JULIO ROSAS: Reflecting On The Minneapolis Riots Four Years Later.
The evening before my flight to Minneapolis, I covered a BLM protest in downtown Los Angeles. Tensions were high. An American flag was burned. LAPD donned on riot gear and pushed angry protesters away from city hall.
But that paled in comparison to what I had witnessed on May 28. The radical elements within the city and beyond seemed to be converging on Lake Street and Minnehaha Avenue. Beyond a Minneapolis police convoy that quickly retreated just as quickly as they appeared, because of the mob attacking them, there was no authority to keep people safe. If you needed help, you were on your own.
It all culminated when the Third Precinct was attacked after the sun went down. Despite holding onto the building for days against the odds, officers were about to be overrun. Multiple times I heard rioters wanting to set the building on fire with the officers still inside. Mayor Jacob Frey ordered the officers to evacuate.
To highlight how much the rioters wanted to keep the officers trapped in the building’s perimeter, someone chained the back gate, forcing police to ram it to allow the evacuation to continue. After the officers were gone, the rioters’ dream became reality after the infamous fire was set. The crowd became ecstatic at the flames. They took selfies with the fire in the background. Fireworks were set off in the air.
While the riots had been going on in the Twin Cities for days, this was a turning point that sent a dangerous precedent: If BLM rioters were violent enough and had the numbers, they could get weak-kneed politicians to back down. It set a high bar for the rest of the rioters across the nation to reach, but Minneapolis showed them it was very possible to reach.
It was also a tactical error on the city’s part. Now that the rioters’ main target was gone, they did not go home. Instead, they spread out to create more victims in the name of social justice.
Thinking about that crazy night, I laughed how I naively believed that first wave of riots were going to be the only ones for that summer. By the end of that summer, I went from thinking, “Oh, this will end soon,” to “Will these ever stop?”
And they did (well, at least for a while), as the left finally gave up on their pipe dream fantasies of defunding the police, reducing the length of prison sentences and shrinking the size of jails:
Related: Four years ago, today:
