Minnesota authorities are investigating whether violent Minneapolis riots are connected to white supremacy.
During a Saturday press conference, Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety John Harrington said the state is analyzing information about those arrested during the violent riots in Minneapolis in reaction to George Floyd’s death, speculating they may be related to white supremacists.
“We have seen things like white supremacist organizers who have posted things on platforms about coming to Minnesota. We are checking to see do the folks that we have made arrests on and that we have information, are they connected to those platforms,” Harrington said. “We have seen flyers about protests where folks have talked about they’re going to get their ‘loot on’ tonight.”
Harrington said authorities are monitoring to determine if there are organized criminal attempts to incite violence in the middle of protests. Minnesota mayors Melvin Carter and Jacob Frey also noted to reporters on Saturday that those arrested in Friday’s riots were either not residents of the cities or state.
“I want to be very, very clear. The people that are doing this are not Minneapolis residents. They are coming in largely from outside of the city, from outside of the region, to prey on everything that we have built over the last several decades,” Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, said about arrests made in his city. “This is no longer about verbal expression. This is about violence. And we need to make sure that it stops.”
“Because we had a relative stillness in St. Paul, we didn’t make an enormous number of arrests. But every single person we arrested, I’m told, was from out of state,” Carter, the mayor of St. Paul, said about the violence after a curfew was put into effect.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison also echoed Harrington’s speculation during an interview on MSNBC with host Joy Reid, saying there appears to be “real, legitimate evidence” that a foreign operation is being used to “tarnish” peaceful protests in reaction to George Floyd’s death.
“We need an investigation on who these people are and their identity,” Ellison said, citing a 2015 case where white supremacists shot at peaceful protesters who reacted to the death of Jamar Clark in Minneapolis. “We know that this kind of thing happens, is planned. We have no good reason to believe that it’s not happening now. It needs to be a separate and independent investigation.”
