Geraldo sounds off on Minneapolis police laying off protesters: An image of a community that has killed itself
Geraldo Rivera reacts to the violent riots in Minneapolis, Minnesota and President Trump's feud with Twitter on 'Fox & Friends.'
Fox News correspondent-at-large Geraldo Rivera called out the "egregious" torture of George Floyd -- an unarmed black man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck for nearly eight minutes -- but maintained that order in Minnesota must be restored.
In a Friday morning interview on "Fox & Friends," Rivera stated that looters and protesters who robbed stores and burned a Minneapolis precinct over the last three nights have "defamed" Floyd's memory and the "reckless" and "cruel way" he was killed.
"Instead of the smug face of the officer with his knee on George's neck killing him [in] eight long minutes the image we have instead is an old lady in a wheelchair getting beaten up by two looters trying to steal her purse. What you have is affordable housing being burnt to the ground, the third precinct being burned, minority-owned businesses being burned," he remarked. "You see...wanton violence that is disgusting in a community, a marginal community, that will take decades to recover if it ever does. It is just a tragedy, a municipal tragedy."
During a raid of a Minneapolis Target, a woman in a wheelchair was pushed, punched, and sprayed with a fire extinguisher after being accused of “stabbing people." Conflicting accounts on social media described "Jennifer" both as a disabled woman who was trying to block looters from breaking into the store and as a violent assailant who was armed with a knife and threatening to hurt protesters.
On Thursday, Minneapolis Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey called for unity after demonstrations against the death of Floyd resulted in chaos.
“We ... need help from our community,” Frey urged in a 1 a.m. news conference, according to FOX 9 in Minneapolis-St. Paul. “We need to make sure that people are looking out for our city right now. It’s not just enough to do the right thing yourself. We need to be making sure that all of us are held accountable, to make sure that we’re holding up the highest ideals that we stand by.”
Rivera told the "Friends" hosts what American history will remember most is the "smoke and the flames and the destruction of a community," rather than confronting the "raw" American problem of systemic racial injustice and police brutality.
Protestors demonstrate outside of a burning fast food restaurant, Friday, May 29, 2020, in Minneapolis. Protests over the death of George Floyd, a black man who died in police custody Monday, broke out in Minneapolis for a third straight night. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
"I've covered virtually every riot in this country since Asbury Park in the summer of 1970 and I have seen what happens to these communities. They shut down, they board up, they are abandoned, the tenants walk away, the landlords are busted, and then slowly the government comes back decades later to start this repair," he explained. "It is a melancholy process – you know, this destruction that took three nights will take 30 years to repair."
However, more than that, Rivera decried what violent protests have done to deflect from what "should have been one of the most egregious cases of police violence we have ever seen."
"This was a torture. A torture-murder. It wasn't just that the cop killed him in the struggle of the arrest," he asserted. "This was an officer with a smug look on his face, with his knee on George's carotid artery, keeping it there for eight minutes until he was sure he was dead. I mean it is so outrageous. It is so pathetic. It is sickening."
"And then, to have instead of that visual, the burning Wendy's and the burning Target and the AutoZone, and affordable housing, and the liquor store, and the ATM machines, and the Dairy Queen, and the minority-owned businesses, you know, and on, and on, and on..." he lamented.
Rivera said he didn't understand the "pacifist, liberal" approach Frey had taken to "lay off the way they have," labeling it "progressivism gone perverted."
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"I just don't understand…this weak-kneed response to this and what it has done is to leave this indelible image of a community that has killed itself," he concluded. "Where is the line to stop these people? Where are the arrests? I want to see much more police action. If there's crime, there must be punishment. Not this kind of laissez-faire: burn it, go ahead and exhaust your passion, and then maybe we'll talk after the town is just a burnt crisp. I don't get the policy of being the Mayor of Embers."
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