US President Donald Trump defended his tweet on Friday warning amid unrest in Minneapolis that said “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
The phrase echoes the language of a Miami police chief in 1967 who made clear his distaste for civil rights activists and his belief that violent protests should be met with deadly force.
The language has also been attributed to segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace in a 1968 campaign speech in Pittsburgh.
About 13 hours after the president’s provocative tweet, Trump took to Twitter again to claim that he wasn’t suggesting the shooting of rioters. Instead, he said he was referring to gun violence that has been spurred by the unrest.
“Frankly, it means when there’s looting, people get shot and they die,” Trump said during a roundtable Friday afternoon.
The phrase first made headlines when Miami Police Chief Walter Headley uttered it in a 1967 speech outlining his department’s efforts to “combat young hoodlums who have taken advantage of the civil rights campaign.”
Trump, in his follow-up tweets, appeared to be referring to the deadly shooting of a man outside a Minneapolis pawn shop on the second night of protests there and to the wounding of people in Louisville, Kentucky, when gunfire broke out at a Thursday protest stemming from the March police shooting death of a 26-year-old black woman.
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