Walz’s handling of George Floyd protests draws fresh scrutiny

The protests were growing increasingly violent, and the Minneapolis mayor had requested that Walz send the National Guard to help.

To Walz, the question was not just how many guard members he could muster, but what they would do when they got there.

Walz recalled "there were people out in those streets that didn’t care and who didn’t know who George Floyd was, and meant to do harm. I had to make sure that I was clearly making decisions … to create a space where those folks could protest.”

Walz’s decisions in those painful, pivotal days after Floyd was killed are facing newfound scrutiny now that Vice President Kamala Harris has selected Walz as her running mate.

“At first, he was just a regular governor, just looking like a politician. Then, he stood up and he put Keith Ellison in place as the prosecutor, and that showed a lot of people he was not playing. He was serious,” Floyd told MSNBC. “If it wasn’t for Governor Walz, we would not be able to walk around and say that we got some accountability.”

But some police officers saw things differently.

They accused Walz of picking sides, for example, after he tweeted that it was an “important step toward justice for George Floyd” after a judge affirmed that Chauvin could be charged with second-degree murder.