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.
