Minnesota’s governor said Friday he expected “swift” justice in the racially charged police killing of George Floyd — as the state’s public safety commissioner called it a “murder.”
“It is my expectation that justice for the officers involved in this will be swift, that it will come in a timely manner, that it will be fair,” Gov. Tim Walz said.
“That is what we’ve asked for. I have been in contact with the Hennepin County attorney, and I am confident that those very things I just said will happen.”
During the same news conference, Commissioner John Harrington of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety referred to Floyd’s death as a “murder” while saying that the “great people of Minneapolis are still having their guts ripped out” by the incident.
“We’ll call it a murder because that’s what it looked like to me,” said Harrington, former metro transit chief of police for the Twin Cities area.
“I don’t want to prejudice this from a criminal perspective, I’m just calling what I see at that point.”
Walz vowed an end to the increasingly violent protests that have rocked Minneapolis the past three nights, and included the burning of a police station Thursday night.
He described getting a phone call Thursday night from a state lawmaker whose “community was on fire” and called that situation “an abject failure we cannot allow to happen.”
“My first and foremost responsibility to the state of Minnesota is the safety of all citizens,” he said.
Walz said he ordered deployment of the state’s National Guard to Minneapolis at 12:05 a.m. Friday and that the “first mission was executed at 3:45 a.m.”
Walz said the death of Floyd — who was black, and appears to have been killed when a white cop, Derek Chauvin, pinned him to the ground with a knee on his neck — came amid racial problems that “have been brewing in this country for 400 years.”
“So, Minnesotans, your pain is real. The chapter that’s been written this week is one of our darkest chapters,” he said.
But Walz also said Floyd’s death was being overshadowed by the past “48 hours of anarchy” and made a direct appeal to city’s African American community, saying, “I will not patronize you as a white man, but I am asking you to help me.”
“We have to restore order to our society before we can start addressing these issues,” he said.
“None of us can tackle these problems if anarchy reigns in the streets.”
