BROOKLYN CENTER, Minnesota — The National Guard and local Minneapolis groups throughout the week de-escalated the protests that followed the police shooting of Daunte Wright, preventing riots similar to those following the death of George Floyd.
The protests, which entered their sixth day on Friday, have tapered off since now-resigned Brooklyn Center police officer Kim Potter shot Wright during a traffic stop on Sunday. That evening, protesters descended on the police station, vandalizing its sign and clashing with officers who shot at them with tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets. Riots soon broke out, and looters ravaged a strip mall and several other businesses about 2 miles away.
Most of those stores are still closed, some with no timeline on when they will reopen. Employees at the Brooklyn Center Walmart on Thursday afternoon turned away shoppers and told the Washington Examiner that the store is still cleaning up from the looting that stretched early into Monday morning. The Brooklyn Center police station, too, has been increasingly fortified throughout the week, with city workers on Thursday setting up concrete barriers and a second fence to encircle a perimeter built earlier in the week.
But, at the same time, each night of protests has attracted smaller crowds — and resulted in fewer violent confrontations. Police arrested more than 40 people on Monday night and more than 60 on Tuesday, but they only arrested 24 on Wednesday. No arrests were made on Thursday, according to Operation Safety Net, a coalition of National Guard and local law enforcement groups that was created after the Floyd riots.
DAUNTE WRIGHT SLAYING SPARKS NEW ‘DEFUND THE POLICE’ PUSH
The decrease in arrests came after a robust response from the Minnesota National Guard, which was already stationed in Minneapolis for the trial for Derek Chauvin, the former officer who killed Floyd. Guard members were stationed up and down East Lake Street, the locus of the riots last summer, and outside the Minneapolis’s 3rd Police Precinct, which protesters took over and burned.
When protesters began looting in Brooklyn Center on Sunday, the National Guard took the 15-minute drive to the suburb and dispersed the crowds. The cycle was repeated for the rest of the week, each time bringing in armed troops, as well as buses to hold the people whom they arrested.
A guardsman on Wednesday told the Washington Examiner that the National Guard would be patrolling Brooklyn Center “as long as we need to be.”
These tactics, along with the Minnesota state police’s enforcement of a 10 p.m. curfew, often left the neighborhood directly behind the police station smelling like tear gas and pockmarked from paint bullets. The increased tension prompted a collection of local groups to push Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to call on the National Guard to stand down.
Walz, a Democrat, responded in a Thursday afternoon news conference, saying that if he called off law enforcement, the area around the police station could be reduced to rubble, similar to how many of the buildings near the 3rd Precinct were last year.
“I’ve learned from the past. That building would have been burned down, and my fear is the surrounding apartments would have been burned, too,” Walz said. “I trust our safety officials to be very judicious and think about this.”
That night, the guard members and police officers stationed behind two fences stood further back from the protesters and did not engage with the crowd. At the same time, members of the Minnesota Freedom Fighters, a local organization friendly with the police, roamed throughout the crowd and urged people not to rattled the fence or throw water bottles at the National Guard.
“The neighborhood can’t handle any more tear gas,” one member of the Freedom Fighters told the Washington Examiner. “We’re fathers and uncles, and we have to think about kids.”
Throughout the night, members of the group pulled protesters off the fence and sent them to the back of the crowd. At one point, the group confronted people throwing water bottles and told them they needed to protest peacefully.
“We’re out here for the community, and if you can’t stay off [the fence], go ahead and bounce,” another Freedom Fighter said.
The group’s intervention came hours after Brooklyn Center elected officials announced that they had been in contact with several community organizations seeking to “stabilize” the protests.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Police on Thursday did not disperse the crowd, which lingered well into the night without incident, according to Operation Safety Net.
Protests are expected to continue Friday afternoon and into the weekend.
