The killing of george floyd by police. As i talked to my friends, who have been in this movement for a very long time, who wake up in this movement every day, and i ask them what theyre seeing, what theyre feeling, what theyre hearing, to a person, i hear them say we dont know these folks. Meanwhile, donald trump and his attorney general had their own explanation, labeling the instigators as left wing and antifa groups. In many places it appears the violence is planned, organized and driven by anarchic and left extremist groups, far left extremist groups. Well, as of this morning, the story has shifted yet again. State officials have since walked back their claims that most of those arrested were from out of state. The situation is so fluid, were still not sure who the violent protesters were or where they came from, but the idea that people would use the grief and justifiable rage that millions of people all over the country feel to wreak havoc on the very communities that are suffering, not just from Excessive Police brutality, but also under the pandemic crisis, and then blend into those protests, using them as the governor said as human shields, well, that may be the sickest development yet. Vice news reports that far right extremists are showing up, armed, to the protests, while others are egging on the violence from behind their computers, with the goal of sparking a race war. And then the story last night changed yet again. When all over the country, protests gained even more momentum, and numerous firstnd accounts attributed the escalation not to outside provocateurs but the Police Caught on video, in multiple instances, using excessive force, the very outrage that so many are protesting about right now. As an example, heres a video of the nypd plowing a truck into a group of protesters in brooklyn after protesters threw things at police vehicles. And in los angeles, the lapd began shooting rubber bullets, even though no protesters were even close to them. And here is my colleague msnbc anchor ali velshi actually being shot at in minneapolis last night with rubber bullets. Nobody was doing anything. They pulled in, they opened fire, look at them, theyre aiming their fire now, theyre working towards us. Theyre working get back. Get back, get back, get back. Youre hit, youre hit. Hes hit. Step back. Watch it, guys. We got gas here. Back up, back up, back up, back up. All right, theyre now moving toward us. Theyre now moving toward us. There was theyre shooting at us. Theyre shooting, guys, put your helmets on. Joining me now is mayor Melvin Carter of st. Paul, minnesota. Live from minneapolis, ali velshi, host of velshi here on msnbc. I want to start with that question, about the activities of police. I want to start with ali, can you clarify for us what happened so that the mayor can get a chance to weigh in on it . So what happened is that at 8 00 our time, 9 00 eastern, that was when the curfew kicked in. Moments before that, everybody who was at the entirely peaceful protest at the 5th precinct in minneapolis got up, they were sitting in many cases, that was their preparation for the possibility of mass arrests, something changed, they decided to get up and go on a march. We marched with them for an hour or to get the motivations of what was going on, see what was happening. To call it 100 peaceful would be to understate it. It was just a march. We were two thirds back to the back of the line. At some juncture, i noticed in front of Us Police Cars flew into the intersection, splitting the group in half, maybe twothirds went forward, we were in the back third, we were probably toward the back of that. And immediately started deploying tear gas and throwing projecti projectile, shooting projectiles. There was no there was a lot of space between us. No one was close to them and we were backing up the whole time and they kept shooting. And in the end i got a rubber bullet in my knee, but there was a lot of tear gas, i have been carrying that tear gas mask around the whole time, i didnt have a chance to put it on, it came out so fast. There was no provocation to that. For a police force in the city that spent the last three nights trying very hard to not get involved in provocations with the protesters, they completely failed at that last night. Where they succeeded was in getting the crowd to disperse. They did do that and invoked the curfew last night. There was no provocation for that action that we saw last night. And you were in minneapolis, right, ali . That is correct. Okay. I want to make sure were clear that mayor melvin, Melvin Carter, you are from st. Paul. Were not going to ask you to take responsibility for what happened in minneapolis, but i wonder if broadly, because were seeing this all over the country, this really aggressive use of force including against journalists, we have a whole bunch of video of it, not just in minneapolis, but all over the country, do you believe that given the severity of what you described and other officials described yesterday about infiltration of the protests, people setting fires, people sparking violence, do you think there was an overreaction by police to that last night . Good morning, joy. Thank you very much for having me on. I really appreciate that. You know, i ran for mayor as maybe one of relatively few elected officials in the nation who know what it feels like to be pulled over for driving while black. I grew up in sort of a twosided existence in a retired police officer, i always tell folks, i met a whole lot of his work colleagues once i turned 16 and started driving around our community. The videos that you just showed, and certainly the video, the gruesome video of George Floyds murder last week show a culture of abuse, violence, and of escalation that has been a part of Police Culture for a very long time before we started seeing cell phone videos about this, because my father and grandfather and aunts and uncles can tell us about these types of stories dating back generations. And so, yes, i think there is a challenge in that we have acult have accepted for generations, i also know there are people in our community right now whose actions over these past week have not been driven by a deep and genuine love for our community when theyre burning and looting blackowned barbershops and immigrantowned restaurants. I know that is not driven by love for our community. I think both are true at the same time. And we have to change both of those things simultaneously. And let me ask you about that part of it, because the question of yesterday yesterday we came into this show expecting to did a completely different show than we wound up doing based on the press conference that yourself and other state officials did, it changed everything that we were talking about yesterday. Yesterday you stated that the people who were arrested, at first yourself and other officials indicated all, but then that was reviced edrevise most people arrested in the night befores demonstrations were from out of state. Is that the case. I think we have seen an enormous number of folks and i want to be pa irtient before we speak on exact numbers. I the initial reports i got turned out to be inaccurate. What is absolutely clear, though, is that a number of folks, wherever theyre coming from, are coming from outside of our community. And, you know, to the point you made earlier, our focus this week ought to be on how wrong it is that george floyd was killed, particularly in the way that he was killed, how wrong it is that his name exists in a long and growing list of unarmed africanamerican men who have been killed by police. We ought to be able to focus our conversation on the fact that not just one but all four of the officers responsible for his death must be held accountable in our justice system, and we ought to be focused conversation on the fact that we have deep soul searching work to do as a nation to ensure that we can stop these cycles from happening over and over and over again. Until we have some ability to be clear and confident that when something is disgusting as George Floyds killing happens and when it is frankly so well documented that someone will be held accountable for it. This level of anger, this level of rage will undoubtedly continue in our community. So i say that just to say that im go ahead. No, no, go on. I just say that to say that im as disgusted as you and mayors and Community Members and the legitimate protesters around the country who are frustrated that those who are seeking to burn our communities and tear down the Community Institutions that our Community Members have built up over decades and generations are drowning out the voice of those legitimate protesters who really have something to say that we must hear as a nation about where we are and where we have to go. And i think that is absolutely true. And i think thats the reason it is so jarring that people woule on that legitimate rage. I have to ask you very quickly, it also is important who those people are, right . So do you have any evidence at this time that it is antifatype groups that were that were doing the violence in the communities in minnesota . You know, like i said, i dont know who it is, other than the fact that i know who it is not. It is not the people i grew up with in our community. It is not the folks who are on the front lines of justice for philando, on front lines of our black lives matter movement, and i think one of the points you made, joy that is really important is that the anger and rage is understandable. It is legitimate. And in some ways it is the only human response to the video that we saw and the videos that we have seen over the past decade that are just disgusting. So as we talk to our Community Members today, im calling for peace, but im not calling for patience. Im not asking people to sit back and patiently wait, while we slowly and incrementally slow the bloody tide of unarmed black men who die at the hands of Law Enforcement. The energy that we have seen consume our country right now is a fire that could either destroy us or that could bring us together in a way that we have never been before. Were asking our young people to stay impatient, to stay driven, to stay passionate, and focus that energy not on destroying our Community Institutions and local businesses, but on destroying the policing contracts, the laws, the Legal Precedents and all those other forces that make it so difficult for us to hold officers accountable for the taking of black lives. And is there going to be a more restrained attitude by police toward legitimate protesters, because that is as disturbing as the idea of White Nationalists going online and saying, hey, you should go to st. Paul, or go to minneapolis and wreak mayhem, if police are also being violent, that is also it is a First Amendment problem, and increases the policing problem. So is there going to be a mandate from state officials, city officials like yourself, to police to behave differently . There has to be. Ill tell you that in st. Paul we have that mandate, we had it for quite a long time. Our current chief has worked very closely with me. We revised our use of force policies, i always hear him talk to our officers in our community about the bank of trust that we have with community and the fact that in order to make any withdraws at all, you have to make years of deposits into that bank. Our chief asks folks were your actions reasonable, necessary, and done with respect . Our two missions this week has been to, one, protect the rights, to peacefully protest for those who just want to scream from the top of their lungs that george floyd should be alive, that the officers must be held accountable that we have to do the work to stop this from happening over and over and over again. Were working hard to protect their rights to peacefully protest and not be those videos that you see of officers escalating the situation and were working hard to say we wont accept folks burning and willfully destroying our neighborhoods, our africanamerican neighborhoods, our low income communities of color as you pointed out very rightly, those same neighborhoods that are in crisis because of covid19, that are in crisis because of an economic crisis, that are in trauma because of the video and had been retraumatized and revictimized this week by this crazy activity that we have seen play out in minnesota and across the nation. And so our goal is to say, we wont accept the killing of black men, and we wont accept the destruction of our neighborhoods and those two things are not opposing goals, theyre actually the exact same thing. All right, if you can hold on for the hour, ill try to keep you as long as i can, ill bring in frank figliuzzi, National Security analyst for msnbc. And he also is a former assistant director for counterintelligence at the fbi. I want to point you toward what the mayor said and what he did not say. So, frank, yesterday the question is who is revictimizing those communities . And you had two different narratives that came out. You had one narrative from the state of minnesota that was very specific and was unanimous that people online, White Nationalist groups online were organizing as well as potentially organized criminals to come in and insert themselves into these protests, use the protesters as human shields, that was the exact phrase used in order to wreak mayhem on the black community. Then you had william barr, Donald Trumps attorney general, coming in and insert a completely different narrative that any of those minnesota officials had said. Which was that it was antifascist groups that was doing it. Thats a contradictory message and it needs to be cleared up. What can you tell us about it, frank, or what would you define from what you heard . I think this needs a lot more emphasis, joy. Im glad you are talking about it. Incomplete truth is really no truth at all. So what we saw yesterday from the attorney general and his press conference was selective use of intelligence, by that, i mean he knows very well what the fbi knows. Which is that there is a Broad Spectrum of extremist groups inserting themselves into these protests. I personally have talked with Law Enforcement sources on a national level, they have confirmed that there is right wing and left wing groups and there are dangerous people amassing and organizing to insert themselves throughout the country in this. It is an exploitation of a tragedy that could turn into a greater tragedy. And i think we need to actually understand the Law Enforcement shift that you spoke about at the top of the show, look, armed with that intelligence, the police made a strategic decision that since we cannot tolerate the kind of organized violence that might be coming our way, were going to take back our streets. We saw an aggressive approach and unfortunately it played out even toward peaceful protesters, which the police have a challenge here. They cant differentiate, if they have been told were not letting anybody down this block, they cant start asking people, hey, are you a dangerous militia member, are you left, are you right . They needed to take care of business. I have to tell you, the shift toward more aggressive use of rubber bullets and indiscriminate shooting, even toward media, is disturbing because i think it is coming from a sense of someones got their back, if they do this. And this gets us right back to washington, d. C. And the attorney general, and the president , who really still has not come out and said i want peace and calm, i call for order and to restore peace to the streets. So i am concerned about this enough to say we should be rooting for the police to get this right, because the alternative is for Massive National guard presence throughout our country that feeds right into the trump narrative here. I know this may sound counterintuitive to a lot of your viewers, we need the police to get this right because the option is not better than what we saw last night. I think thats important. Glad you pointed that out. I have more guests to bring in. I want to first thank mayor Melvin Carter. We did lose his feed. We were not able to hold on to him. Thank you very much. Profound words from Melvin Carter. Do we still have ali velshi . Is he still there . Yeah, im here. Quickly, we have more guests to bring in. I want to quickly ask you, you spent the entire day and evening out there marching with protesters. Were you able to define or did you talk to people that seemed to you to be not interested in george floyd but interested in some other agenda . Did you see that . Do you have any reporting on that at all . I spoke to a lot of people. And there were a lot of people who had arguably a broader social justice agenda. So they i wouldnt call them people who were capitalizing on a protest, they were sort of seeing george floyd as an example of a lack of social justice. So there were people who were talking about economic rights and greater social justice. I didnt see anybody who looked like a provocateur in the groups. And in particular, look, three nights ago i was right here. Two nights ago i was right here. The police moved in to arrest people who were looting or setting fire to buildings. That would have been something that was at least subject to debate. That was not what was happening at all yesterday and just to be clear, this is a part of things we didnt see clearly on the video, we werent able to roll, we had backed up, we were trying to get out of it, we got blocked again by a new route of police and National Guard, we needed to get out, so we put our hands up and said that we were media, walk toward them. We were still several hundred feet from them. We yelled, were media, they responded, we dont care. And they opened fire a second time. And we had to retreat from that line again. So i hear Frank Figliuzzis point. What happened last night was indisciplined. I dont know whether they knew my camera, i wish i could show you, miguel, hes tall and hes got a camera. They knew we were media. Im in front of him with a stick mic. Even if you assume they didnt know the first time they shot at us, the second time they did. Were not a radical group that came in t