According to FTP, “several videos of a highly suspicious [white] man wearing a gas mask and carrying a hammer, paint an ominous picture of potential agent provocateurs stoking the rioting among the protesters.

Throughout the day, most of the protests in Minneapolis were peaceful with the exception of protesters directing their anger and property destruction toward the police department who refused to immediately charge George Floyd’s killers. However, as was widely reported, the Autozone near the department was one of the first places to be looted and set on fire.

Now, we have the video of the first person to instigate the destruction — and he was definitely not part of the George Floyd protests.

Brad Svenson (@SvensonBrad on pscp.tv) was streaming live Wednesday night. As he filmed the protests, he took no interest in the Autozone directly behind him as all the protesters were peacefully chanting at the officers in front of them.“

All of that quickly changed, however, when we hear a loud pop, followed by the sound of breaking glass. When Svenson panned his camera around, we see a shady white guy, dressed in all black, holding an umbrella, a hammer, and a gas mask, shattering the windows out of the Autozone like he was getting paid to do it.

The black umbrella is a symbol of the protests in Hong Kong. Protesters used umbrellas as a tool for passive resistance to the police’s use of pepper spray to disperse the crowd during the occupation of the city over the 2014 elections.

Illustrating just how reluctant the protesters were to begin rioting and looting, they yelled at the shady man in black and confronted him as he began smashing windows.

“Are you a cop?!” several of the protesters yell.

As the man attempts to escape without being tackled or stopped by folks who did not want the rioting and looting to start, the man becomes confrontational and challenges a Black man pursuing him to a fight. The Black man, says ‘Oh you wanna go’ and then turns give somebody his blunt - but the white man quickly flees from the confrontation with the black man in pursuit. The provocateur tries to swat the camera from the person filming him.

“Get the f**k away from me,” the agent provocateur says as he flees behind the Autozone. He is chased about 100 feet away before the video cuts out.

It is pretty clear from the video that the protesters — at least before the provocateur smashed out windows — wanted nothing to do with looting and destroying local businesses. However, after he smashed the windows of Autozone, it would set off a chain reaction, leading to a handful of others parting from the peaceful protests and begin looting.

Many have taken to social media to allege that he is a cop, with some claiming he fled into the police station.

Despite people on social media claiming the white man in the mask is Pederson, Heavy.com spoke to the St. Paul PD who claimed it was not him. In a statement sent to Heavy, Steve Linders, public information officer for the Saint Paul Police Department, wrote that the post accusing Pederson was a “false social media post.” The man isn’t Pederson, he stated (although he didn’t use Pederson’s name, Heavy asked about that.)