The city of Minneapolis and its police department has spent years engaging in systemic racial discrimination against Indigenous people and people of colour, according to a scathing new report from the state.
“It’s going to take a lot of work by a lot of people to get out of this,” Minnesota Human Rights Commissioner Rebecca Lucero told reporters on Wednesday.
The probe from the state’s human rights agency found dicrimination and abuse at all levels, ranging from excessive, paramilitary-style training, to officers using disproportionate force on people of colour, to police maintaining secret social media accounts to criticise politicians and organisations focused on civil rights work and Black empowerment.
The Minnesota Department of Human Rights will now negotiate a consent decree with the city, a court-enforceable agreement laying out how Minneapolis and its police need to change to meet state law.
“Race-based policing is unlawful, and it harms everyone, especially people of colour and Indigenous community members, sometimes costing community members their lives,” Ms Lucero added.
The so-called “pattern or practice” probe was launched in the days after George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police, and involved reviewing hundreds of hours of police body camera footage, hundreds of thousands of city documents, and interviewing numerous officers and community members. It marks the first time a state agency has investigated one of its police forces in such a manner.
The agency’s report echoed previousfindings that Minneapolis police regularly single out non-white people for harsher treatment.
Since 2010, 13 of the 14 people killed by Minneapolis police were people of colour, the human rights investigation found, while officers used force against Black people at a rate more than three times greater than their percentage of the population.
And this disproportionate use of police power was met with weak accountability systems that rarely punished bad officers, the inquiry found. In one 2017 incident, an officer cracked open an unarmed 14-year-old’s ear with a flashlight because he did not immediately stand up when police entered his room.
Elsewhere, current and former officials admitted to stopping the cars being driven by people of colour “for either no genuine reason or for low-level violations in an effort to find guns or drugs in cars operated by people of color,” the report found.
Some of the most shocking findings, however, were qualitative.
MPD officers referred to Black people as “n*****s” and “monkeys,” Black women as “Black b*****s”, Latinx individuals as “b*****s” and Somali men as “orangutans.” This racist abuse was also directed at officers of colour on the force itself, according to the report, who were referred to as “cattle” and “nappy”-haired.
This culture of vulgarity and hate, with officers “much less professional and respectful than officers from other police departments," was so extensive it often interfered with using police body camera footage in court, "because of how disrespectful and offensive MPD officers are to criminal suspects, witnesses, and bystanders,” the report found.
The probe also ripped city officials for failing to follow through on promised reforms.
“The lack of collective and sustained action among City and MPD leaders has, in effect, allowed this organisational culture to fester within MPD and resulted in unlawful policing practices that undermine public safety,” the report reads. “City and MPD leaders have been aware of the long-standing, disproportionate impact of race-based policing on people of color and Indigenous individuals, especially Black individuals.”
Activists and city leaders alike reacted with dismay to the agency’s findings.
Many in the city’s racial justice movement argued the report underscored their calls to wholly transform the structure of the MPD into a holistically focused public safety agency, an effort that’s previously been defeated at the city ballot box.
“Denial, self-deception and wishful thinking won’t give Minneapolis the solutions they deserve. This is a solvable problem once we admit the ‘bad apple narrative doesn’t apply here,” JaNaé Bates, a Minneapolis-based organiser, said on Wednesday. “The whole tree is rot.”
“There is no reforming this,” added DA Bullock on Twitter, an activist and filmmaker based in the Twin Cities.
The Minneapolis Police Department said in a press conference on Wednesday it is “not waiting to move forward” on some of the “deeply concerning” findings from the review, pointing to new initiatives in bystander training, de-escalation, and a quality assurance department that will make sure the MPD actually implements the reforms it publicly commits to.
“I found the contents to be repugnant, at times horrific,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said on Wednesday at the press conference. “They made me sick to my stomach and outraged, and I think that our community feels the same way.”
Mr Frey has argued he ushered through changes to police training and use of force after Mr Floyd’s death, but critics point to the fact that many of his reforms haven’t altered the underlying police structure and culture identified as toxic by state officials.
His office opposed the ballot initiative to form a new public safety agency, and negotiated a new police union contract with the MPD that left discipline and accountability procedures mostly untouched.
Wednesday’s report isn’t the first audit taking aim at the MPD.
Earlier this year, a city-commissioned study found a “vast, vast void” in leadership in how Minneapolis police responded to the 2020 George Floyd protest, indiscriminately firing riot control weapons at oftentimes peaceful protestors and causing severe injuries.
Another 2022 audit found the the MPD usually spend less time on emergencies requiring an armed response and instead use police resources on other tasks that could be handled by non-armed administrators and outreach workers.
The Minneapolis City Council has revived its attempts to create the new public safety agency, this time outside of the ballot initiative process.
The scrutiny of the MPD will not end with the human rights report, however. The Department of Justice is also investigating the department, and said it is taking into account the human rights agency’s findings.
