Mayors in Minnesota said everyone arrested in riots on Friday were either not from the state or from their cities.
During a Saturday press conference, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey condemned the nationwide, violent riots occurring since Tuesday in reaction to George Floyd’s death but highlighted that those arrested in their respective areas were not residents.
“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 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 last night, I’m told, was from out of state,” Carter said about violence in his city after a curfew was put into effect.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison reacted to the conference on MSNBC shortly after 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 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.”
