expanded across much of the country, was their first exposure to Walz, a former teacher and congressman, who apparently projects Midwest dad vibes.
By most accounts, it was not a good first impression.
For days, Walz expected the riots to die down organically, a mistake he eventually owned up to. “I will take responsibility for underestimating the wanton destruction and the sheer size of this crowd,” a frustrated Walz acknowledged days after the rioting began.
He falsely suggested at one point that the overwhelming majority of the violence, as much as 80 percent, was being committed by outsiders — anarchists, white supremacists, even drug cartels — who’d descended on the city to sew chaos. It wasn’t true.
He engaged in finger-pointing, blaming Frey and St. Paul mayor Melvin Carter for not doing enough to protect their cities, calling their response an “abject failure,” according to a report in the Star Tribune newspaper. He blamed the mayors for not wanting the National Guard to be deployed, and waffled on whether deploying the Guard was a smart move, considering that the riots had been prompted by police violence against a black man.
During a press conference on May 29, 2020, three days after the riots had begun, Walz, a retired guardsman, lamented that “the very tools that we need to use to get control to make sure that buildings aren’t burned and that rule of law collapses are those very institutional tools that have led to that grief and pain,” referring to the grief and pain of minority communities. While the Twin Cities burned, Walz contemplated how “children of people who look like me run to the police” during crises, while “others have to run from” the police.
“I just want to be clear,” he said during that press conference, “there’s philosophically an argument to be made that an armed presence on the ground in the midst of where we just had a police killing is seen as a catalyst.”
According to the senate report, before deploying the National Guard, Walz’s staff quizzed the Guard’s leaders about its “diversity and inclusion training,” which communities the guardsmen would be coming from, and if they would be “wearing riot gear.”
Walz’s slow response to the riots drew concerns from local media outlets. “Where is the Governor????????” tweeted a reporter with KARE 11 News on May 30.
Early in the riots, a reporter with WCCO stated that “We have not heard from our city leadership nor Governor Walz about taming down this violence.” Another KARE 11 reporter stated that “the city, the state needs to hear from our leaders,” and that “people are getting incredibly scared,” according to the senate report.
Republican lawmakers were frustrated over the partisan nature of Walz’s response. According to the senate report, Walz’s office worked solely with the Democratic state house of representatives, rather than with both legislative bodies and both parties. “Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and elected leaders identified with the causes promoted by the demonstrators, causing them to lose sight of their responsibility to protect the public from criminal acts committed during the riots,” the senate report concluded.
Days into the riots, then-state house minority leader Kurt Daudt, a Republican, released a statement complaining about a “disturbing lack of leadership” from Walz.
John Phelan and Bill Walsh with the conservative Center for the American Experiment think tank have accused Walz of being “terrified of upsetting his party’s activist base which sympathized with the rioters, for whom Kamala Harris raised money.” Walz, they wrote, dismissed the rioters as merely “19-year-old crooks.”
Then-state senate majority leader Paul Gazelka, also a Republican, was one of Walz’s most outspoken critics during the riots, particularly over slow-walking the Guard deployment.
“Above all else, this is a failure in leadership, and that leadership rests on governor Walz’s shoulders. The governor cannot blame the mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul,” Gazelka told the Star Tribune, saying that Walz should have immediately deployed thousands of guardsmen, not hundreds. “It was obvious that the Minneapolis mayor was in over his head. And I think that’s where the governor needed to respond with emergency powers and commander-in-chief over our National Guard — the National Guard was simply waiting for a plan of action.”
At one point, Gazelka reached out to the Trump White House for help from Trump. “I said, ‘Minnesota needs you,’” he told the Star Tribune. “Our governor is not able to keep the peace. And we need help before our city burns down.”
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