The chief of the Minneapolis Police Department said this week he believed some of the destruction the city suffered during more than a week of protests and riots there was the result of a planned effort to cause chaos.
“Being on the ground … that did not appear to be organic,” Chief Medaria Arradondo said. “There were strategic things that appeared to be going on at once in key locations. I had not experienced that before.”
Arradondo did not speculate on who or what group was behind any coordinated effort to cause destruction in the city.
In the days that followed the May 25 death of George Floyd, a black man who was killed after a white police officer in the city knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes, thousands of people took to the streets in Minneapolis and nearby St. Paul to protest systemic racism and mistreatment of minorities by law enforcement.
Arradondo fired the officer, Derek Chauvin, and he has been charged with second-degree murder. Chauvin had been hit with more than a dozen complaints of excessive force before the incident with Floyd.
Floyd’s death, caught on video and shared millions of times, has triggered a civil rights investigation into the department by the state. Separately, a veto-free majority of the Minneapolis City Council signed a pledge to dismantle the city police department as it is currently structured and reallocate funding to other areas of the city’s public safety budget.
Among the largely peaceful protests, which went on for more than a week, was looting, vandalism, and arson. President Trump and his defenders in Congress and the media have blamed the destruction in Minneapolis and other cities on antifa — a loosely organized left-wing fringe group.
“The violence instigated and carried out by antifa and other similar groups in connection with the rioting is domestic terrorism and will be treated accordingly,” Attorney General William Barr said earlier this month.
“Because of the coordinated events that appeared to be occurring throughout, preservation of life became the No. 1 priority,” Arradondo said of the riots in Minneapolis, which have largely subsided.
City officials have estimated the protests and riots have caused $500 million worth of damage to local businesses and public property.
