In the wake of the killing of George Floyd and associated riots, the people of Minneapolis are turning to a 2017 report, Enough is Enough: A 150 year Performance Review of the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD150).
The Past
The report begins with history. Starting in London in 1829, police forces are relatively recent creations. In the US, they began as vigilante militia slave patrols. During the genocide of California’s Natives in the 1850s, these patrols were reimbursed by the new state government for scalps and expenses incurred. The Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) was established in 1867, just five years after the mass hanging of 38 Dakota men in Mankato. Early municipal police forces in the US in the late 1800s made ample use of the Thirteenth Amendment, hauling people off the streets and forcing them into slavery on behalf of the city.
Police jobs were given out as political favors, with early mayors sometimes replacing entire police forces with political appointees with each new term. Departments quickly became armed wings of corrupt political parties. By the early 1900s, well-connected businesses were using city police to break up unions. In Minneapolis the mayor deputized a right-wing militia, the Citizen’s Alliance, to work with police in breaking strikes and combatting unions. They were basically the private army of the powerful used to suppress the poor, paid for with public funds. By the 1920s, the Great Migration had caused Minneapolis’s black population to swell, while KKK members joined the MPD.
There have been several hundred riots in the history of the United States. Before World War II, most were initiated by poor whites demanding better conditions, or by angry whites attacking immigrants. Since Harlem 1964, most have been initiated by urban Blacks in the aftermath of police brutality. Riots are now regular and predictable. City planners, mayors, and police departments expect and anticipate them. They are the acceptable price the powers pay rather than reform.
Minneapolis’s first riot against police brutality wasn’t until 1967; the National Guard was called in. Many more have followed, especially since the 1990s. Since then, the MPD150 observes, “the pattern established by the 1967 riot – policy brutality leads to community outrage, leads to protests, leads to promises of reform, leads to a lack of meaningful change – would become a constant feature of policing in Minneapolis for the next fifty years.” A series of investigations in the 1970s found the MPD to be racist, homophobic, and in the words of its own police chief, “damn brutal”. In 1999, Minnesota repealed a residency requirement for MPD officers, allowing them to come from outside the city. That bill was authored by a recent Hennepin County Sheriff.
The report concludes:
“the history of policing in Minneapolis and across the country has taught us that it doesn’t matter who the chief is, or even who runs the city: the police can’t be controlled. The Minneapolis Police Department was built on violence, corruption, and white supremacy. Every attempt ever made to reform it or hold it accountable has been soundly defeated. The culture of silence and complicity in the department, along with the formidable political power wielded by the police union, will continue to preserve the status quo…. It’s time for us to face the reality – if we want to build a city where every community can thrive, it will have to be a city without the Minneapolis Police Department.”
The Present
The problems in Minneapolis are not unique; they plague most urban police departments around the nation. The police are outsiders, literally. In Minneapolis, 95% of police officers live in distant suburbs, are from a different ethnic group, and communicate and socialize in different ways. They often view the people they are there to serve with disdain.
Where Democrats and Republicans live in the Minneapolis-St.Paul area. The police come primarily from the red areas, but work in the blue. Source: FiveThirtyEight.
To use a village metaphor, it’s as if a traditional Iroquois town hired a group of Shawnees to be their police force. Problems are inevitable.
Armed to the teeth, these officers spend the vast majority of their time responding to minor traffic violations, traffic accidents, mental health crises, and domestic disputes. This is at once inefficient, inappropriate, ineffective, and dangerous. Like sweeping up leaves with a chainsaw, armed police are the wrong tool for most of their jobs. As outside mercenaries from another culture, they are even poor at solving crimes; many locals don’t trust them and won’t confide in them.
Robb Davis, former mayor of Davis, California and former executive director of Mennonite Central Committee, observed,
“We need to see policing for what it has become in too many places: an institution that views itself as separate from the community but, somehow, charged with ‘saving the community from itself’; an institution that refuses to be morally judged for its tactics, arguing that as ‘technical experts’ it should be left alone; and an institution that has created structures via political processes to protect its worst actors from legal action.
Any institution that has been given a ‘monopoly to use force’ must be tightly reviewed and controlled. What we see today in policing is what we see in practically every institution that operates without control: an entity bent on its own survival, resistant to change, and self-destructive in its behavior.”
The Future
The MPD150 report envisions an alternative structure where, instead of armed police from a different ethnic group, well-trained mental health professionals, social workers, and others are called to deal with mental health crises, threats of domestic violence, and other situations that police are poorly trained to address.
Returning to the Native village comparison, in traditional communities from North America to Africa, people knew each other and relied on each other. Laws were enforced by all. In most eastern North American communities, village chiefs or elders were the arbiters of conflicts, but women chose the chiefs and had final power of clemency. Modern cities can replicate these principles, setting up local neighborhood networks to promote community and reduce anonymity, to create local structures for investigating crimes and implementing restorative justice.
The current MPD budget of nearly $200 million per year could be put to use for these endeavors, as well as to alleviate poverty. The report lists a number of small local NGOs that are already doing this work – including emergency dispatch of mental health workers—though with meager funds.
This has been done before, most drastically in Northern Ireland in 2001. Police departments have been dismantled many times in the US (most famously New York City in 1857 and Boston in 1919). In the past decade, Jennings, Missouri and Camden, New Jersey concluded that, due to institutional racism and corruption, their police departments were unredeemable. They fired all their officers and started over.
Today in Minneapolis, alternatives to armed outside police forces are already happening. Local neighborhood groups are forming, neighbors are talking, traditional village-type networks are solidifying. The looting and arson was largely quelled by protesters guarding sites. The American Indian Movement (AIM), founded in Minneapolis, is playing a leading role in this. MPD150 notes, “In 1968, community patrols emerged in Black and Native communities to keep people safe, deescalate conflict, and prevent police violence. These programs were enormously successful, and their legacies continue today.”
Now we have an opportunity. The arc of history, or, in this case, the long train of riots, has brought us to a new point, a possible tipping point. The recent uprising over the murder of George Floyd is a little different from the past. First, the police were fired immediately and quickly faced serious charges. Second, the protests were decidedly multiracial. Third, the general public has shown widespread empathy for the Black community, with a stunning 54% supporting the burning of the 3rd Precinct (compared to 38% support for Colin Kaepernick taking the knee four years ago). Finally, even some Republican politicians have called for a time of listening and reform. The door has opened a crack.
Minneapolis City Council member Steve Fletcher posted this on Twitter:
“It became clear by day two that people were marching for much more than that – the response to George Floyd’s death needed to be much more than any prosecution could offer. What people in the streets have won is a permanent, generational change to the mainstream view of policing.
I don’t know yet, though several of us on the council are working on finding out, what it would take to disband the MPD and start fresh with a community-oriented, non-violent public safety and outreach capacity. Our city needs a public safety capacity that doesn’t fear our residents. That doesn’t need a gun at a community meeting. That considers itself part of our community. That doesn’t resort quickly to pepper spray when people are understandably angry. That doesn’t murder black men.
We can totally reimagine what public safety means, what skills we’re recruiting for, what tools we do and don’t need. We can invest in cultural competency and mental health training, de-escalation and conflict resolution…. We can resolve confusion over a $20 grocery transaction without drawing a weapon, or pulling out handcuffs. The whole world is watching, and we can declare policing as we know it a thing of the past, and create a compassionate, non-violent future. It will be hard. But so is managing a dysfunctional relationship with an unaccountable armed force in our city.”
That’s how an imaginary newspaper might have reported the departure of Governor Oñate. After a hearing in Mexico City, he was found guilty, banished from New Mexico for life, and returned to Spain.
The soldiers and hired civilians gathered the frozen forms, tossed them onto wagons, all stiff arms and legs, carried them to the hill where the guns had been, and tossed them into a mass grave on the snow-swept tundra.
But Lost Bird, 10-years old, was restless. She knew she did not belong. She wanted to play with the black children but was told not to—it was beneath her—but that left her wondering what level she was on. Her mother, sensitive to Zintka’s past, took her to see a traveling troupe of Sioux drummers and dancers. She would have heard them before, at her mother’s breast, and it would have been the Ghost Dance. Like a bird in a cage watching a bird out the window, she was transfixed. Her mother tugged her arm to leave, but Lost Bird wanted to stay and watch.
Hanford, California, 1920
Here’s what they learned in the town of Vo’, Italy, when they tested everybody. This comes from a Physicians Facebook group, posted by an Italian doctor (Daniela Molena):
Memories of the People 