Reflecting On The Minneapolis Riots Four Years Later

I had been on the ground for hours outside the Minneapolis Police’s Third Precinct on May 28, 2020. It had been a surreal day. Growing up, I saw the Ferguson (2014) and Baltimore (2015) riots on the news. I had read about the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Even back then and long before I knew I would enter journalism, I wanted to be there for those historic moments.

Now, here I was at the epicenter of the chaos that was taking over nearly every major city in the United States. The evening before my flight to Minneapolis, I covered a BLM protest in downtown Los Angeles. Tensions were high. An American flag was burned. LAPD donned on riot gear and pushed angry protesters away from city hall.

But that paled in comparison to what I had witnessed on May 28. The radical elements within the city and beyond seemed to be converging on Lake Street and Minnehaha Avenue. Beyond a Minneapolis police convoy that quickly retreated just as quickly as they appeared, because of the mob attacking them, there was no authority to keep people safe. If you needed help, you were on your own.

It all culminated when the Third Precinct was attacked after the sun went down. Despite holding onto the building for days against the odds, officers were about to be overrun. Multiple times I heard rioters wanting to set the building on fire with the officers still inside. Mayor Jacob Frey ordered the officers to evacuate.

To highlight how much the rioters wanted to keep the officers trapped in the building’s perimeter, someone chained the back gate, forcing police to ram it to allow the evacuation to continue. After the officers were gone, the rioters’ dream became reality after the infamous fire was set. The crowd became ecstatic at the flames. They took selfies with the fire in the background. Fireworks were set off in the air.

While the riots had been going on in the Twin Cities for days, this was a turning point that sent a dangerous precedent: If BLM rioters were violent enough and had the numbers, they could get weak-kneed politicians to back down. It set a high bar for the rest of the rioters across the nation to reach, but Minneapolis showed them it was very possible to reach.

It was also a tactical error on the city’s part. Now that the rioters’ main target was gone, they did not go home. Instead, they spread out to create more victims in the name of social justice.

Thinking about that crazy night, I laughed how I naively believed that first wave of riots were going to be the only ones for that summer. By the end of that summer, I went from thinking, “Oh, this will end soon,” to “Will these ever stop?”

Minneapolis is now a shell of its former self. But it’s not just Minneapolis. Name any Democrat-run city, and you can see how the BLM riots made those jurisdictions worse off. While crime has slightly declined overall, they have not returned to pre-2020 levels.

“Four years later, and the city still hasn’t provided a permanent precinct for the cops in that precinct. Four years later, and cops here are still being labeled by local politicians as racist murderers. Four years later, and crime has continued unchecked in areas. But I guess police are still problem here,” a Minneapolis police officer told me what they thought about the riots four years later.

The current anti-Israel protests have brought back that fear in people there could more riots like those that occurred four years ago. I believe there needs to be more of an “accelerant” on the current simmering chaos in our country, we are certainly getting primed for another round of mass lawlessness.

“[I]t's clear that neither the big marches nor the small acts of sabotage (burnt cop cars, broken windows) are sufficient. what needs to happen is obvious and yet almost impossible unless we develop organization and commitment to a disruption of our comfortable lives,” a post on X with thousands of likes said in relation to the ongoing anti-Israel/anti-U.S. protests.

That same Minneapolis police officer has told me numerous times if riots were to kick off again in Minneapolis, the city is doomed.

While I was too young to understand the impact 9/11 had on the U.S. and how it changed our way of life, I view 2020 as my personal inflection point. In combination of the ridiculousness that COVID brought, the BLM and Antifa riots showed it does not take a whole lot to radically alter people’s quality of life. The far-left still don’t think our country has changed enough to “pay” for what happened to George Floyd and others.

That is why they are looking at the anniversary of the fire as motivation to keep going.

“Remember what joy looks like. Remember what hope feels like. Remember that the police and the state are neither omipotent nor omnipresent. Cops bleed, their bones break and they sometimes beat a hasty retreat, too. There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in,” a far-left account posted.

It was not until I saw the trailer for TWISTERS that I was reminded how I loved the original 1996 movie when I was a kid. I went to the rental store so many times to rent TWISTER the clerk behind the counter went to grab the VHS tape before I reached the aisle. It is because of that film I declared I wanted to be a storm chaser. I stuck with it for awhile before finding out how much math was in meteorology. I hated math. Still do. So I dropped it.

But now, all these years later, I realized I ended up becoming a different kind of storm chaser, a chaos chaser. Even though I often make jokes about how it is riot season once again, it is truly alarming to see how business is booming for us chaos chasers in another election year and how it appears to be the norm from now on.

As I wrote in my book, “Fiery But Mostly Peaceful,” I truly don’t know what the future holds. I can only guess I will continue to be busy, if not consistently, then at least seasonally.