The US Department of Justice has released a scathing report into the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD), outlining systemic abuses after a year-long investigation that was ordered as a reaction to the May 2020 murder of George Floyd and the ensuing racial justice demonstrations.
The Justice Department has found that MPD routinely uses excessive force, including unjust deadly force, the department revealed during a press conference on Friday.
US Attorney General Merrick Garland appeared with city officials in Minneapolis to speak about the blistering 89-page report. He said that the “patterns and practices we observed made what happened to George Floyd possible”.
Mr Garland added that he spoke to the family of Mr Floyd earlier on Friday, noting that he told that his death has had a “irrevocable” impact on the city and the country, according to The New York Times.
“His loss is still felt deeply by those who loved and knew him and many who did not,” Mr Garland said.
The attorney general ordered the probe in April 2021, nearly a year after the death of Mr Floyd.
The report states that MPD uses Tasers and firearms without properly assessing threats. The report also notes that in one such incident in 2017, an officer was “spooked” by a woman reporting a sexual assault.
DoJ also found that the MPD disregards the safety of those they take into custody and that they failed to step in to prevent the unreasonable use of force, such as in the murder of Mr Floyd by then-MPD officer Derek Chauvin when several fellow officers stood by and didn’t intervene.
Chauvin received a state sentence of 22.5 years and a federal sentence of 21 years.
The report also states that the practice of stop and search and the use of force disproportionately affected Black and Native American residents and that MPD wasn’t held accountable for racist activity until public protests ensued. MPD had been accused of using excessive force well before the murder of Mr Floyd.
DoJ called the findings “deeply disturbing” and said that they “erode the community’s trust” in policing.
The report found that it was “reasonable” to believe that officers are guilty of a “practice of conduct that deprives people of their rights under the Constitution and federal law”.
The Department of Justice also accused MPD of violating the First Amendment rights of protesters and reporters at demonstrations.
The report states that when some individuals break the law at a protest “officers frequently use indiscriminate force, failing to distinguish between peaceful protesters and those committing crimes”.
The city of Minneapolis has agreed to negotiate to possibly come to an agreement to be enforced by the courts that would put in place major changes to the city’s police. Similar consent decrees have been enacted in cities such as Chicago and Baltimore, in addition to several others.
The report found that from January 2016 until August of last year, there were 19 police shootings and that “a significant portion of them were unconstitutional uses of deadly force”.
Police at times discharged their firearms “without first determining whether there was an immediate threat of harm to the officers or others”.
An investigation conducted by the state of Minnesota finished in 2022 similarly outlined systemic abuse.
The federal report states that Chauvin had been found to previously have used excessive force. DoJ found that several other officers “stood by” in multiple other cases involving Chauvin.
DoJ also accused the city of not adhering to the Americans with Disabilities Act as they discriminate against those with behavioural health disabilities.
The report states that “many behavioral health-related calls for service do not require a police response, but M.P.D. responds to the majority of those calls, and that response is often harmful and ineffective”.
The federal probe found that officers in the Minneapolis force often failed to properly consider the health complaints of those they placed under arrest.
“We found numerous incidents in which officers responded to a person’s statement that they could not breathe with a version of, ‘You can breathe; you’re talking right now,’” the document stated.
Outlining racist comments by officers, the report states, “Some officers we spoke with aired fears and grievances about being perceived as racist, even as they made comments to us that themselves suggested bias and contempt for the people they are supposed to serve”.
In one incident, an officer said that he was aiming to wipe the Black Lives Matter movement “off the face of the earth”.
Investigators found that officers “suddenly stopped” gathering information regarding race and gender in a “large number of stops” following the murder of Mr Floyd, despite that this information gathering is required.
Before Mr Floyd’s death, about 71 per cent of traffic stops included information about race, but only 35 per cent of stops did so after the murder, The New York Times noted.
The report found that probes into wrongdoing by officers including into “serious misconduct” were “inexcusably slow” with more than 53 per cent of cases not being resolved for at least a year. More than 26 per cent went unresolved for at least two years.
A number of officers who were being investigated for serious misconduct were reassigned to train new recruits, according to the report. Some of them “violated a person’s rights while training a new officer”.
“People in Minneapolis have reason to question whether making a complaint to M.P.D. was worth the trouble,” the investigators wrote. “Our investigation found that all too often it wasn’t.”
The report outlines many instances of discrimination against Native Americans, specifically in the city’s third precinct. Some aggressive officers requesting to be placed there were called “cowboys” within the department.
Standing next to Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, at the federal courthouse in the city, Mr Garland said: “After MPD officers stopped a car carrying four Somali-American teens, one officer told the teens, ‘Do you remember... Black Hawk Down, when we killed a bunch of your folk? I’m proud of that. We didn’t finish the job over there. If we had, you guys wouldn’t be over here.’”
During the Battle of Mogadishu between 3 and 4 October 1993, which was later turned into the 2001 film Black Hawk Down, 18 US soldiers were killed while the estimates of the Somali death toll vary widely, ranging from numbers in the hundreds to figures in the thousands.
