A photographer shared his firsthand account of what he calls the “real story” of the George Floyd riots along with his never-before-seen photos of the destruction in an interview on Liz Collin Reports.
Chris Birt said he decided to come forward now after Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was named as the running mate for Vice President Kamala Harris in the upcoming presidential election.
Birt explained how he has a long history of capturing what he calls “tension spots” around the world as a photojournalist. At the time of the riots, he lived in Minneapolis and owned a business there in May of 2020.
“I recall very succinctly that I was watching television and I heard that somebody had broken the windows on the police precinct … and I knew that’s the beginning of anarchy,” he said.
The destruction
“By Tuesday afternoon, it was clear something was wrong. I was working at the time … in Seven Corners (Uptown, Minneapolis) and I told my staff, said, ‘Hey, you’re not going to see me for seven days or for however long this lasts. I’m just going to go out and start shooting, literally taking pictures of what’s going on,'” Birt recalled.
Birt said he had a sense very early on that “nothing was being done about it” and explained that three elements stood out to him right away about the riots. The first, he said, was the language. Some of the graffiti he captured on camera included, “When our turn comes, we will make no excuses for the terror,” “Good cops are dead cops,” and “Fuck the Boys in Blue.”
“Graffiti tells the story of what’s going on. And the graffiti was absolutely violent. It wasn’t peaceful, or even protest graffiti. It was we’re coming for you,” he said.
Birt said by that Tuesday the graffiti was “all over the place.”
“It was the language of anarchy, the language of we are coming for you, we want to kill you, and we won’t rest until a new society is brought into being. And I think one of my photographs captures that,” he said.
Secondly, Birt said the size of the destruction also stood out to him.
“There are three to five-story warehouse buildings that were not only burned to the ground, but just decimated. To be able to accomplish that level of burning something down, you need to have professionals involved in that. It was very clear to me that professional arsonists had engaged in this destruction,” Birt said.
“The scope of the violence was one half-billion dollars in damage to buildings, 893 buildings were damaged or destroyed in three days and the scale of that destruction was something that, if you look at my pictures, my pictures capture how it’s concrete and steel that are twisted and bent. Minneapolis looked like a war zone.”
On leadership
Finally, Birt observed that there was a distinct lack of leadership across all levels of government.
“The leaders completely absconded in all of their responsibilities. There was no leadership for almost five days, if not more. They bailed when it burned,” he said.
Birt included Walz and Harris in his assessment, noting that the chaos and violence hurt the low-income areas of Minneapolis most.
“Where did the violence fall? It fell exactly where it always falls, on the poor, on those who can least afford to have this happen to them. They were the ones that were destroyed by this and the local government, Walz in particular, not only did he do nothing as it burned, he bailed. He bailed and he bailed and he bailed. You know who else bailed? Apparently, Kamala Harris set up a fund to bail out the arsonists and some of those that were involved in the burning in Minneapolis.”
He also captured some people who, in his opinion, showed up thinking they were supporting something different.
“I think they’re also following something that they don’t fully understand. They don’t understand totalitarian violence. And this is what was happening. It was premeditated, planned, calculated totalitarian violence. It was designed to destroy the system … that’s what I tried to show,” he said.
“I want people to see the way those buildings were burned. That’s what I want to show. Because when you see that, there’s no difference between Beirut, which used to be a beautiful city in the seventies, and Beirut today. That’s what happens when anarchy comes to town. They have to be able to show both of those things or nobody is doing justice to the story of what happened in Minneapolis.”
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Liz Collin
Liz Collin has been a truth-teller for 20 years as a multi-Emmy-Award-winning reporter and anchor. Liz is a Worthington, Minnesota native who lives in the suburbs with her husband, son and loyal lab.
