George Floyd was just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a new report out on our cops, and it’s not pretty. They’re under-trained bigots who take a military approach to policing. They kill people at an alarming rate.
The report said race-based policing in Minneapolis is primarily a result of police force culture. Officers, supervisors and trainers “receive deficient training, which emphasizes a paramilitary approach to policing that results in officers unnecessarily escalating encounters or using inappropriate levels of force,” it said.
The department’s accountability systems are “insufficient and ineffective at holding officers accountable for misconduct,” the report said. But it said former and current city and police leaders have failed to act, effectively allowing an aggressive culture to fester.
The report said the department maintains a culture where officers “consistently use racist, misogynistic, and disrespectful language and are rarely held accountable” for it.
“Without fundamental organizational culture changes, reforming MPD’s policies, procedures, and trainings will be meaningless,” the report said.
Fire them all. Or at least, go through their records and ruthlessly fire anyone with a history of discrimination and violence — kick out everyone with spousal abuse on file, for instance. There go 90% of the cops!
I know, that’s unrealistic. Instead, they’ll do nothing and use the report as an excuse to hire more, presumably “better” cops. Maybe get some more tanks and SWAT teams.
Hey, in totally unrelated news, the man who murdered George Floyd wants his jail sentence overturned.
Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has filed an appeal, asking the state Court of Appeal to overturn his conviction for killing George Floyd in 2020, according to CNN. Chauvin was found guilty of unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter, and was sentenced to 22 1/2 years in prison by Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill back in June, NPR reports.
An 82-page brief filed on Monday alleged that several factors during the case corrupted proceedings and made them “structurally defective,” CNN reports. One of the factors also noted was the pretrial publicity, protests outside the courthouse and the announcement during jury selection that Floyd’s family would receive a $27 million settlement. It continued, describing the court proceedings as “so pervaded by error, misconduct and prejudice that they were structurally defective.”
What a shame that he chose to publicly, callously murder a man in front of all those phone cameras. If it hadn’t been for all the publicity, nobody would have caught on and he’d be a free man today, probably still with a good job with the Minneapolis police department. And the Floyd family probably wouldn’t have gotten that settlement if the whole world hadn’t seen Chauvin openly execute a man!
Doesn’t everyone realize he was innocent, just a product of accepted Minneapolis police behavior?
It’s so cool that police are getting all this extra funding, too. Surely that’ll solve something.
I see that the Minneapolis City Council approved a new police union contract last month. Surely the council and the union have recognized this severe lack of accountability and have agreed to fix it. Right?
Of course it’s crickets from those on the right who bitch about the “deepstate” and the “corrupt FBI.” They won’t even use this as a cudgel to bash Biden whose most recent statements concerning policing ranged from unhelpful to downright alarming.
In many ways both sides are equally useless on this issue. We need politicians to acknowledge that policing in this country is as broken as most of the infrastructure and are willing to fix it.
I mean, I knew Chauvin would do that. We all knew it. But still- you’d think there’d be a flash of remorse from him. Also, if you look at the comments on the Strib and PP you can see there are still plenty of Cops and bootlickers looking to make racist defenses.
The report is pretty horrific.
For most of us, the report earns a big “Duh.” Who doesn’t know what police departments are all about?
“Lack of accountability” mystifies me. In what other profession do we need to legislate accountability? We hold plumbers, doctors, mechanics accountable for the work they do. We expect it.
If we have to make sure that cops are held accountable for their f%ckups, maybe the Police have been hiring the wrong kind of people.
Of course not a word from the right who were screaming about the “deepstate” and the “corruption” within the FBI. They can’t even be counted on to use this as a cudgel to bash Biden because they refuse to acknowledge the problem.
Both sides are pretty equally useless about fixing policing too. We need politicians who will both acknowledge that policing is as broken as the infrastructure and then fix it.
Boston, Chicago and Washington DC are the 3 I would have picked as the worst before reading this (and this particular graph is only about 1 axis of bad, so that might still hold true), and I’m almost relieved to find them taking up 3 of the top 4 spaces, and with a firm hold on #1. If it were otherwise I would have to start thinking that I’ve been dramatically underestimating how bad it is in the rest of the country if I thought Boston & Chicago & DC were the worst.
Still, it’s at least a little bit of a big deal to find out that Minneapolis slides in above DC, even with all the terrible news out of there in the past few years.
I hope you Minnesotans can get this fixed. You deserve better.
I wonder if there is a correlation between this graph and the amount of violence associated with the protests of the murder of George Floyd?
@Crip Dyke #6:
Three of top 5 with Chicago as #2. Note the note about Miami and how it could not be graphed due to the black/white disparity being +∞.