GOP critics say Tim Walz 'let Minnesota burn' in 2020 protests. Here's what happened

Tim Walz joining the Democratic Party’s presidential ticket has prompted renewed scrutiny of how the Minnesota governor handled the protests following George Floyd's death.

Opponents of the pick by Vice President Kamala Harris wasted no time bringing up the demonstrations that began in Walz’s state and grew increasingly violent during the week that followed Floyd’s killing at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.

Four years later, the images of Minneapolis in May 2020 remain striking. Flames bursting from the city’s 3rd Precinct police headquarters and raging inside a looted AutoZone store. A protester illuminated by fire carrying an upside-down U.S. flag, a sign of distress, down a burning street.

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Those snapshots were referenced in a post on X, formerly Twitter, by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who said Walz “sat by and let Minneapolis burn.” Similarly, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan posted that Walz “let rioters and looters burn a police station to the ground in 2020," and Minnesota Republican Party chair David Hann said Walz “did nothing” to stop the riots.

Follow-up interviews with these critics showed a focus on how and when Walz activated the National Guard, an authority reserved for the governor of each state.

In an email to USA TODAY, Hann said Walz "waited three days before activating the National Guard" and claimed the governor was reluctant to oppose Democrats' characterization of the protests as peaceful. Jordan spokesperson Russell Dye referenced a New York Post article detailing an October 2020 report from a Republican-controlled Minnesota Senate committee that states Walz "failed to act" during the riots and specifically criticized the speed of the National Guard deployment. USA TODAY reached out to spokespeople for DeSantis and for Walz's gubernatorial office and the Harris-Walz campaign but did not immediately receive responses.

Let’s look back at the chain of events during that tumultuous week in May 2020.

Fact check: Gov. Walz does not need to resign after VP selection

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Protests began after video of Floyd death went viral

It started on May 25, 2020 – Memorial Day, a Monday – when the Minneapolis Police Department received a call that someone spent a possible counterfeit $20 bill on cigarettes at a convenience store.

Responding officers came across a 46-year-old Black man, later identified as Floyd, and handcuffed him. He was placed on the ground, and Officer Derek Chauvin proceeded to hold his knee on Floyd's neck for more than eight minutes while ignoring Floyd's protests that he couldn't breathe. Floyd was declared dead shortly thereafter.

A bystander shared a video of his killing on social media – sparking the first of the protests.

“By the time we get to Tuesday, we’re already seeing some emergent conflicts between protesters and the police, but they’re relatively small-scale,” said Michelle Phelps, a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota and the author of a book about policing in Minneapolis that examines the protests.

But by that Wednesday, things changed. The demonstrations became more violent, with officers firing noise devices and projectiles toward crowds of protesters and fires breaking out at the AutoZone and other locations.

“Wednesday is when things really started picking up,” said Rachel Moran, an associate professor of law at St. Thomas University and an expert on police accountability. “And then Thursday morning, he calls in the National Guard. … It actually happened relatively quickly. It was just, the protests were massive, and Wednesday … I think that’s when everyone in Minneapolis, they’re realizing, ‘OK, this is going to be bigger than what we’ve seen.’”

That prompted Jacob Frey, the Democratic mayor of Minneapolis, to call Walz on Wednesday and discuss activating National Guard troops. The governor – not then-President Donald Trump, as some have wrongly claimed – activated the Guard that Thursday.

But with only 90 troops on the ground in the Twin Cities later that night, The Star Tribune reported, protesters set fire to the 3rd Precinct station. That led Trump to call protesters “thugs” and vow that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts" in an X post the following day. Walz mobilized the full Guard that Saturday – its first full mobilization since World War II – and conceded his administration underestimated the size of the crowds of protesters. By Sunday, even as protests spread across the U.S., the violence in Minneapolis had calmed.

Walz activated Guard after written request, not mayor’s phone call

One of the most powerful tools at a governor's disposal is the National Guard, and it's largely up to him to decide when and to what degree to use it. Experts say the rhetoric aimed at Walz's National Guard activation oversimplifies a chaotic and complicated moment.

“I don’t think city officials or the governor knew exactly what to do,” Moran said. “But that’s very different than saying he stood by and let it burn. I absolutely wouldn’t agree with that."

John Harrington, the state's public safety commissioner at the time, told MinnPost in 2023 that officials in Minneapolis typically do not request state assistance for protests "because most of the time, Minneapolis handles their own business." So when state help became necessary, the parties involved weren't well-versed in how to make that happen.

The question of who to blame for the speed of the National Guard response, then, hinges on a bit of bureaucracy: Walz couldn't activate the guard until Frey formally asked him to do so, an expert said, and the two leaders disagree on when that request was made.

"There's some back and forth between the mayor and the governor. So, the mayor had to formally request the National Guard activation, because until that point, it was the city that was responsible for managing the unrest," said Phelps, the sociology professor.

Frey said his call to the governor that Wednesday evening qualified as a formal request and claimed Walz was "hesitating." Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo asked for Guard troops in an email sent that night to Harrington, the Star Tribune of Minneapolis reported.

But National Guard mobilization guidelines reference a request from a mayor, not a police chief. And Walz's office has countered that the mayor misunderstood the requirements of a formal request, saying Walz recognized the written letter he received a day later as that request. The Guard was activated that afternoon.

Harrington characterized Frey’s phone call as vague, and an outside firm that reviewed the response largely agreed. A request for Guard assistance must include specific details typically found in an operations plan or an incident action plan that the firm said in its 2022 report “we did not receive and that we determined through interviews did not exist.”

In its report released three weeks before Election Day in 2020 and criticized by Democrats as the product of "one-sided hearings," the GOP-led state Senate Joint Transportation and Judiciary and Public Safety Committee blamed Walz for poor decision-making and said he wanted to "wait for assignments" from the city before mobilizing the Guard. The document paraphrases Harrington as saying during a hearing that officials should have been "quicker to bring people in" and that the state could have been more "successful" had it mobilized the right personnel and used the right tactics – without specifying what those should have been.

"There were a lot of imperfect attempts to figure out how to respond," Moran said. "Part of the city did burn, for sure. I don't disagree with the actual results. But it wasn't a matter of people standing by."

Additionally, increasing the police presence prematurely ran the risk of introducing a different set of problems. Moran noted, "These were protests about the police, and so the presence of law enforcement was, in a way, antagonizing."

Experts also said attacking Walz over the timing of the Guard's activation oversimplifies the logistical challenge of transporting them and providing them with a mission. Gen. Jon Jensen, the Guard’s former adjutant general, later testified that only 700 of the state’s 13,000 troops had riot training.

“It takes a while to get all of those troops on the ground,” Phelps said.

That delay was illustrated Thursday, when more than 500 soldiers were activated but reports indicated fewer than 100 troops were on the ground. That number on the ground grew to 700 on Friday and swelled to 4,500 by Saturday, as Walz activated the full Guard for the first time since WWII. More than 7,000 were on duty by Sunday as the violence eased.

“To say that he let Minnesota or Minneapolis burn is just a wild misconstruing of the facts," Phelps said. “It was a response to a really unusual set of circumstances, and I think they responded as fast as was reasonably possible, given the scale of the operation."

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Did Tim Walz 'let Minneapolis burn' in 2020? Here's what happened.