#minneapolis uprising

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Lucien Bruggeman and Katherine Faulders at ABC News:

In the hours after Vice President Kamala Harris announced Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, allies of former President Donald Trump rushed to denigrate the Minnesota Democrat, seizing on criticism of his handling of the riots in the wake of George Floyd's murder in May 2020. "He allowed rioters to burn down the streets of Minneapolis," Ohio Sen. JD Vance, the Republican candidate for vice president, said Tuesday.

But at the time, Trump expressed support for Walz's handling of the protests, according to a recording of a phone call obtained by ABC News -- telling a group of governors that Walz "dominated," and praising his leadership as an example for other states to follow. "I know Gov. Walz is on the phone, and we spoke, and I fully agree with the way he handled it the last couple of days," Trump told a group of governors on June 1, 2020, according to a recording of the call, in which he also called Walz an "excellent guy." "I was very happy with the last couple of days, Tim," Trump continued. "You called up big numbers and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins." Trump also suggested on the call that it was his encouragement that sparked Walz to call in the National Guard: "I said, you got to use the National Guard in big numbers," Trump said. A spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign said Wednesday that was untrue.

[...] "Governor Walz allowed Minneapolis to burn for days, despite President Trump's offer to deploy soldiers and cries for help from the liberal Mayor of Minneapolis," Leavitt said in a statement to ABC News. "In this daily briefing phone call with Governors on June 1, days after the riots began, President Trump acknowledged Governor Walz for FINALLY taking action to deploy the National Guard to end the violence in the city."

Trump's contemporaneous approval of Walz's decision-making in the wake of George Floyd's murder undermines one of Republicans' most vocal lines of attack against the vice presidential nominee. Critics have accused Walz of stalling the mobilization of the National Guard to quell rioters who set fire to 1,500 buildings, caused some $500 million in property damage, and were linked to at least three deaths.

Donald Trump and his right-wing media allies are attacking Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz for his handling of the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis; however, in 2020, Trump had praised Walz for his handling of them, per an ABC News story.

[chaddavisphotography]

Lake and Minnehaha during the Minneapolis Uprising on May 28th, 2020.

[nando161mando]

Precinct in Ruins: Minneapolis Fights for the Legacy of the 2020 Uprising

[horseforeplay]

no, i do not believe this level of delusion about the pandemic being “over” is sustainable. i have noticed people behaving in ways they never would have before c19, like they know deep down that things are not OK and they’re scared. international travel, huge parties, etc. i don’t know. i guess i’ve been surprised and disappointed by mass human cruelty and indifference before but i really do believe there will be a tipping point. once activists can catch their fucking breath? maybe? it took 10 years of AIDS before ACT UP took to the streets. i don’t want to wait 10 years. i’ll push as hard as i fucking can but unfortunately i’m close to bed-bound by long covid at the moment. i do not want to die. c19 activism feels like a tipping point for climate change action, anticapitalist action, and abolition action. this can be a radicalizing moment. they made the US slightly more accessible for a MINUTE and then yanked it away but we *saw* it. we saw it!!!!!!!!!! efforts to squash c19 precautions go hand-in-hand with squashing anti-police protests: they know that the summer 2020 uprisings were able to happen because enough people, for a brief moment, were freer than they had ever been in this fucking evil country. when people are given resources, they give a shit. cops were the only maskless faces in the streets of minneapolis and that is not a coincidence. the old world is fucking scared and wants you to get sick and die. c19 deaths keep climbing, your yard is burning or flooding or bogged down by smoke, cops have killed more people each year since 2020. that’s the “normal” everybody is trying to convince you it’s sooooo fun to go back to. fuck off. fuck off. there will be a crack and we will kick it open

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How the NYPD defeated bodycams

Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. When American patience for racial profiling in traffic stops reached a breaking point, cops rolled out dashcams. Dashcam footage went AWOL, or just recorded lots of racist, pretextual stops. Racial profiling continued.

Tasers and pepper spray were supposed to curb the undue use of force by giving cops an alternative to shooting dangerous-seeming people. Instead, we got cops who tasered and sprayed unarmed people and then shot them to pieces.

Next came bodycams: by indelibly recording cops' interactions with the public, body-worn cameras were pitched as a way to bring accountability to American law-enforcement. Finally, police leadership would be able to sort officers' claims from eyewitness accounts and figure out who was lying. Bad cops could be disciplined. Repeat offenders could be fired.

Police boosters insist that police violence and corruption are the result of "a few bad apples." As the saying goes, "a few bad apples spoil the bushel." If you think there are just a few bad cops on the force, then you should want to get rid of them before they wreck the whole institution. Bodycams could empirically identify the bad apples, right?

Well, hypothetically. But what if police leadership don't want to get rid of the bad apples? What if the reason that dashcams, tasers, and pepper spray failed is that police leadership are fine with them? If that were the case, then bodycams would turn into just another expensive prop for an off-Broadway accountability theater.

What if?

In "How Police Have Undermined the Promise of Body Cameras," Propublica's Eric Umansky and Umar Farooq deliver a characteristically thorough, deep, and fascinating account of the failure of NYPD bodycams to create the accountability that New York's political and police leadership promised:

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-police-undermined-promise-body-cameras

Topline: NYPD's bodycam rollout was sabotaged by police leadership and top NYC politicians. Rather than turning over bodycam footage to oversight boards following violent incidents, the NYPD suppresses it. When overseers are allowed to see the footage, they get fragmentary access. When those fragments reveal misconduct, they are forbidden to speak of it. When the revealed misconduct is separate from the main incident, it can't be used to discipline officers. When footage is made available to the public, it is selectively edited to omit evidence of misconduct.

NYPD policy contains loopholes that allow them to withhold footage. Where those loopholes don't apply, the NYPD routinely suppresses footage anyway, violating its own policies. When the NYPD violates its policies, it faces no consequences. When overseers complain, they are fired.

Bodycams could be a source of accountability for cops, but for that to be true, control over bodycams would have to vest with institutions that want to improve policing. If control over bodycams is given to institutions that want to shield cops from accountability, that's exactly what will happen. There is nothing about bodycams that makes them more resistant to capture than dashcams, tasers or pepper spray.

This is a problem across multiple police departments. Minneapolis, for example, has policies from before and after the George Floyd uprisings that require bodycam disclosure, and those policies are routinely flouted. Derek Chauvin, George Floyd's murderer, was a repeat offender and had been caught on bodycam kneeling on other Black peoples' necks. Chauvin once clubbed a 14 year old child into unconsciousness and then knelt on his neck for 15 minutes as his mother begged for her child's life. Chauvin faced no discipline for this and the footage was suppressed.

In Montgomery, Alabama, it took five years of hard wrangling to get access to bodycam footage after an officer sicced his attack dog on an unarmed Black man without warning. The dog severed the man's femoral artery and he died. Montgomery PD suppressed the footage, citing the risk of officers facing "embarrassment."

In Memphis, the notoriously racist police department was able to suppress bodycam disclosures until the murder of Tyre Nichols. The behavior of the officers who beat Nichols to death are a testament to their belief in their own impunity. Some officers illegally switched off their cameras; others participated in the beating in full view of the cameras, fearing no consequences.

In South Carolina, the police murder of Walter Scott was captured on a bystander's phone camera. That footage made it clear that Scott's uniformed killers lied, prompting then-governor Nikki Haley to sign a law giving the public access to bodycam footage. But the law contained a glaring loophole: it made bodycam footage "not a public record subject to disclosure." Nothing changed.

Bodycam footage does often reveal that killer cops lie about their actions. When a Cincinnati cop killed a Black man during a 2015 traffic-stop, his bodycam footage revealed that the officer lied about his victim "lunging at him" before he shot. Last summer, a Philadelphia cop was caught lying about the circumstances that led to him murdering a member of the public. Again, the officer claimed the man had "lunged at him." The cop's camera showed the man sitting peacefully in his own car.

Police departments across the country struggle with violent, lying officers, but few can rival the NYPD for corruption, violence, scale and impunity. The NYPD has its own "goon squad," the Strategic Response Group, whose leaked manual reveals how the secret unit spends about $100m/year training and deploying ultraviolent, illegal tactics:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/07/cruelty-by-design/#blam-blam-blam

The NYPD's disciplinary records – published despite a panicked scramble to suppress them – reveal the NYPD's infestation with criminal cops who repeatedly break the law in meting out violence against the public:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/27/ip/#nypd-who

These cops are the proverbial bad apples, and they do indeed spoil the barrel. A 2019 empirical analysis of police disciplinary records show that corruption is contagious: when crooked cops are paired with partners who have clean disciplinary records, those partners become crooked, too, and the effect lasts even after the partnership ends:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2378023119879798

Despite the risk of harboring criminals in police ranks, the NYPD goes to extreme lengths to keep its worst officers on the street. New York City's police "union"'s deal with the city requires NYC to divert millions to a (once) secret slushfund used to pay high-priced lawyers to defend cops whose conduct is so egregious that the city's own attorneys refuse to defend them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/26/overfitness-factor/#heads-you-lose-tails-they-win

This is a good place for your periodic reminder that police unions are not unions:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/28/afterland/#selective-solidarity

Indeed, despite rhetoric to the contrary, policing is a relatively safe occupation, with death rates well below the risks to roofers, loggers, or pizza delivery drivers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/27/extraordinary-popular-delusions/#onshore-havana-syndrome

The biggest risk to police officers – the single factor that significantly increased death rates among cops – is police unions themselves. Police unions successfully pressured cities across American to reject covid risk mitigation, from masking to vaccinations, leading to a wave of police deaths. "Suicide by cop" is very rare, but US officers committed "mass suicide by cop union":

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/12/us/police-covid-vaccines.html

But the story that policing is much more dangerous than it really is a useful one. It has a business-model. Military contractors who turn local Barney Fifes into Judge Dredd cosplayers with assault rifles, tanks and other "excess" military gear make billions from the tale:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#1033-1022

It's not just beltway bandits who love this story. For cops to be shielded from consequences for murdering the public, they need to tell themselves and the rest of us that they are a "thin blue line," and not mere armed bureaucrats. The myth that cops are in constant danger from the public justifies hair-trigger killings.

Consider the use of "civilian" to describe the public. Police are civilians. The only kind of police officer who isn't a civilian is a military policeman. Places where "civilians" interact with non-civilian law enforcement are, by definition, under military occupation. Calling the public "civilians" is a cheap rhetorical trick that converts a police officer to a patrolling soldier in hostile territory. Calling us "civilians" justifies killing us, because if we're civilians, then they are soldiers and we are at war.

The NYPD clearly conceives of itself as an occupying force and considers its "civilian" oversight to be the enemy. When New York's Civilian Complaint Review Board gained independence in 1993, thousands of off-duty cops joined Rudy Giuliani in a mass protest at City Hall and an occupation of the Brooklyn Bridge. This mass freakout is a measure of police intolerance for oversight – after all, the CCRB isn't even allowed to discipline officers, only make (routinely ignored) recommendations.

Kerry Sweet was the NYPD lawyer who oversaw the department's bodycam rollout. He once joked that the NYPD missed a chance to "bomb the room" where the NYPD's CCRB was meeting (when Propublica asked him to confirm this, he said he couldn't remember those remarks, but "on reflection, it should have been an airstrike").

Obvious defects in the NYPD's bodycam policy go beyond the ability to suppress disclosure of the footage. The department has no official tracking system for its bodycam files. They aren't geotagged, only marked by officer badge-number and name. So if a member of the public comes forward to complain that an unknown officer committed a crime at a specific place and time, there's no way to retrieve that footage. Even where footage can be found, the NYPD often hides the ball: in 20% of cases where the Department told the CCRB footage didn't exist, they were lying.

Figuring out how to make bodycam footage work better is complex, but there are some obvious first steps. Other cities have no problem geotagging their footage. In Chicago, the CCRB can directly access the servers where bodycam footage is stored (when the NYPD CCRB members proposed this, they were fired).

Meanwhile, the NYPD keeps protecting its killers. The Propublica story opens with the police killing of Miguel Richards. Richards' parents hadn't heard from him in a while, so they asked his Bronx landlord to check on him (the Richards live in Jamaica). The landlord called the cops. The cops killed Richards.

The cops claimed he had a gun and they were acting in self-defense. They released a highly edited reel of bodycam footage to support that claim. When the full video was eventually extracted, it revealed that Richards had a tiny plastic toy guy and a small folding knife. The officers involved believed he was suffering an acute mental health incident and stated that policy demanded that they close his bedroom door and wait for specialists. Instead, they barked orders at him and then fired 16 rounds at him. Seven hit him. One ruptured his aorta. As he lay dying on his bedroom floor, one officer roughly tossed him around and cuffed him. He died.

New York's Police Benevolent Association – the largest police "union" in NYC – awarded the officers involved its "Finest of the Finest" prize for their conduct in the killing.

This isn't an isolated incident. A month after the NYPD decided not to punish the cops who killed Richards, NYPD officers murdered Kawaski Trawick in his Bronx apartment:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#Kawaski-Trawick

The officers lied about it, suppressed release of the bodycam footage that would reveal their lies, and then escaped any justice when the footage and the lies were revealed.

None of this means that bodycams are useless. It just means that bodycams will only help bring accountability to police forces when they are directed by parties who have the will and power to make the police accountable.

When police leaders and city governments support police corruption, adding bodycams won't change that fact.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/13/i-want-a-roof-over-my-head/#and-bread-on-the-table

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

Tony Webster, modified https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Minneapolis_Police_Officer_Body_Camera_%2848968390892%29.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[radicalgraff]

Memorial murals around the world for George Floyd, whose murder by Minneapolis police on 25 May 2020 sparked uprisings in cities around the US, and protests against police racism in various cities around the world.

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

This is what I was printing the other night when I took pics of my zine set up.

[godzilla-reads]

💫 Across a Field of Starlight by Blue Delliquanti

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

“Being helpful and kind is almost always more efficient, in my experience.”

In this teen sci-fi graphic novel, two nonbinary teenagers form a bond and manage to find each other through space and time no matter what. But when war is threatening the home of one, can they survive together?

This book is advertised as a romance and I think that’s poor marketing because the book contains multitudes and what’s hinted as a romance is only a very minor occurrence. This book felt like so much more than that.

“Across a Field of Starlight” holds a special place in my heart after reading Blue Delliquanti’s author’s note about living in Minneapolis (where I’m from), living as a queer person (which I am), and experiencing the turmoil of political movements such as the uprising (which I was here for). The book holds a vaster meaning when you see how freedom and human rights are easily taken or, similarly, when people thrive under a peaceful, love-filled community.

The characters were all so well created and had depth and nuance that I’m very happy to see. Now this is pretty science-fictiony with the dialogue and concepts and I’d greatly recommend it.

[transfemmbeatrice]

A divide has quickly emerged between them and people who have not been sucked up in the emotion, activists and radicals who are incredulous at the enthusiasm, trying desperately to remind these Walz-pilled posters that Democrats are currently behind the genocide in Gaza, that Kamala is in fact already in power. Comrades from Minnesota have pointed out that Walz, who was a national guardsman himself, was the one who sent in the National Guard to put down the George Floyd Uprising in Minneapolis, and that Walz, despite getting to the governor's mansion on a campaign focused on climate and ecological justice, crushed an indigenous led water-protector movement to push forward the Line 3 Fracking Pipeline. The aforementioned enthusiastic supporters are responding with some variation of "yeah, we know, but stop killing our vibe".

These two groups are talking past one another. The memers are responding to a structure of feeling, an experience of hope and joy, an affect, one that I sometimes share. On multiple occasions I have been moved by seeing the nominees actually stand up to these creeps and call them what they are, by witty and dismissive press releases or in front of cheering crowds. It's a powerful image, it feels good, at least in the moments where the crowd isn't chanting "USA! USA! USA!" And many of the memes have been really fucking funny.

The Cassandras, meanwhile, are speaking with hard-won-knowledge and wisdom from decades in the fight, and are trying to stop people from rushing into the same mistake made during Obama's campaign, or indeed Bernie Sanders' (or Corbyn's, or Syriza's, or Podemos' etc. etc.) They're trying to protect these erstwhile friends from throwing themselves behind a campaign that can only ever betray them. But because they're not acknowledging the power of the affect shift, perhaps because they genuinely don't share it, they are left sounding to the memers like they're arguing against feeling good itself.

…

But all of that good feeling, that sense of victory, of hope and possibility, do not come from or belong to Harris and Walz. While it is a relief that the Democrats finally brought a knife to the knife fight (instead of their traditional book of etiquette), they could and should have already done this a dozen times before.

Vicky Osterweil

[prettykikimora]

Everyone excited for Tim walz except Minnesota people. Oh cool the guy who called in the national guard during the uprising. People forgetting it all started in Minneapolis.

[mypatchworkreflection]

"Since the 2020 uprisings following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, politicians and the financially powerful have closed ranks — throwing the language of “Black Lives Matter” up on a billboard when it benefits them, but endorsing, justifying and funding an increasingly militarized and invasive police presence in Black, Brown and other structurally impoverished communities. See, for example, President Biden’s 2022 call to “fund the police” in his State of the Union address — or see what is happening in Atlanta, where a $90 million police training center (“Cop City”) to be built on green space in a Black community has united corporate, political and police leadership in an effort to suppress protest.

No political candidate should be shot at. But nor should any 16-year-old fear for their life at the hands of the state when they attend a neighborhood block party. Nor should trans people, sex workers and homeless youth live in fear of a 911 call while simply walking the streets. For some bodies, every move through public space is political, and a gunman who doesn’t believe your life matters is always only a phone call away."

[chaddavisphotography]

A sticker reading "MPD receives training from the IDF. To serve & protect settler colonialism. All colonizers are bastards" found on a post outside the former Minneapolis police third precinct.

[lizardsfromspace]

The nominees for Best Picture, 2040 were announced today! The nominees include...

"...it's not that I don't want to include them, but you have to think about middle America and the foreign markets..."

Drag Queens for Liberty. This life-affirming dramedy tells of how a group of trans people and drag queens fought a library censorship campaign in their small town in the early 2020s.

"...fired from Scream 7 for 'false statements about genocide'..."

The River and the Sea. This fact-based war drama follows a Palestinian father trying to save his family from the bombings of 2023, and an Israeli soldier who begins to have his doubts about the war.

"...I couldn't vote for Selma because of how divisive they were, claiming Hollywood is racist..."

Minneapolis. This docudrama follows several individuals in the uprising in the wake of the death of George Floyd.

"...Hollywood isn't a bunch of snaggletoothed hillbillies, how can they say we're racist?"

SoWhite. This biopic details the efforts of activists to make the Oscars acknowledge people of color's performances. Watch these films and more compete at the Oscars, where we honor art that grapples with the world as it is and takes bold stances, this February, 2040.

[nerdyqueerandjewish]

Overall I like Walz but I’m also really not looking forward to the rest of the country digging into the Minneapolis Uprising again

[arctic-hands]

"Racism was a long time ago, get over it!" For one, if you think pervasive and systemic racism, both anti-Black as well as racism against other marginalized racial and ethnic groups, in America is "over", you're probably too willfully obtuse to bother to continue reading, but on the rare chance you do, I'll indulge your claim that "racism is over!":

I just turned thirty this month, May twenty twenty-three. My father was born four years before Loving v. Virginia granted the basic right for Black and white peoples to marry each other in every state. My mother was born the same year the Green Book ceased publication. My grandmother was barely thirty when she attended the RFK rally in Indianapolis where Kennedy announced that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. My father (not in attendance) was not quite five. My father was a fourth grader the year Fred Hampton was assassinated in his own bed by the FBI and local law enforcement. My mother was two years from giving birth to my older brother when the Black Panther Party was torn apart by COINTELPRO, my father was a few couple years into college. My father wasn't even thirty when I was born. My mother is a few years younger.

The LAPD beating of Rodney King and the consequential riots happened almost exactly a year before I was born, I was nineteen when Rodney King passed away. That was two years before Mike Brown was killed by Ferguson police and the consequential uprising. I was twenty-two and living just outside Baltimore the year Freddie Gray was killed in the back of Baltimore PD van from a "rough ride" and the consequential uprising. I had fun (despite covid and the lockdowns) on my twenty-seventh birthday when my four roommates and I got drunk and sung bad karaoke, less than three weeks before George Floyd was murdered (as defined the court and the rulings proving guilt) by Minneapolis PD and the consequential worldwide uprisings. Today I'm just two weeks and a day past my thirtieth birthday when I woke up to the news that a U-haul truck bearing the Nazi flag tried ramming the fence to the White House. That's the same day the NAACP issued a travel warning for Black people to not go to Florida, fifty-seven years after the Green Book ceased publication. This is just a few weeks after Jordan Neely, a Black man my age who was having a mental health episode was killed by a white marine being encouraged by other people in the subway car. Florida governor Ron DeSantis is funding that white marine's defense team.

Ruby Bridges is still alive, as are all but one of the Little Rock Nine–as is the white teenager who was forever caught on camera screaming at them. It's only in the last few years that the civil rights leaders of the Fifties and Sixties who weren't assassinated have started dying of old age, and many more are still alive. I was in seventh grade when Rosa Parks died, I was almost done with third grade when the white bus driver who had her arrested died.

This isn't "a long time ago". This isn't old history. It's all within living memory. Our living memory. Our grandparents' memories, our parents' memories, the memories of you and I that are still forming.

Anyway I don't know how to end this, I'm shaken by the NAACP warning I guess, and I'm not even Black. And you're a willful fool if you think racism is over and has been over for a long time.

[reasoningdaily]

A rightwing extremist boasted of driving from Texas to Minneapolis to help set fire to a police precinct during the George Floyd protests, federal prosecutors said.

US attorney Erica MacDonald said on Friday that she had charged Ivan Harrison Hunter, a 26-year-old Texas resident, with traveling across state lines to participate in a riot. The charges are the latest example of far-right extremists attempting to use violence to escalate national protests against police brutality into an uprising against the government, and even full civil war.

The case also reveals the extent of the coordination between violent members of the nascent far-right “Boogaloo Bois” movement operating in different cities across the country.

According to the criminal complaint against Hunter, on 26 May, as intense protests broke out in Minneapolis over the killing of George Floyd by a city police officer, a “Boogaloo Boi” based in Minnesota posted a public Facebook message: “I need a headcount.”

Hunter, a resident of Boerne, Texas, which is roughly 1,200 miles away, responded: “72 hours out.”

Another “Boogaloo Boi”, based in North Carolina, posted a public message the same day: “Lock and load boys,” he wrote, adding, “the national network is going off.”

“Boogaloo” has long been used on online message boards as an ironic term for a second civil war, one that might be sparked by any government attempts to confiscate Americans’ guns. But in 2019 and early 2020, the memes about a coming “boogaloo” began to coalesce into an anti-government, pro-gun movement, with armed “Boog bois” showing up at protests, some wearing the “Boogaloo” uniform of a bright Hawaiian shirt paired with a military-style rifle.

In the late winter and early spring of 2020, researchers noted a growing number of “Boogaloo” groups on Facebook, many of them posting explicitly about military tactics and killing government officials, as well as the proliferation of “Boogaloo”-themed merchandise for sale, such as flags, patches, and Hawaiian-print gun accessories.

Prosecutors say that Hunter would later describe himself to Austin police officers as “the leader of the Boogaloo Bois in south Texas”.

By 28 May, during a night of the most intense unrest and destruction in the city, Hunter was in Minneapolis, just as the 3rd precinct police station, known locally as a “playground for renegade cops”, was being set on fire.

Video shot that night shows a person later identified as Hunter firing 13 rounds from a semiautomatic assault-style rifle on the 3rd precinct police station while people believed to be looters were inside. He then high-fived another person and shouted, “Justice for Floyd!” according to the complaint.

Later, he privately messaged Steven Carrillo, another alleged “Boogaloo Boi” in California, urging him to “go for police buildings”, according to the federal criminal complaint.

“I did better, lol,” Carrillo allegedly replied.

Hours before Carrillo sent that message, according to the complaint, federal prosecutors say Carrillo had driven to Oakland with an accomplice, and, as protesters were demonstrating blocks away, shot two officers guarding a federal courthouse in downtown Oakland, killing one, David Patrick Underwood.

Carrillo was later charged with killing another law enforcement officer, a Santa Cruz sheriff’s deputy, in an ambush attack in June.

According to the complaint, Hunter would later post multiple messages on Facebook bragging of his actions in Minneapolis on the night of 28 May and morning of 29 May, writing, “I set fire to that precinct with the Black community,” and, “My mom would call the FBI if she knew.”

“I’ve burned police stations with Black Panthers in Minneapolis,” he claimed in one message, and in another, “The BLM protesters in Minneapolis loved me.”

Police in Austin, Texas, stopped a pickup truck, in which Hunter was a passenger, on 3 June for multiple traffic violations. Hunter had six loaded magazines for a semiautomatic rifle in a tactical vest he was wearing. Officers also found multiple firearms in the truck.

Several days after the stop, federal agents learned of Hunter’s online affiliation with Carrillo. MacDonald said Hunter made his initial court appearance on Thursday in San Antonio, Texas. It is unclear if he has an attorney.

Hunter is the third alleged “Boogaloo Boi” to be charged in connection with protests in Minneapolis. Across the country, the “Boogaloo” movement has been linked to more than two dozen arrests and at least five deaths this year, including the alleged plot to kidnap the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer.