For the second time in two years, Minneapolis, Minnesota, is once again the flashpoint of the frustratingly slow fight for criminal, racial, and social justice in the face of oppressive police violence. While the eventual conviction of former officer Derek Chauvin for the 2020 murder of George Floyd brought a measure of closure to a grieving community, the still-raw wounds of Floyd’s death and the mass uprising that followed have been ripped open again, after Minneapolis Police SWAT officers shot and killed Amir Locke during a no-knock raid last week. That Locke was not named in the warrant, and was simply crashing on someone else’s sofa, made the circumstances of his death all the more anguishing for a city still reeling from the injustices Floyd’s death rendered impossible to ignore.
To give a sense of how interconnected the cyclical struggle for justice in Minneapolis has become, consider that on the same day high school students left their classes and marched to the governor’s mansion in St. Paul to protest Locke’s death, a federal judge settled a years-long lawsuit against the state, ordering more than $800,000 in reparation payments to journalists who were targeted, attacked, and injured by state patrol officers during the Floyd protests. Furthermore, the state patrol is now legally barred from interfering with, dismissing, or damaging the equipment of journalists. And if you think that having to codify “don’t beat up the press” is the sort of thing that suggests perhaps law enforcement is more prone to fascistic tendencies than some people would like to admit, keep in mind that journalists from Reuters, CNN, Vice, and other high-profile outlets were all attacked — and in some cases seriously injured — by officials during the uprisings.
