Kamala Harris made an odd choice of running mate if she wanted to appear tough on crime.

If Kamala Harris wanted to dispel the idea that Democrats are soft on crime, Tim Walz was an odd choice of running mate. Mr. Walz’s tenure as Minnesota’s governor will be defined by the George Floyd race riots in Minneapolis and his response to them. Americans everywhere still live with the consequences. On Memorial Day 2020, May 25, Floyd passed a counterfeit $20 bill at a Minneapolis convenience store. The clerk called the police; Floyd, high on fentanyl, resisted arrest and said that he couldn’t breathe. After a long struggle, the responding officers managed to cuff Floyd and place him prone on the ground; Officer Derek Chauvin kept his knee on Floyd’s neck and back for nine minutes. Floyd died of cardiac arrest. The violence in Minneapolis began soon after a cellphone video of the incident went viral on May 26. By May 27, the looting, arson and assaults had become an ecstatic frenzy of destruction. Rioters tore open plywood barricades that business owners had hurriedly nailed over storefronts and tossed Molotov cocktails inside the premises. Cash, merchandise and safes were stolen, businesses burned to the ground. Firefighters were attacked, and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said they were delayed in responding to calls because of “insufficient law enforcement presence to ensure firefighters’ safety prior.” The Third Precinct—where the officers who responded to the Floyd call worked—came under attack in the early hours of May 28. Rioters fired high-powered BB guns at officers outside the precinct; the front door was shot out at 4 a.m. All around the station house, businesses were burning down. On May 27, Gov. Walz used his midday Covid press briefing to racialize what he called Floyd’s wrongful death and to commend the Minneapolis mayor’s immediate firing of the four officers: “We all know that these types of incidents disproportionately affect our black and brown community members,” Mr. Walz said. He thanked the “protesters” for their “commitment to safely protest during this pandemic”—an apparent reference to wearing masks—and “encouraged everyone to be safe, especially in light of the Covid 19 pandemic.” He described himself as “saddened to see that some of the protesters were in harm’s way” the previous night, his only oblique reference to the riots. At 6:30 p.m. the same day, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey asked Mr. Walz to activate the Minnesota National Guard. Mr. Frey followed up with a written request at 9:11 p.m. Mr. Walz didn’t respond until 4 p.m. the next day, when he signed an executive order activating 500 state soldiers. In the interim, his staff had quizzed the Guard about its members’ DEI training and whether they had experience working with “diverse communities,” according to a report by a Minnesota Senate committee. By the time the Guard arrived on May 28, it was too late. According to the committee report, officers at the Third Precinct were “taking paintball rounds, frozen water bottles, rocks, and mortar rounds.” Mr. Frey ordered its evacuation just before 10 p.m. The station house was immediately overrun and torched. On May 29, Mr. Walz held a press conference to explain his decision to send in the National Guard and its belated timing. “There was a decision during the day whether—did you occupy the entire city and shut it down after those 24 hours?” he said. The problem Mr. Walz allegedly confronted was that the “tools of restoring order are viewed by so many as the things that have oppressed and started the problem in the first place.” He spoke of “people who are concerned about that police presence of an overly armed camp in their neighborhoods that is not seen in communities where children of people who look like me run to the police, others have to run from.” Mr. Walz’s skin color bore on his legitimacy as a decision-maker, he said: “I will not patronize you as a white male without living those experiences of how difficult” it is to have a police force occupying one’s neighborhood. He described the riots themselves as a manifestation of systemic racism: “What the world has witnessed since the killing of George Floyd on Monday has been a visceral pain, a community trying to understand who we are and where we go from here.” Mr. Walz imputed a sacramental quality to the looted and torched buildings: “The ashes are symbolic of decades and generations of pain, of anguish, unheard.” The limited deployment of Guardsmen proved insufficient. On the morning of May 30, Mr. Walz activated the entire Minnesota National Guard. By the next day, more than 5,000 soldiers and airmen had been called up. They eventually restored order.

The unchecked chaos in Minneapolis had long since spread across the country, with copycat looting, arson, and attacks on police breaking out in multiple cities. In Minneapolis, more than 1,500 businesses and buildings burned. Property damage was estimated at $500 million; the livelihoods destroyed by the mayhem were incalculable. Most of the Minneapolis rioters faced no consequences; police were too overwhelmed to make many arrests, and almost nobody was prosecuted. The message was clear: Lawlessness is free. Homicides nearly doubled in Minneapolis from 2019 to 2021; aggravated assaults were up by one-third. Carjackings increased more than fivefold between 2019 and 2020 and are still at record levels, with armed juveniles as young as 12 playing a starring role. So far in 2024, homicides in Minneapolis are 114% above their 2019 level. Homicides in the Third Precinct are more than three times the 2019 figure, and robberies are up 84%. Crime in the state as a whole is up 12% compared with 2019, when Mr. Walz took office. Nationwide, homicides rose 29% in 2020, the largest annual increase in U.S. history. Felony crime in many cities is still above its pre-George Floyd race riot levels. A primary cause of this national crime increase is the demoralization of law enforcement. Officers have left the profession in droves and aren’t being replaced. In 2023 Minneapolis’s patrol strength reached its lowest level in at least four decades. The rest of Minnesota isn’t doing much better. In 1996 the Rochester Police Department received 550 applications for five open spots. In 2022, 10 open spots elicited 18 applications. Officers fear accusations of racism if they make too many stops and arrests in high-crime neighborhoods. Mr. Walz signed legislation in 2023 to lessen criminal penalties, expunge convictions and reopen felony murder sentences, although Minnesota’s incarceration rate had already been dropping in tandem with the rise in crime. Mr. Walz’s belief in “systemic racism” dovetails with Kamala Harris’s worldview. Both portray the police as the major threat to black Americans. In Minneapolis, 309 black people were shot in 2021—only one of them by a police officer, who was returning fire. That proportion—99.7% of black shooting victims shot by civilians, themselves overwhelmingly black—is typical. But a Harris-Walz White House would continue the Biden-Harris theme: that police are the problem in black communities. The result will be more lawlessness and more needless loss of black lives.

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