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Friday, March 29, 2024 | Back issues
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Probe finds pattern of race discrimination in Minneapolis police force

The Minnesota Department of Human Rights found that aggressive training, lack of discipline and an overtly racist culture allowed for persistent discrimination against Black residents and other people of color.

MINNEAPOLIS (CN) — An investigation report released Wednesday morning found that the Minneapolis Police Department discriminates against the city’s Black residents through disproportionate force, covert and unjustified social media monitoring and consistent use of racial and misogynistic slurs. 

The findings by the Minnesota Department of Human Rights come at the end of a nearly two-year investigation started in the summer of 2020, shortly after George Floyd’s death under the knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in May of that year. 

Human Rights Commissioner Rebecca Lucero held a press conference Wednesday to discuss the investigation. She said it found that over the past decade, 63% of MPD’s uses of force were against Black people, who make up less than 20% of the city’s population. She also noted that Black residents were the subjects of 78% of the department’s searches. 

The department’s officers are also more likely to use chemical irritants, neck restraints and chokeholds against Black individuals, the report found. An injunction filed shortly after the start of the investigation banned the use of chokeholds and neck restraints and put stricter controls on the use of “crowd control weapons” such as chemical irritants and “less-lethal” munitions, along with a strengthened version of the city’s duty-to-intervene policy that requires both verbal and physical intervention, regardless of rank and seniority. 

The city and department, Lucero said, will soon get to work on a consent decree seeking to resolve the issues raised by the investigation. She said a Wednesday morning meeting with Mayor Jacob Frey was “productive,” but did not provide details on what the consent decree could contain. 

Lucero laid the department’s failures at the feet of its training and a lack of action by department and city leadership. A 2019 ban of “warrior-style” training, she said, did not put an end to an “us-against-them” framing in later training, and the department consistently failed to discipline officers for misconduct. 

While city officials have frequently blamed arbitration and Minneapolis’ militant police union for an inability to fire problem officers, Lucero said the department’s own conduct frequently facilitated lenient decisions from arbitrators. In one instance, she noted, an arbitrator decided to reverse the termination of an officer whose supervisors had put him back on active duty as soon as possible following a desk-duty assignment for misconduct, even keeping him on as a field training officer. Investigators and then-Chief Medaria Arradondo then delayed terminating the officer for over a year after the Police Conduct Review Panel recommended that he be fired. 

“The City and MPD could have limited the likelihood that an arbitrator would have reduced this disciplinary decision by diligently investigating the case, not returning the officer to regular duty, and not permitting the officer to serve as a field training officer,” the report said. “Because of the actions and inactions of the city and MPD, an officer who engaged in a serious excessive force violation was returned to their job to police in the community and train new MPD officers.” 

While Lucero and the report declined to give that officer’s name, the circumstances and timing of the case match up with an incident in which now-former officer Chauvin, who was convicted last year of Floyd’s murder, beat a 14-year-old boy around the head with a flashlight and held him in a chokehold. Chauvin evaded federal civil rights charges for that incident in December, when he made a deal to plead guilty to violating Floyd’s civil rights. 

Lucero also noted that internal investigators and those with the Office of Police Conduct Review routinely failed to properly investigate misconduct complaints, including by failing to examine body-worn camera footage, and that in up to 37% of cases where discipline was foregone in favor of “coaching” by supervisors, no coaching actually took place. 

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Approximately 35% of disciplinary proceedings between 2013 and 2019 led instead to “coaching,” according to a 2020 investigation by local publication the Minnesota Reformer. Sixty percent yielded no discipline at all. 

At Wednesday’s press conference, Lucero pointed to a “vacuum” of “collective, sustained action from key city and MPD leaders.” Small reforms on short time scales, she said, had not been adequate to address the department’s culture of discrimination. 

The report also drew attention to officers’ frequent use of abusive and discriminatory language, which Lucero noted was directed “to everyone; to criminal suspects, to witnesses, to bystanders, and to fellow… city employees.” 

While Lucero did not go into detail on the phrases used, the report notes that Black people were frequently referred to as “monkeys” or “niggers,” Latino people as “beaners,” Somali men as “orangutans” and women, particularly Black women, as “cunts,” “bitches” and an apparently MPD-invented slur, “cussy.” 

This language, the report noted, made it difficult for city and county prosecutors to use MPD body camera footage in court. “When MPD officers scream obscenities at community members, it makes it challenging for prosecutors to do their job and therefore undermines the criminal justice system,” the report said. 

The report also examined the force’s use of fake social media accounts to monitor Black residents for what it found were not legitimate purposes. The department, the report found, used covert accounts to impersonate Black people and perpetuate racial stereotypes, harass local Black activists and leaders, and criticize city and state elected officials with no law enforcement purpose. Officers also created at least two dozen accounts not accounted for on the department’s inventory of such accounts, and the department had no policy requiring leadership to ensure that covert accounts were being used for legitimate investigative purposes. 

Even after reaching an agreement with the Department of Human Rights, the city and MPD will not be out of the woods with investigators. A U.S. Department of Justice pattern-and-practice investigation of the police department is pending, having been announced by Attorney General Merrick Garland last April following Chauvin’s conviction. That investigation has a broader scope, covering allegations of inequitable policing along with the department’s responses to protests and compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. 

University of St. Thomas law professor Rachel Moran, who specializes in police accountability and reform issues, said the report was “pretty enraging” but “not surprising.”

“I think the report does a pretty thorough job of memorializing what a lot of people already know,” Moran said, but that city leadership “haven’t done anything about, or haven’t done enough about.”

A consent decree, she said, could bring real change only if its requirements were strict and specific. “A meaningful consent decree would have time limitations and specific changes rather than regurgitating jargon about how we need to change,” she said. 

Some changes, she said, could include eliminating non-safety related traffic stops, which the investigation found were heavily weighted against drivers of color, and a more empowered civilian oversight commission. The report called the existing Police Conduct Oversight Commission “ineffective as implemented,” noting that a lack of resources and access to body camera or investigative files prevented it from making any meaningful changes to the department. 

Moran also said she sympathized with the complaints of prosecutors that abusive policing habits jeopardized their cases, but that they themselves were not blameless in Minneapolis’ policing problems. 

“I think there are a lot of people responsible for the police department we have,” she said, noting that the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office and the Minneapolis city attorney have “woefully inadequate systems” for maintaining so-called Brady list of officers considered untrustworthy. 

“Hennepin County takes the position that they don’t have to have a Brady list,” Moran said. While the department’s culture may indeed hurt prosecutors’ cases, “they have some power here that they’re not using.” 

Categories / Civil Rights, Government, Regional

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