The trial of Derek Chauvin offers the political, civic and business leaders of the city of Minneapolis an opportunity to redeem themselves for decades of their neglect to stop police violence. It is time to stop passing the problem on to yet another City Council and mayor. The trial presents city leaders with an opportunity to take decisive, bold action to end the militarized police presence that acts as an occupational force in our city. The recent killing of Dolal Idd by the MPD, in coordination with the state’s BCA, is the latest example of law enforcement out of control.
The world is watching, not only the trial of Derek Chauvin, but the trial of the city of Minneapolis for its negligence, culpability and complicity that perpetuates police violence. The city is on trial. City leaders at this writing are simply repeating the past. Do as little as possible, placate the public and heap praise on themselves for reforms that are not substantially different from those of past decades.
The fact that officers are still on the MPD who killed unarmed individuals under the last three DFL administrations is a cowardly admission of their impotence. Will this mayor and council do what’s right? Will they fire them? Have they adopted any of the proposals suggested by Communities United Against Police Brutality? Are they addressing the demands issued by the coalition of groups leading protests against police violence? So far, silence and denial reign.
The system treats citizens like George Floyd as if they were enemy combatants, not fellow citizens. For an alleged counterfeit $20 bill he was dragged from his vehicle at gunpoint, treated no better than a suspected terrorist and arrested even before he knew what he was being arrested for.
In watching a video produced by the Wall Street Journal documenting the period from the arrival of the first two officers at Cup Foods to Floyd’s life ending, you see officers exhibiting a callous disregard for a human being. Yet, this is how they are trained. How can city leaders, state legislators and law enforcement officials justify and fund such a training regime?
There is no way to reform such a system. That prompts the question: What kind of policing does our city deserve?
[image_caption]Wayne Nealis[/image_caption]
The officers know the neighborhood because they live in the area. That is a requirement set under the public safety governance system in which community members hold the decisive decision-making role in setting the rules, protocols, training and hiring and evaluation of officers. A governance system that along with public safety officers work with social workers, drug counselors and educational institutions to improve our community, not police it. Some armed police are needed from time to time, but when it comes to non-violent criminal activity or suspected activity like that at Cup Foods, armed officers would be unnecessary.
Now let’s say Floyd acknowledged he knew the bill was counterfeit. Instead of arresting him the officer might inquire further about whether Floyd might need some financial assistance. Is he out of work? Does he have a drug problem that needs attention? And finally, they would ask Floyd to work with them and the clerk to resolve the conflict utilizing the reconciliation methods in which they are trained. In that role, they would also remind Floyd that his choosing to use the bill did not help him or the community.
Achieving such a public safety department might be messy and difficult and mistakes will be made, but the current system is beyond reform or repair. Reforms are not enough to make amends to families whose loved ones were killed, brutalized or were unnecessarily arrested or incarcerated. The city and the state need to take action to rethink law enforcement’s purpose, training, protocols, oversight and governance. Now is the time.
Wayne Nealis is a writer and longtime peace and labor activist living in Minneapolis.
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For starters, there are state laws on who can respond to certain situations. Per the MPD, officers were not trained to act as they did in the Floyd murder. This idea that social workers will go out into the night in two’s into unknown situations, is logistically not something most will do. Currently EMT’s demand police presence due to past safety concerns. Also the city and county were working on having co responder programs–something some on the current city council have pulled back from in terms of expanding. I would encourage you to read Sue Aberholden’s letter from NAMI on this situation. The county and city are also working on diverting calls from 911 already. Creating yet another department with more cost and another layer makes no sense. Many officers, years ago, did live in the area, and it didn’t seem to make much of a difference and then there is the current state law that does not allow that, certainly they should have some experience or connection in the city. Again we need policy makers who have some experience in the areas they are over, otherwise we are left with feel good policies that are not effective.
Absolutely 100 percent on this. People don’t seem to understand that when a social worker interacts with someone with a gun or knife or who is threatening violence, the social worker doesn’t intervene. The social worker calls the police. That isn’t going to change if you defund/re-organize the police.
We absolutely need to get rid of cops like Chauvin and the culture that allows them to act the way they do. But this neighborhood of make believe approach by people like the author here isn’t helping that happen.
One thing the author got correct is, the mayor and city council are responsible for the police force and rules by which they police the city. So in this “reimagine” scene, is the person of interest high on multiple drugs? So you want the police officer to bring the clerk over to a car to interview a subject? Where in the manual does it suggest you bring civilians to help in securing a suspect? Do you really want civilians walking up to subjects, that are not secured , to talk about a complaint?
The author has no clue as to the difficulty of policing a city. Unfortunately for citizens everywhere, there are people breaking laws and harming fellow citizens (current crime wave in Mpls proves this). Police work is not fun and is very dangerous. 283 police officers were shot in 2020, resulting in 44 deaths. The idea that “we talk it out” sounds good but is not practical until suspects are secured. This hindsight 20/20 view of a police officer trying to sort out a complaint is not realistic.
Bad cops need to be thrown off the force, everyone agrees on that. The reality is most cops are good guys trying to do their job and get home after work. If you want a different set of rules for policing Mpls, look to the mayor and city council to make changes. Remember the citizens of Mpls will have to live with these changes.
What a load of nonsense.
Dolal Idd was a violent criminal from a family of violent criminals. He was a man who sold guns to criminals – people who were barred from buying guns by legal means. If you care about gun control laws, you need to have the police enforce them.
Putting aside his criminality, Idd could have simply surrendered to the police. Instead he shot at the police. They shot back and killed him. The police overuse the idea of shooting people because they fear for their lives, but when someone shoots at them first, that fear is legitimate. Citing this case as police misconduct destroys your credibility. It undermines efforts to stop legitimate police misconduct.
George Floyd was murdered and the cops who did it all belong in prison. But the idea that they could have instead just had a chat with him about his finances ignores the fact that Floyd was extremely high on fentanyl. Acknowledge reality.
I was just reading the comments (I know, never read the comments) in a story about the Jacob Blake civil suit in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where people were arguing about basic, undisputed facts of the case. Blake is a rapist who was violating the restraining order his victim obtained (he was not helping break up a fight as initially claimed) and was resisting arrest and attempting to flee. That being said, there was no reason that a cop needed to shoot him in the back 7 times. You don’t need to erase the bad facts about Blake to be critical of the officer’s actions.
Policing in this country is broken. But if it is going to be fixed, you have to be honest, you have to acknowledge facts, you have to recognize that there is nuance to these cases. That not every police shooting is the same. If you don’t, like the author does not, you aren’t helping.
Lets not forget, last year there were 5,422 violent crimes, of those, 533 gunshot victims, and 84 murders. Each of these incidents has repercussions across multiple families, and individuals. Any thoughts about reducing these Tsunami effects? We all understand there are some policing issues, but there are some very series crime issues as well, and decade after decade they continue, and they also have some very ugly results. Suspect if we reduced the crime levels as well as the violence level, we would also reduce the police interaction levels.
No. Mr. Chauvin is on trial. If convicted, it won’t be Minneapolis who goes to prison.
Why does every other city in the State need to change because Minneapolis is broken?
Man, I haven’t seen such an impressive display of the institutional racism revealed in these comments in a very long time. The mere suggesting that police could talk to people instead of drawing their weapons, dragging them out of their cars, and killing them has unleashed a nearly hysterical response here.
People who had no problem “imagining” the domestic standing armies we created with the billions of dollars of military equipment handed out to our police forces for decades, cannot imagine cops who talk to people instead of killing them. To be clear: this is a failure of imagination, not a superior perception of “reality”. When you think you stand on the safe side of the blue line, I guess it’s a lot easier to live with cops who kill… so long as their not killing YOU eh? Just remember, you stand on the safe side of the blue line… until you don’t. Your skin color, affluence, and address may afford you some protection for now, but that can change in a nanosecond. Good luck.
Then when the street explode in flames because the warrior training you endorsed or ignored for years and decades finally kills one too many black men, you decide talking to people instead of beating them will draw us into chaos. Uh huh. And then the only solution you can imagine is calling up the National Guard and replacing one domestic army with another. Whatever.
I’m listening Mr. Anderson, let’s keep talking.
Come on Paul, not everything is black and white, and these comments all fall into different shades of gray, as they should.
Acknowledging that Floyd was high out of his mind and that a reasoned conversation wasn’t going to happen with a guy who quickly swallowed his drugs isn’t racism. And it also doesn’t mean that he wasn’t murdered. Floyd needed medical help, not a guy kneeling on his neck. You’ll never solve the problem of bad police and bad policing if you don’t deal in facts.
Mr. Floyd was publicly executed by rogue police officers. They killed that man, and I don’t have to see that horrendous video more than once to think about it every day, and to know Mr. Floyd’s sorrowful pleadings to breathe were ignored.
Mr. Nealis seems to take a ‘kitchen sink’ approach to fixing our broken policing system, and a few points of clarification are in order:
At one point, Mr. Nealis calls for a residency requirement for police; at another point, Mr. Nealis calls for implementing Communities United Against Police Brutality’s recommendations. It should be noted that CUAPB is pretty consistently against residency requirements, deeming it a feel good solution that has no empirical backing to suggest it makes a difference. CUAPB was against the charter amendment last year that would have created a Public Safety body that would subsume the police department…I believe they are against it this year as well but I’m not sure – the only documentation on their site about it references how last year’s change to the charter was rushed.
In regards to the city charter, though it does not appear anywhere in the article or any of the responses to it, there is one massive lie that needs to be snuffed out immediately because it is shamefully being forwarded by members of the Charter Commission itself: that the problem with Minneapolis policing is that of “too many bosses”. This is unarguably false and it’s quite hard to NOT see it as *intentionally* misleading. As every member of the Charter Commission knows, the police department is almost completely under the control of the Mayor’s office. Jacob Frey himself explicitly noted this in a video when he attacked former mayor Hodges for not really controlling the department. The City Council can weigh in on the budget and…that’s pretty much it. The dishonesty from our Charter Commission is shameful and frankly dispiriting.
“Police reform” has been Minneapolis’ go-to for at least the past 20 years, perhaps 30. “Police reform” is the status quo policy, which sounds contradictory but when “reform” basically equals “appear to do something so some people are temporarily mollified”, then it makes sense. Sorry folks, reform has been tried to death (literally, of the victims of police misconduct) and it resulted in our city suffering one of the worst bouts of rioting in our nation’s history. Time to pull our heads out of the sand and understand that something more radical and impactful than the 20 years of “reform” is the only non-insane solution out there.
The Minneapolis Police Department has been beyond civilian control for at LEAST 75 years. The last serious attempt to reign them in was under Mayor Don Fraser and Police Chief Tony Bouza. Since leaving the PC job, Mr. Bouza has written extensively about what is wrong with policing in Minneapolis and America.
It seems to me that any serious effort at reform must first recognize that the MPD has a powerful constituency who have been happy to have the cops between “us and them.” That support was weakened with the killing of Justine Damond and the dawning f the realization that the police tendency to “shoot first, and ask questions later” is no longer restricted to the Near North Side and the Phillips neighborhood.
At this point, if we are serious about converting the MPD into an agency that will “Serve and Protect” our ENTIRE community, we must be willing to do some very basic things:
First, we must give the Mayor and Chief real power over hiring and firing decisions by changing the arbitration rules. I don’t remember the numbers, but well over half of all sworn officers fired in Minneapolis during the past decade have regained their positions through arbitration.
Second, an elected board (like the park or school boards), headed by the Mayor, could bring credibility and political clout to bear against ingrained police attitudes and practices.
There are many other things that might be done to improve the accountability of the MPD to the community, but first, we must gain civilian control of the agency.