The New Yorker:

On Thursday, in Minneapolis, crowds protesting the killing of George Floyd overran the Third Precinct police station, where Derek Chauvin, the officer now charged with murdering him, had been assigned. By midnight, the building was ablaze and hundreds of looters were emptying out the surrounding stores, restaurants, and businesses. People in a celebratory mood gathered around two burning vehicles in the intersection outside the station. Nearly all of them looked to be in their early twenties, and at least half of them were white. Alcohol circulated from a liquor store that had been broken into.

Jay Carter, a twenty-six-year-old African-American studying copywriting at Augsburg University, a mile and a half to the north, gazed at the scene with an air of saddened disbelief. Before I could pose any questions of my own, he asked me, “Do you think it’s worth it?” As Carter watched flames pour out of the precinct-house windows, and a car filled with teen-agers spinning donuts nearby, he said that he was disturbed by the turn the protests had taken. “It doesn’t feel right,” he told me. “I’m not judging anybody here, but I don’t agree with all this.”

By the time the police returned to the area, at around 4:30 A.M., large fires were threatening to spread into residential neighborhoods. Enough of the protesters had gone home for the police to retake control; when I returned, later that morning, state troopers in riot gear and Minnesota National Guard soldiers with armored Humvees had cordoned off the area. The show of force didn’t last. By Friday evening, thousands of protesters were back at the Third Precinct station, and there were no soldiers or law enforcement in sight. (Carter wasn’t there, either; when I texted him, he responded, “I had enough.”) At around eight-thirty, everyone began marching west on Lake Street, a main commercial boulevard, toward another police station, in the Fifth Precinct. They chanted, “Say his name! George Floyd!” and “No Justice, no peace! Prosecute the police!” At some point, vehicles in a parking lot were set on fire, and several exploded, but otherwise the protest felt tenuously restrained.

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