Harris VP pick Tim Walz under microscope for response to 2020 George Floyd protests in Minneapolis

The announcement of Tim Walz as Kamala Harris’s running mate has shaken up the 2024 presidential race once again, and it’s also turning the clock back to 2020 when the country was riven by protests following the police murder of George Floyd.

Walz was governor when police in his state pinned Floyd to the ground by his neck for more than nine minutes, sparking massive, sometimes violent, protests and looting across the Minneapolis area and the country.

Republicans, predictably, have already seized on this moment in Walz’s history, painting him as another soft-on-crime liberal who lost control of their city.

“They make an interesting tag team, because of course, Tim Walz allowed rioters to burn down Minneapolis in the summer of 2020,” JD Vance, Walz’s rival on the GOP ticket, told Fox News on Tuesday.

Those on the left, meanwhile, found plenty to take issue with as well, criticizing heavy police tactics during the protests.

So, how did Tim Walz respond to Floyd’s death?

The most controversial part of the governor’s response to the tragedy came in the days that followed, as protests escalated into looting and arson in parts of Minneapolis, a conflagration that ultimately destroyed 1,500 businesses and buildings and caused an estimated $500m in damage. Parties still disagree over whether Walz activated the state’s National Guard too late, allowing Minneapolis to suffer.

On Wednesday, May 27, two days after Floyd’s murder, Minneapolis Jacob Frey and then-police chief Medaria Arradondo both reached out to the governor’s office, requesting the Guard deploy in the city to stem the growing chaos.

"We expressed the seriousness of the situation. The urgency was clear," Frey said the following month, as criticisms mounted of the city’s response to the protests.

"He did not say yes...He said he would consider it."

The Guard wasn’t activated until the following afternoon, and even then they didn’t arrive in time to stop a Minneapolis Police Department precinct from burning down that day.

State officials say Walz hadn’t gotten specific enough details about how Minneapolis planned to deploy the state troops.

“As a 24-year veteran of the Minnesota National Guard, Governor Walz knows how much planning goes into a successful mission,” his office told the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2020. “That’s why he pushed the City of Minneapolis for details and a strategy. He ordered the Minnesota National Guard to start preparing Thursday morning which allowed them to deploy to both St. Paul and Minneapolis that evening, per the Mayors’ requests.”

He also faulted city leaders like Frey, calling their actions an “abject failure.”

At the same time as he was beefing up the state response to the protests, he was also calling on fellow leaders to turn down the temperature, and criticizing Trump for tweeting “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” which many interpreted as a coded threat to protesters of all stripes.

“In a moment that is so volatile, anything we do to add fuel to that fire is really, really challenging,” Walz said at the time.

The governor also leaned into an “outside agitators” narrative that some protest leaders felt delegitimized their complaints with racist policing in Minneapolis and elsewhere.

“Let’s be very clear: The situation in Minneapolis is no longer in any way about the murder of George Floyd. It is about attacking civil society, instilling fear and disrupting our great cities,” Walz said a few days into the protest, announcing that many of those arrested were from outside of Minneapolis

Some Republican state leaders argued that it was Walz’s liberal sympathies that slowed his decision to deploy the Guard, in what would eventually be the largest activation of state troops since WWII.

“It was obvious to me that he froze under pressure, under a calamity, as people’s properties were being burned down,” State Senator Warren Limmer, a Republican, recently told The New York Times of the period.

“Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and elected local 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,” a 2020 report from the state senate, then controlled by the GOP, found.

A 2022 after-action review, commissioned by Minneapolis, found fault across the response to the protests, describing how police and fire officials neglected their own emergency plans and didn’t set up an adequate command structure. They also found that Minneapolis police didn’t keep any records of the chemical and riot control rounds they used on protests, injuring an estimated 45 people, despite policies requiring a use of force review for each such projectile.

The report also described city leaders unfamiliar with the process for requesting National Guard troops.

“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,” according to the review.

Others on the ground, meanwhile, say it was heavy-handed policing that escalated the protests in the first place.

“One of the city’s employees has just murdered someone in the most brutal fashion,” he said, “and for you to then pretend like you’re the victim and you’re under siege, to fire mace and tear gas and rubber bullets in response to water bottles being thrown — you have at that point 100 percent antagonized the situation,” Minneapolis city council member Jeremiah Ellison said in 2020.

After the protests subsided, Walz won praise for helping to pass multiple police and criminal justice reform packages in 2020 and 2023, which banned chokeholds, required police to intervene in use of excessive force, and reduced the state’s parole population.

He also tapped his attorney general to prosecute Derek Chauvin, one of the officers involved in killing Floyd.

The move was seen as an important reason for the case’s success, which marked only the second time an on-duty Minneapolis police officer in the department’s over 150-year history was charged with murder, and the first time involving an officer who is white.