Did Tim Walz ‘Let Minneapolis Burn’?

our years after the murder of George Floyd, the site where he died looks like a shrine. Cup Foods, where Floyd bought cigarettes with a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, leading to his arrest by Minneapolis police, is under new management and has been renamed Unity Foods. The curbside in front of the store, where Officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck, is filled with planter boxes sprouting wildflowers. The torched gas station across the street has become an open-air community meeting space, and the nearby intersection is now a roundabout encircling a metal statue of a raised fist. Everywhere, murals and hand-painted signs celebrate Black Lives Matter.

About three miles away, the 3rd Precinct, the Minneapolis police headquarters that was torched by protesters during the 2020 riots, stands empty, barricaded by a chain-link fence with barbed wire. Signs in the windows of a bookstore next door mimics Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham: “We do not want your precinct here! Nor there! We do not want it anywhere!”