TRUMP’S REMARKS ESCALATE CRISIS
Minneapolis: Former officer who kneeled on black man charged with murder
President Donald Trump issued a violent ultimatum to protesters in Minneapolis on Friday and inserted himself in a harshly divisive fashion into the growing crisis there, attacking the city’s Democratic mayor and raising the specter that the military could use armed force to suppress riots that erupted after the death of George Floyd, a black man, at the hands of a white police officer. That officer, Derek Chauvin, 44, was arrested on murder charges Friday and accused in court papers of ignoring another officer’s concerns about the handcuffed black man who died after pleading that he could not breathe.
An attorney for Floyd’s family welcomed the arrest, but said he expected a more serious murder charge and wanted all the officers arrested.
Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman said more charges were possible. He said the investigation into three other officers who were at the scene continues, but authorities “felt it appropriate to focus on the most dangerous perpetrator.”
Chauvin allegedly disregarded the worries of the other officer, who wanted to roll Floyd onto his side, according to the criminal complaint.
The papers also said that an autopsy revealed nothing to support strangulation as the cause of death. The exam concluded that the combined effects of being restrained, potential intoxicants in Floyd’s system and his underlying health issues, including heart disease, likely con
tributed to his death, according to the complaint. Floyd’s family was seeking an independent autopsy.
Officials in Minneapolis, after three nights of escalating unrest, decided on Thursday to enact an 8 p.m. curfew in Minneapolis.
Protesters began gathering around the Bay Area Friday afternoon to demonstrate.
Hundreds of people walked through downtown San Jose in a protest that began outside of City Hall on Friday, stopping traffic on city streets and on Highway 101 while chanting “Black Lives Matter.” Many of the protesters were high school and college-age students who wore face coverings and held signs with the words “I can’t breathe” and “Justice for George Floyd.”
A large Friday evening demonstration in Oakland was expected to begin at 8 at Frank Ogawa Plaza. It’s billed as the Minneapolis Solidarity Demonstration and is one of at least three protests planned in the city this weekend.
Trump’s threat to have unruly protesters shot — “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” — stirred an outcry in Minnesota and from his national critics, with his Democratic challenger in the presidential race, Joe Biden, expressing indignation that Trump was “calling for violence against American citizens during a moment of pain.”
The president framed his comments in explicitly ideological terms, as a denunciation of a liberal local government that had failed to maintain order, before abruptly retreating from them some 14 hours later in a slapdash effort to claim he had been misinterpreted. At an event in the White House Rose Garden on Friday afternoon, he made no mention of events in Minneapolis, took no questions and offered no acknowledgment of the spiraling conflagration over his initial outbursts on Twitter.
“I can’t stand back & watch this happen to a great American City, Minneapolis,” Trump wrote shortly before 1 a.m. Friday. “A total lack of leadership. Either the very weak Radical Left Mayor, Jacob Frey, get his act together and bring the City under control, or I will send in the National Guard & get the job done right.”
Trump’s mix of demands and attacks came despite the fact that Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota had already activated and deployed the National Guard in response to a request from local leaders.
Trump began talking about the unrest in Minneapolis overnight as cable news showed a police station engulfed in a fire set by protesters. The four city police officers involved in the death of Floyd were assigned to that station.
Floyd was killed Monday after one of the officers, who were responding to a call about an alleged counterfeit bill used at a store, knelt on his neck while he was handcuffed and lying face down on the ground. Floyd called out, “I can’t breathe.” The officer, Derek Chauvin, and the three others were fired the next day.
In saying “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” Trump echoed a phrase coined by a Miami police chief in the 1960s about crackdowns on black neighborhoods during times of unrest. Walter Headley, the Miami police chief in 1967, warned that young black men who he called “hoodlums” had “taken advantage of the civil rights campaign,” and added, “We don’t mind being accused of police brutality.”
Shortly before his event in the Rose Garden — a statement announcing punitive measures against China — Trump tweeted in a puzzling construction that his remarks overnight had been “a fact, not a statement” and said he had not been urging further violence but rather describing it as a natural consequence of looting.
On Friday afternoon, Biden condemned the president’s remarks, without naming Trump.
“This is no time for incendiary tweets,” Biden said over a livestream from his basement. “It’s no time to encourage violence.”
“The original sin of this country still stains our nation today, and sometimes we manage to overlook it,” Biden said.