The Minneapolis Police Department has received some, shall we say, rather negative press for a series of ugly incidents — not just the George Floyd murder, but also other outrages. So the United States Department of Justice carried out an investigation. The results have been released in a 92 page document. It’s not pretty. Here is the summary of the major conclusions.
FINDINGS
The Department of Justice has reasonable cause to believe that the City of Minneapolis and the Minneapolis Police Department engage in a pattern or practice of conduct that deprives people of their rights under the Constitution and federal law:
- MPD uses excessive force, including unjustified deadly force and other types of force.
- MPD unlawfully discriminates against Black and Native American people in its enforcement activities.
- MPD violates the rights of people engaged in protected speech.
- MPD and the City discriminate against people with behavioral health disabilities when responding to calls for assistance.
We like to think that Minnesota is a pretty good place to live — good schools, progressive politics, relatively good cost of living, etc., etc., etc. — but that only applies if you’re white. The report also documents some of our deeper problems.
Not everyone in Minneapolis shares in its prosperity. The metropolitan area that includes Minneapolis and neighboring St. Paul—known as the Twin Cities—has some of the nation’s starkest racial disparities on economic measures, including income, homeownership, poverty, unemployment, and educational attainment. By nearly all of these measures, the typical white family in the Twin Cities is doing better than the national average for white families, and the typical Black family in the Twin Cities is doing worse than the national average or Black families. The median Black family in the Twin Cities earns just 44% as much as the median white family, and the poverty rate among Black households is nearly five times higher than the rate among white households. Of the United States’ 100 largest metropolitan areas, only one has a larger gap between Black and white earnings.
In case you’re wondering how we ended up this way…
Some researchers have traced Minneapolis’ homeownership gap and other economic disparities back to the restrictive racial covenants that barred non-white people from living in many parts of Minneapolis in the first half of the 20th century. Beginning in 1910, local and federal public officials and mortgage lenders embraced racial covenants, and lenders engaged in redlining by routinely denying loans for properties in majority Black or mixed-race neighborhoods. The racially restrictive covenants, which the Supreme Court sanctioned in 1926 but later ruled unenforceable in 1948, funneled the City’s growing Black population into a few small areas and laid the groundwork for enduring patterns of residential segregation.
It’s as if there is an effect of history that is harming current generations, and a deep institutional racism routinely propped up by the courts.
That’s just CRT real racism designed to make white children feel bad! Here, let me fix it for conservatives…
“Some researchers have traced Minneapolis’ homeownership gap and other economic disparities back to the covenants that allowed housing choice in many parts of Minneapolis in the first half of the 20th century. Beginning in 1910, local and federal public officials and mortgage lenders embraced choice covenants, and lenders engaged in redlining by routinely denying loans for properties in neighborhoods of concern. The unexpectedly restrictive covenants, which the Supreme Court sanctioned in 1926 but later ruled unenforceable in 1948, funneled the City’s growing urban population into a few small areas and laid the groundwork for enduring patterns of housing choice.”
There. See? Nobody has to feel bad now about something they had nothing to do with and they can be judged by the content of their character just like Dr. King said!
Tabby Lavalamp @ 1
…..and people who complain are just liberal snowflakes. Yes, people get shot sometimes, but people also die of snakebites and meteor impacts* so what is the big deal.
(fixed it for you)
*or get eaten when trying to have sex with an alligator, like my cousin Cletus.
So, the only people with behavioral health disabilities are non-white people?
No, it was the healthy white population that were catered to, their wealthy segment being pampered. With, during the early 20th, through the mid and now returning, eugenics justifying screwing anyone outside of the mean.
Because, predatory capitalism needs a sizable victim class, both to scapegoat and to oppress and charge exorbitant fees from to keep them down in their place. Jews, Gypsies and the infirm and disabled in Germany, Blacks, the infirm and disabled in the US.
The only thing that kept the US from going the death camps route was war interrupted admirers of fascism and the discovery of Germany’s camps derailed their fever dreams.
In the late 80’s I encountered Lt. Mike Sauro of the MPD. I had ridden my motorcycle to a downtown bar to meet friends and checked my leather jacket at the coat check. When the evening was done, my jacket was gone, and staff were being very evasive as to what happened with it. Sauro was off duty, but working security in MPD uniform, that night at the bar. He grew very agitated with me as I pursued finding my jacket, so much so that I realized I should just leave before making him madder.
Years later, at the same bar, he handcuffed a college student, took him into the kitchen, and beat him. When the story broke, I thought, “that could have been me.” He also led a raid on the wrong house that resulted in the deaths of an elderly couple. That one officer cost the city millions of dollars and still kept his job.
His list of brutalities starts at paragraph 5. https://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports98/police/uspo86.htm.
Time to start human trials. Find a bunch (4 should be enough) of people with heart disease and start feeding them fly wings.
Wrong spot.
They could feed the flies to bad cops.
At best they’ll prevent allergic reactions to flies via digestive systems for prevention of reactions to food antigens.
Sorry. I posted on the wrong thread too.
@4 dbinmn
Yup… moved to MPLS in 87 and I distinctly remember the Mike Sauro days. How many millions did he cost the city in settlements? Not that St. Paul cops were (are) any better, if you remember Alery’s bar in lowertown.
“You do not need to be a sociopath to work here, but it helps”.
I would not be surprised to see a strong correlation between the degree of violence following the murder of George Floyd and the degree the local population was brutalized by the police.
Well, per the DOJ report, there was a very strong correlation.
Of course, “Minnesota nice” only makes it harder to have needed discussions of racism.
This is a perfect illustration of the swiss cheese model of error. It’s almost never just one bad cop, it’s almost always a sign of multiple failures. In this case the majority of failures were in the culture of the MPD (and as we know, PDs across the world). The disastrous action that killed George Floyd was merely the last and most public of those errors.
(I am using the non-judgemental word ‘error’ here in reference to accident prevention theory and not to exculpate Foyd’s murderers; what Chauvin and the other attending officers did to George Floyd was not an ‘error’ in the common meaning, it was an assault that they chose to perpetrate in public, while people were conspicuously recording them, with bystanders yelling at them to stop. Their sense of impunity was so ingrained that nothing, absolutely nothing, could have stopped them killing Floyd that day.)
I suspect that a similar report could be made about most big-city police departments. Definitely NYPD — “brutal, racist, and corrupt”. It seems like every 10 years, the Justice Department would investigate and turn up tons of systemic corruption. (The fact that I haven’t heard of any recently is IMHO more likely because they haven’t looked.) But I’ve hear things about Philadelphia, Chicago, LAPD, and of course, St. Louis and Baltimore.
I think it’s not so much that power corrupts as that power attracts corrupt people.
Oh, and in NYC, the racism and brutality are policy, set by City Hall, i.e., the Mayor’s office. And since the Mayor is an elected office, that means that it’s what the electorate wants. It’s what they mean by “law and order.”
@chrislawson
It reminds me of learning of error chains in aviation. There is never one “error” that happens in aviation- it is a series of errors each linking together that one day results in an incident- and in aviation the incidents are normally fatal. If you want to fix a problem to make sure incidents don’t happen, you don’t fix the last error only- you fix the whole chain.
Example- in LA in 1991 two aircrafts collided on a runway. The final errors were a pilot that basically landed on a runway where another pilot was setting up for take-off because of ATC. The contributing errors? Problems with tower location, problems with ATC, fog on the field and not having good policies to deal with, unusual situations where for instance another pilot was on the wrong frequency. Any one of these is an error. You loop these errors together and you have an error chain.
None of the people involved were bad actors. All pilots involved had hundreds of hours experience. ATC controllers had years of experience. No one at the airport intentionally built blind spots into the tower (happened organically over years of expansion). Shit happens.
But to keep from happening again, controllers retrained. Pilots got extra safety briefings. They built the tower higher. They switched policies so best practice is you don’t land planes on the same runways that you’re landing planes on, and it goes from “best practices” to “mandatory” in cases of inclement weather that interrupts visibility. Best practices everywhere is “if a plane is lost and we can see, no takeoffs and landings until we all figure out where the plane is”. There are checklists for pilots for frequency in error. The whole aviation industry is run on the idea “The worst pilot on the worst day in the worst conditions with the worst ATC should still be able to land a plane safely” and plans accordingly.
The problem with MPD is not Derek Chauvin, or 4-20-40%* of the cops being unmitigated assholes who shouldn’t be allowed near a firearm if their life depended on it. The problem is systematic, from the training being bad, to the culture being violent, to the investigators also being the police, to the consequences of bad actions being hidden and not lining up with their actions, to the city holding the bag and not the violent cops. To the fact that the job is hard, and the cops need therapy, legitimately, and cannot get it because it benches them. Each chain needs to be fixed.
*4 percent number is from the former MPD Deputy Chief of police (he was fired after saying that’s the percent that shouldn’t be cops and should never be cops). 20% is the average amount of incompetent people in any given field. 40% is the amount of cops who admit to being domestic abusers.
antigone10, I thought those damned lessons were learned after Tenerife! Biggest difference between the two, takeoff vs landing, the rest far too similar – similar enough to wonder if lessons learned just weren’t.
As for chain of errors leading to casualty, we have the same thing in the military. Initial response is to interrupt as many links in the chain as possible immediately, then produce a plan of action and milestones, reporting on them at a minimum weekly until all are addressed.
The more POA&M’s, the longer the senior leaders meetings with command, leaving all quite irritated, hence driving completion being expedited.
Training is critical, including concurrent training. Most cops get training at the academy and that’s it for their career, no, training needs reinforcement and updating.
Easier waiving or removal of qualified immunity shifting responsibility back to the offending officers is another part. Banning unions that disparage such leadership and accountability would be effective as well, precedent being our banning of communist party members.
Spousal abuse, you’re gone. Abusive behavior, fix it immediately and show progress or you’re gone.
And deescalation being mandatory, not that insane always take control via violence as a primary method of operation.
Those would be good beginning things to address.
wzrd1:
Domestic violence by law enforcement officers; notably, their rate of offending greatly exceeds that of the general population, whereas their rate of conviction greatly subceeds it.
(FWTW)
Tenerife was in Spain. Totally different sky.
Joking aside, Tenerife helped the recommendations. But tower location is always going to be tricky.