Walz's handling of George Floyd's death and protests under new scrutiny

In May 2020, as Minneapolis burned and mourned the police killing of George Floyd, Tim Walz seemed cornered.

Minnesota's governor was facing a barrage of criticism for not acting more quickly to restore order after the Fire at a police station and several shops. When Walz mobilized the state's National Guard three days after Floyd's death, the move drew praise from the unlikeliest of supporters: then-President Trump.

On a call with Walz and other leaders about a week after Floyd's death, Trump said that “what they did in Minneapolis was incredible.”

“They came in and dominated, and it happened immediately,” Trump said. according to an audio recording of the call obtained by ABC News and other media.

Those comments and Walz's decision-making in the immediate aftermath of Floyd's death have taken on new meaning in recent days, since Vice President Kamala Harris named Walz as her running mate.

After a whirlwind week on the campaign trail with Harris, the previously little-known Midwestern governor kicked off his first solo campaign stop as a vice presidential candidate with a speech at a labor convention in Los Angeles this week.

Walz was less than two years into his governor’s office and still dealing with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic when Floyd was killed. His death on May 25, 2020, was captured on a livestream by a bystander, who showed him writhing and pleading for air as a white officer knelt on his neck for nearly 9½ minutes. The incident forced a reckoning with police brutality and racism, and mass protests spread around the world. Some turned violent.

“I think she’s struck a delicate balance: She’s supported police and community members at the same time, and a lot of state officials can’t do that,” said Duchess Harris, a professor of American studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, whose research focuses on race, law, politics and gender studies.

Among Democrats, Walz supporters have highlighted the chaotic weeks following Floyd’s death to help show his willingness to put aside partisan differences to work toward a common goal, a trait that dates back to his days in Congress.

Republicans, meanwhile, have argued that Walz's actions showed he was a useless leader who sat idly by, waiting to be called upon, as fires and vandalism spread across his state's largest city.

But as president, Trump struck a decidedly different tone in a call with Walz and administration officials on June 1, 2020, a week after Floyd's death.

“Tim, you called out a large number of people and the large numbers took them out so fast they looked like bowling pins,” he said. Trump said he had planned to send in federal troops “to get the job done right” and criticized the city’s mayor, Jacob Frey, saying he had shown a “total lack of leadership.” But he did not criticize Walz at the time.

On the call, Trump described Walz as “a great guy” and later told him: “I don’t blame you. I blame the mayor.”

But that was then. Walz’s Republican counterpart in the vice presidential race, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, is now publicly accusing Walz of allowing “rioters to burn down Minneapolis.” The claims, sometimes misleading or false, are echoing in Republican attack ads and on social media.

On social media platform X, the official Trump campaign account, Team Trump, posted: “Tim Walz let rioters burn down Minneapolis in 2020 and the few that were caught, Kamala bailed them out of jail,” referring to Harris’s expressed support for a bail fund that was set up to help people who were arrested while protesting.

In the days after Floyd's death, Walz called the city's response an “absolute failure,” setting off a frenzy of finger-pointing against Frey over who was to blame.

A series of follow-up reports pointed to significant failures in communication and coordination that had led to a disjointed response from numerous law enforcement agencies.

A report Commissioned by the City of Minneapolis He suggested that local leaders’ lack of familiarity with protocols for requesting National Guard assistance had “caused a delay in approval and deployment of resources.”

TO Separate State Senate Report —controlled by Republicans at the time—brought a more scathing critique, accusing both Walz and Frey of “failing to realize the gravity of the riots” that caused an estimated $500 million in property damage, and of failing to act “in a timely manner to confront the rioters with necessary force due to an ill-conceived philosophical belief that such action would exacerbate the riots.”

Had Walz acted more decisively, the report's authors say, “the riots would have been brought under control much more quickly.”

Walz's supporters have dismissed such criticism as an attempt to rewrite history.

The current president of the Democratic-controlled state Senate, Bobby Joe Champion, said Walz had “worked with a cross-section of the population” to coordinate a response to the unprecedented mass protests that rocked Minneapolis following Floyd’s death. Despite criticism directed at the governor, he did a “great job” of balancing the right to free speech with the need for safety and order, Champion said.

“In hindsight, there are those who will say what they could have, should have and would have done,” said Champion, who under the state constitution will become lieutenant governor if Harris and Walz win in November.

Any skeptics of Walz’s record need only look at the series of “recent legislative victories” aimed at addressing “historical racial inequalities” that will have a subsequent impact on crime rates, Champion said.

Walz’s political record is that of “a centrist Democrat who controlled a state where Democrats had moved to the left,” said Michelle Phelps, a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota.

Walz has earned the respect of some members of his party for his role in passing progressive legislation to expand free school lunches and protect transgender and abortion rights, he said, but he has failed to advance any bills that “substantially challenge police powers in Minnesota.”

He also pushed for hundreds of millions of dollars in state funding for more police as violent crime surged after Floyd's killing.

“If you look at it more holistically, what you get is this more centrist Democrat who is trying to find the classic way of how… [to] “Police reform is about curbing unlawful police violence while also promising a sense of safety to the state’s residents,” said Phelps, who has written a book about police reform in Minneapolis. “And that means empowering the police while also trying to make some minor adjustments.”

And just as Harris has had to answer for his past as a prosecutor in California, Walz's criminal justice record will likely come under intense scrutiny. In recent days, some have highlighted the several occasions when Walz intervened in high-profile criminal cases.

After Floyd's death, the governor made the unusual decision to Reassignment of the Prosecutor's Office State Attorney General Keith Ellison has sued the fired Minneapolis police officer who killed him. More recently, he publicly questioned the top prosecutor in the county where Minneapolis is located for her handling of several cases, including one in which she charged a state trooper with the killing of a black motorist.

Prosecutor Mary Moriarty later dropped murder and manslaughter charges against the officer amid mounting pressure from law enforcement groups, and accused Walz of treating her differently than her male predecessor because she is a queer woman.

Toussaint Morrison, a filmmaker and musician, said that while Walz faced a difficult challenge in responding to the unrest, his decision to deploy the National Guard exacerbated an already tense situation as numerous troops used force against protesters. The following year, Walz again used the Guard to respond to protests over the killing of a black motorist in a Minneapolis suburb.

“What I saw was someone attacking, abusing and trying to intimidate protesters. I understand that people want public safety, they want to feel safe. On the other hand, people want to be able to access their First Amendment rights,” said Morrison, a longtime organizer in the Twin Cities who has supported families affected by police brutality. “And I say this as someone who will likely vote for Harris-Walz.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Walz speaks at a news conference on May 29, 2020, about the Twin Cities riots.

(Glen Stubbe/Associated Press)