No reason to stop in either case

Both the peaceful protesting and the unpeaceful rioting and looting increased yesterday. Target stores all over the Cities were closed, and Metro Transit bus and train services shut down.  Mail service suspended in a few areas.

Last night's madness included the mayor of Minneapolis ordering 3rd precinct police to abandon their building (the precinct headquarters mentioned in previous posts), as rioters broke into it and set it on fire. Some police gear was apparently looted from it. USPS trucks stolen and used to ram things. Other fires were going on in the same area, extending the devastation of Wednesday night (which people had been working on cleaning up throughout the day). Some other parts of the city also saw smashing, looting, and fires.

There was also a large and mostly peaceful protest in downtown Minneapolis of thousands of people, circling around and stopping for a time at the Hennepin County Government Center, where I had a spell of jury duty once. The presence of the county jail right across the street perhaps helped to keep the peace there; police acted to disperse the crowd when it was moving on from there through downtown.

In St. Paul, mostly along University Avenue, there was rioting and a number of fires and according to police over 170 buildings damaged or looted, although some of the rioters broke off and left to go see the 3rd precinct fire when the news reached them.  It looked like police continued to protect the SuperTarget.

Looters and arsonists were spreading out a bit:  robbing businesses along Grand Avenue in St. Paul, where there are many upscale boutiques, and apparently also setting fires in businesses along Energy Park Drive, which is a somewhat industrial area that isn't central, but just sits there in between other places. Out in the first-ring northern suburb of Roseville, there were break-ins in various places, apparently including a group forcing their way into the Rosedale Mall. Suburban police had warned businesses and malls to prepare for things like this. In the southern suburb of Apple Valley, a courthouse was set on fire. 

It is harder to get news of these smaller and much more dispersed events.

The National Guard was finally called in by the governor yesterday, 500 of them, but they were visibly deployed in only a few places, so far as I can tell. The governor has also not been very visible for the past day or so.                                                                                                                                                                                        

The mayor of Minneapolis in a press conference was asked about what President Trump had tweeted about him, and I'm pretty sure that his response to Trump was far more forceful than any of his responses to the rioting have been so far. Trump has mostly stayed away from the topic of the riots, probably for the best, since there are a nontrivial number of people around here who hate him so much that they would go out and start burning things down just to spite him.

Trump's idea in his partially-censored tweet, that "when the looting starts, the shooting starts", is at odds with Minnesota law, which doesn't allow the use of deadly force to defend property, and would require federal intervention, I believe.