#Minneapolis Police Department

[worldwide-blackfolk]

Black Twitter got Happy #Shanksgiving trending

[petnews2day]

Man, dog seriously injured in Minneapolis shooting

New Post has been published on https://petn.ws/4I5fA

Man, dog seriously injured in Minneapolis shooting

One man and a dog are seriously injured after a shooting inside of a camper in Minneapolis on Sunday morning. At around 8:17 a.m., officers responded to the report of a shooting on the 1400 block of Thomas Avenue North. Police found a man in his 40s with potentially life-threatening gunshot wounds. Preliminary information suggests […]

See full article at https://petn.ws/4I5fA #DogNews #Minneapolis, #MinneapolisPoliceDepartment, #Shooting8217

[1900scartoons]

Getting Very Full

September 26, 1907

An overfull garbage can drunkenly staggers around as an angry policeman looks on.

The caption reads 'Maybe if the garbage pail gets full enough the policeman will run him in'.

The tax levy board was voting on whether to increase salaries for garbage workers.

From Hennepin County Library

Original available at: https://digitalcollections.hclib.org/digital/collection/Bart/id/6013/rec/1722

[n0thingiscool]

Fuck police unions. It's literally a union of white supremacists. They're unionized nazis. Unionized hate groups don't get a fucking say in anything.

[thecitynative]

A two year review finished by the DOJ shows Minneapolis Police's widespread discrimination against it's Native & Black residents. The review also shows excessive/deadly force, the use of force following stops, and discrimination against those with behavioral health disabilities. The CDC & 2019 Census data released show that Native people suffer from police deaths 2.2 % higher than white people and 1.2 % higher than black people. Here is the report

This is really scary

[amaxantys]

local politics my beloved

mayor jacob frey you poor spineless ass of a man it is so satisfying to see you get ur entire career handed to you by the city council

"all our pigs are quitting the force (because they suck and people hate them) you know what'll help this giving them all bonuses no reform necessary no questions asked <33"-frey

"fuck you fuck your family fuck your dog fuck the police department that signs your paychecks kicking you kicking you kicking you kicking you kicking you"-city council

[xtruss]

I Gave George Floyd First Aid. Police Have Learned Nothing

— Jeremy Norton | July 30th, 2023 | Newsweek Magazine

Jeremy Norton (Pictured) has been a Fire Captain for the Minneapolis Fire Department for over 22 years.

I watched my city burn. Saw the anguish caused, and suffered. Saw fractures and fissures in public fabric—Good Cops Castigated and Lumped with the Bad. Unfair, certainly, but so many citizens have suffered blanket judgments without redress.

The city leaders made promises—most of which have remained abstract, or abandoned. Floyd, his name, and image took on a life after his death, tragically. But: I stress, we still are missing the point.

I testified in the State and Federal Trials of the officers involved in killing Floyd. I have seen convictions, payouts, and reams of social media postings and think pieces, and declarations from civil leaders.

And yet, I must ask, Structurally, Systemically, and Institutionally: What changes have been made to prevent more Avoidable Deaths?

I argue we have yet to recognize or understand the fatal dynamics that caused the deaths of George Floyd, Keenan Anderson, Ivo Otieno, Elijah McLean, Yia Xiong, Travis Jordan, and David Smith.

The names spill off my page: I cannot tabulate the dead in the space allotted here.

We must distinguish between the truly rare aggressive and hostile person and the too-common civilian experiencing some form of altered mentation. Someone who is Incoherent, who is experiencing Emotional or mental Distress for any reason, this person's behaviors must be recognized and treated as something other than "Resisting" and "Refusing to Comply."

Someone in crisis and someone aggressively hostile are not the same. It is that simple.

Anderson had caused a Minor Traffic accident and appeared Incoherent and Agitated when the police officer engaged him. The officer escalated from speaking to shouting to physical restraint to fighting against a man who was clearly in distress.

More officers joined the fray. They shouted multiple commands, some contradictory; they piled on him on the ground, then deployed their Tasers—multiple times. The young man was not resisting or fighting them; he was having a crisis. His death was Unnecessary and Avoidable.

Otieno was experiencing a Mental Health crisis. His family called 911 for help. The responding officers escalated a Physical Struggle with the Agitated, Panicked young man. This began a multiple-hour process of Prone Restraint, Physical Abuse, Positional Asphyxia, and Medical Neglect. His death was unnecessary and avoidable.

In my 23 years as a Minneapolis Firefighter and EMT, I have been on multiple scenes with Agitated Civilians experiencing altered Mental Conditions, many people Incoherent and Unreachable through Words and Force.

George Floyd was not my first fatal call. We worked hard yet in futility to revive someone killed by overly aggressive officers. Every one of us at the scene carries the tragic horror with us.

I have seen far too many interactions go south explicitly due to the responders' Blind Demand for Immediate Submission and Acquiescence—generally the police, but at times EMS, too.

Relatives of George Floyd carry candles during a vigil at George Floyd Square on May 25, 2023 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Stock image. Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

Here's the crucial point, what should be at the forefront of police and EMS training as well as state and city legal discussions: The majority of these calls go badly because emergency responders are not trained, equipped, or disposed to understand what they are actually encountering.

Police, Fire, and Paramedics must recognize that a person experiencing altered mentation is not the same as a person refusing to follow orders. Treating emotional and behavioral crises as deliberate aggression fails the public and the fundamental concept of emergency response.

How many civilians experiencing a mental health crisis—overwhelmingly men of color—must die at the hands, knees, and weapons of peace officers?

An investigation—of a minor vehicle collision, a bogus twenty-dollar bill, a man walking down the street—spirals out of control. Not because the subject means to harm the police officer, but because the Police Officer Demands Compliance, and if the person does not, or cannot, immediately comply, that is seen as a challenge and a threat.

If we do not Change Our Tactical Approach when encountering someone not in their right mind, We will Continue to Kill Innocent People.

The job can be dangerous: You never know what you will encounter. But that is the essence of emergency response. It is unpredictable and often chaotic.

Responders are given scant information via dispatch; we must make swift inferences immediately upon arrival. Daily, The Police, Paramedics, and Firefighters encounter civilians in conditions or crises of altered mentation. We should expect these folks. We must be prepared for a range of people who are not going to respond coherently.

What if the person does not speak English? Has a Brain Injury? Is Hypoxic or Hypoglycemic? In shock? Is under the Influence of Narcotics? What if it's my father with Alzheimer's? What if it's someone having a mental health emergency, a psychotic break?

I have responded to people with each of These Conditions and none of them were Lucid or Immediately Compliant. None of them were deliberately a threat, either.

There are numerous videos of police encountering civilians in emotional distress, mental crisis, and incoherence, with the officers escalating a physical battle. Yelling Orders at someone who is Incoherent is a Flawed, Futile Approach. Using Joint Locks, Pressure Point Attacks, Chokeholds, and Bodyweight—all the forms of overwhelming Physical Engagement—do not calm or control a person in crisis or altered mentation. The Pain Inflicted by the Officers will Not 'Bring Them to Their Senses' but will provoke panic and a fight-or-flight response.

When someone is pinned on the ground by several people, there can be Panicked Agitation, Hyperventilation, and Positional Asphyxia.

We are directly causing a growing cardiac and respiratory crisis, one that would not be occurring had we not physically restrained the person.

For Years, the City Leadership Repeated the Police Narrative: The Man Refused to Comply. Officers attempted to subdue him. He resisted. He suffered a medical event. There was nothing else we could have done.

What strikes me is that So Many Killings have Occurred Without any Significant Accountability, No Rules or Laws Changed, No Legal Interventions, No Oversight of Department Policies or Training.

Allowing the behaviors to persist, despite the number of dead and the settlements after the fact, is a Moral Failure by Local, State, and National Leaders.

These deaths have been accepted as the cost of policing. With increased public pressure, and abundant video evidence, more cities are prosecuting the officers involved.

This might be a step toward justice for the families of the dead, but it avoids addressing what is at the root: Poor Understanding, Poor Training, Poor Guidelines, and a Healthcare Crisis that leaves so many people struggling with Mental Health, Substance Abuse, Medication Shortages.

We, the emergency responders, are the ones who engage those in crises. The Cities Won't Do What is Necessary to Equip Their Responders with the real tools to better recognize, assess, and engage the vast range of civilians.

I am not naïve. I have been on tumultuous, violent calls. I have seen aggressive, agitated, and unstable people. There was no calming or cajoling them. The longer it took us to recognize the person was beyond reaching, the more the scene deteriorated. These are scary situations. On the streets, away from the emergency departments, we need a means to safely subdue a person in crisis.

Sedation works. But sedation should not be dispensed wantonly. We must recognize that if we sedate someone after several minutes of agitated struggle and physical engagement, they might already be heading into respiratory or cardiac collapse.

If emergency responders cannot distinguish between someone who is a deliberate threat versus someone who is in crisis, and if we act as if there is only the former—we will continue to murder innocent people.

“If City Governments Can Only Exonerate Their Officers, No Matter Their Misdeeds, or Else Vilify the Individual Officers As Rogues and Lone Wolves — Avoiding the Crucial Roles that Systemic and Cultural Behaviors Play—They will Continue to Fail Their Citizens and Their Employees.”

The final line of Langston Hughes' powerful poem "Harlem" (commonly referred to as "A Dream Deferred") is: "Or does it explode?"

Why must it take a riot to get our attention? What will it take to make actual changes?

— Jeremy Norton is a Fire Captain for the Minneapolis Fire Department and the Author of Trauma Sponges: Dispatches from the Scarred Heart of Emergency Response.

[chaddavisphotography]

United States Attorney General speaks on it's findings from their investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department on June 16, 2023.

[horseforeplay]

tim walz is credited for the free public school lunch program that was actually a years-long grassroots campaign by the mother of philando castille. her son would pay for kids’ lunches out of his own pocket was murdered in cold blood by the cops that walz has funded and protected as they terrorize black minnesotans and their friends and loved ones with impunity (to such an extent that the department of justice found the extrajudicial killings carried out by minneapolis police to be exceptional). this election will be a special kind of hell for twin cities residents who have not seen any resolution to the summer that walz sent the national guard into our neighborhoods to fire rubber bullets at us on our porches. these people will not make our lives better. these people are not “easier to organize against”. harris and walz are blood-drenched terrorists with big cheesy grins on their faces

[infinitemonkeytheory]

The latest reminder that police officers around the country routinely deny Black people their constitutional rights comes from the Justice Department. This time, it’s about Minneapolis, the site of a police officer’s video-recorded murder of resident George Floyd.

More than three years after Floyd’s brutal death and the global protest movement that sprang from it, a June 2023 Justice Department report found that Minneapolis police use excessive force, including unjustified deadly force in their interactions with civilians, and discriminate against Black people.

[filosofablogger]

Meanwhile In Minneapolis ...

It was the brutal murder of George Floyd by former police officer Derek Chauvin on May 25th, 2020, that led to a three-year investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice into the practices of the Minneapolis police department.  Yesterday, the Justice Department released its findings in a scathing 89-page report that found systemic abuses by the police in Minneapolis. Per the New York Times…

[particularj]

You cannot reform this.

This is not an instance of a single person, unit, or city’s police force. This is the case of every department across the country, as investigation after investigation has shown. From Chicago to Ferguson, no matter the size of the force or it’s location, police commit unconstitutional and unnecessary violence, openly, without accountability or remorse.

Abolish police. Period.

[1900scartoons]

Oh, Yes; the Lid Is Closed

September 5, 1907

The Minneapolis Police Force snoozes; a clock reads 9:05, presumably in the evening.

The 'lid' refers to both the officers eyelids, and the time at which all saloons must be closed, 9:00 PM. The police were not readily enforcing this rule.

From Hennepin County Library

Original available at: https://digitalcollections.hclib.org/digital/collection/Bart/id/6304/rec/240

[minnesotafollower]

City of Minneapolis Settles Other Derek Chauvin Cases

On April 13, 2023, the Minneapolis City Council agreed to pay two citizens nearly $9 million to settle their lawsuits alleging misconduct by former officer Derek Chauvin before his leading the now infamous killing of George Floyd in May 2021.  [1] Lawsuit by John Pope, Jr. One lawsuit was brought by John Pope Jr., a black man, who will receive a $7.5 million settlement. His lawsuit alleged that…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How the NYPD defeated bodycams

Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. When American patience for racial profiling in traffic stops reached a breaking point, cops rolled out dashcams. Dashcam footage went AWOL, or just recorded lots of racist, pretextual stops. Racial profiling continued.

Tasers and pepper spray were supposed to curb the undue use of force by giving cops an alternative to shooting dangerous-seeming people. Instead, we got cops who tasered and sprayed unarmed people and then shot them to pieces.

Next came bodycams: by indelibly recording cops' interactions with the public, body-worn cameras were pitched as a way to bring accountability to American law-enforcement. Finally, police leadership would be able to sort officers' claims from eyewitness accounts and figure out who was lying. Bad cops could be disciplined. Repeat offenders could be fired.

Police boosters insist that police violence and corruption are the result of "a few bad apples." As the saying goes, "a few bad apples spoil the bushel." If you think there are just a few bad cops on the force, then you should want to get rid of them before they wreck the whole institution. Bodycams could empirically identify the bad apples, right?

Well, hypothetically. But what if police leadership don't want to get rid of the bad apples? What if the reason that dashcams, tasers, and pepper spray failed is that police leadership are fine with them? If that were the case, then bodycams would turn into just another expensive prop for an off-Broadway accountability theater.

What if?

In "How Police Have Undermined the Promise of Body Cameras," Propublica's Eric Umansky and Umar Farooq deliver a characteristically thorough, deep, and fascinating account of the failure of NYPD bodycams to create the accountability that New York's political and police leadership promised:

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-police-undermined-promise-body-cameras

Topline: NYPD's bodycam rollout was sabotaged by police leadership and top NYC politicians. Rather than turning over bodycam footage to oversight boards following violent incidents, the NYPD suppresses it. When overseers are allowed to see the footage, they get fragmentary access. When those fragments reveal misconduct, they are forbidden to speak of it. When the revealed misconduct is separate from the main incident, it can't be used to discipline officers. When footage is made available to the public, it is selectively edited to omit evidence of misconduct.

NYPD policy contains loopholes that allow them to withhold footage. Where those loopholes don't apply, the NYPD routinely suppresses footage anyway, violating its own policies. When the NYPD violates its policies, it faces no consequences. When overseers complain, they are fired.

Bodycams could be a source of accountability for cops, but for that to be true, control over bodycams would have to vest with institutions that want to improve policing. If control over bodycams is given to institutions that want to shield cops from accountability, that's exactly what will happen. There is nothing about bodycams that makes them more resistant to capture than dashcams, tasers or pepper spray.

This is a problem across multiple police departments. Minneapolis, for example, has policies from before and after the George Floyd uprisings that require bodycam disclosure, and those policies are routinely flouted. Derek Chauvin, George Floyd's murderer, was a repeat offender and had been caught on bodycam kneeling on other Black peoples' necks. Chauvin once clubbed a 14 year old child into unconsciousness and then knelt on his neck for 15 minutes as his mother begged for her child's life. Chauvin faced no discipline for this and the footage was suppressed.

In Montgomery, Alabama, it took five years of hard wrangling to get access to bodycam footage after an officer sicced his attack dog on an unarmed Black man without warning. The dog severed the man's femoral artery and he died. Montgomery PD suppressed the footage, citing the risk of officers facing "embarrassment."

In Memphis, the notoriously racist police department was able to suppress bodycam disclosures until the murder of Tyre Nichols. The behavior of the officers who beat Nichols to death are a testament to their belief in their own impunity. Some officers illegally switched off their cameras; others participated in the beating in full view of the cameras, fearing no consequences.

In South Carolina, the police murder of Walter Scott was captured on a bystander's phone camera. That footage made it clear that Scott's uniformed killers lied, prompting then-governor Nikki Haley to sign a law giving the public access to bodycam footage. But the law contained a glaring loophole: it made bodycam footage "not a public record subject to disclosure." Nothing changed.

Bodycam footage does often reveal that killer cops lie about their actions. When a Cincinnati cop killed a Black man during a 2015 traffic-stop, his bodycam footage revealed that the officer lied about his victim "lunging at him" before he shot. Last summer, a Philadelphia cop was caught lying about the circumstances that led to him murdering a member of the public. Again, the officer claimed the man had "lunged at him." The cop's camera showed the man sitting peacefully in his own car.

Police departments across the country struggle with violent, lying officers, but few can rival the NYPD for corruption, violence, scale and impunity. The NYPD has its own "goon squad," the Strategic Response Group, whose leaked manual reveals how the secret unit spends about $100m/year training and deploying ultraviolent, illegal tactics:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/07/cruelty-by-design/#blam-blam-blam

The NYPD's disciplinary records – published despite a panicked scramble to suppress them – reveal the NYPD's infestation with criminal cops who repeatedly break the law in meting out violence against the public:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/27/ip/#nypd-who

These cops are the proverbial bad apples, and they do indeed spoil the barrel. A 2019 empirical analysis of police disciplinary records show that corruption is contagious: when crooked cops are paired with partners who have clean disciplinary records, those partners become crooked, too, and the effect lasts even after the partnership ends:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2378023119879798

Despite the risk of harboring criminals in police ranks, the NYPD goes to extreme lengths to keep its worst officers on the street. New York City's police "union"'s deal with the city requires NYC to divert millions to a (once) secret slushfund used to pay high-priced lawyers to defend cops whose conduct is so egregious that the city's own attorneys refuse to defend them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/26/overfitness-factor/#heads-you-lose-tails-they-win

This is a good place for your periodic reminder that police unions are not unions:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/28/afterland/#selective-solidarity

Indeed, despite rhetoric to the contrary, policing is a relatively safe occupation, with death rates well below the risks to roofers, loggers, or pizza delivery drivers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/27/extraordinary-popular-delusions/#onshore-havana-syndrome

The biggest risk to police officers – the single factor that significantly increased death rates among cops – is police unions themselves. Police unions successfully pressured cities across American to reject covid risk mitigation, from masking to vaccinations, leading to a wave of police deaths. "Suicide by cop" is very rare, but US officers committed "mass suicide by cop union":

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/12/us/police-covid-vaccines.html

But the story that policing is much more dangerous than it really is a useful one. It has a business-model. Military contractors who turn local Barney Fifes into Judge Dredd cosplayers with assault rifles, tanks and other "excess" military gear make billions from the tale:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#1033-1022

It's not just beltway bandits who love this story. For cops to be shielded from consequences for murdering the public, they need to tell themselves and the rest of us that they are a "thin blue line," and not mere armed bureaucrats. The myth that cops are in constant danger from the public justifies hair-trigger killings.

Consider the use of "civilian" to describe the public. Police are civilians. The only kind of police officer who isn't a civilian is a military policeman. Places where "civilians" interact with non-civilian law enforcement are, by definition, under military occupation. Calling the public "civilians" is a cheap rhetorical trick that converts a police officer to a patrolling soldier in hostile territory. Calling us "civilians" justifies killing us, because if we're civilians, then they are soldiers and we are at war.

The NYPD clearly conceives of itself as an occupying force and considers its "civilian" oversight to be the enemy. When New York's Civilian Complaint Review Board gained independence in 1993, thousands of off-duty cops joined Rudy Giuliani in a mass protest at City Hall and an occupation of the Brooklyn Bridge. This mass freakout is a measure of police intolerance for oversight – after all, the CCRB isn't even allowed to discipline officers, only make (routinely ignored) recommendations.

Kerry Sweet was the NYPD lawyer who oversaw the department's bodycam rollout. He once joked that the NYPD missed a chance to "bomb the room" where the NYPD's CCRB was meeting (when Propublica asked him to confirm this, he said he couldn't remember those remarks, but "on reflection, it should have been an airstrike").

Obvious defects in the NYPD's bodycam policy go beyond the ability to suppress disclosure of the footage. The department has no official tracking system for its bodycam files. They aren't geotagged, only marked by officer badge-number and name. So if a member of the public comes forward to complain that an unknown officer committed a crime at a specific place and time, there's no way to retrieve that footage. Even where footage can be found, the NYPD often hides the ball: in 20% of cases where the Department told the CCRB footage didn't exist, they were lying.

Figuring out how to make bodycam footage work better is complex, but there are some obvious first steps. Other cities have no problem geotagging their footage. In Chicago, the CCRB can directly access the servers where bodycam footage is stored (when the NYPD CCRB members proposed this, they were fired).

Meanwhile, the NYPD keeps protecting its killers. The Propublica story opens with the police killing of Miguel Richards. Richards' parents hadn't heard from him in a while, so they asked his Bronx landlord to check on him (the Richards live in Jamaica). The landlord called the cops. The cops killed Richards.

The cops claimed he had a gun and they were acting in self-defense. They released a highly edited reel of bodycam footage to support that claim. When the full video was eventually extracted, it revealed that Richards had a tiny plastic toy guy and a small folding knife. The officers involved believed he was suffering an acute mental health incident and stated that policy demanded that they close his bedroom door and wait for specialists. Instead, they barked orders at him and then fired 16 rounds at him. Seven hit him. One ruptured his aorta. As he lay dying on his bedroom floor, one officer roughly tossed him around and cuffed him. He died.

New York's Police Benevolent Association – the largest police "union" in NYC – awarded the officers involved its "Finest of the Finest" prize for their conduct in the killing.

This isn't an isolated incident. A month after the NYPD decided not to punish the cops who killed Richards, NYPD officers murdered Kawaski Trawick in his Bronx apartment:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#Kawaski-Trawick

The officers lied about it, suppressed release of the bodycam footage that would reveal their lies, and then escaped any justice when the footage and the lies were revealed.

None of this means that bodycams are useless. It just means that bodycams will only help bring accountability to police forces when they are directed by parties who have the will and power to make the police accountable.

When police leaders and city governments support police corruption, adding bodycams won't change that fact.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/13/i-want-a-roof-over-my-head/#and-bread-on-the-table

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

Tony Webster, modified https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Minneapolis_Police_Officer_Body_Camera_%2848968390892%29.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en