The Minneapolis Police Department (or Baltimore or New Orleans or New York or Basically Any City in the Nation)
The cops are fascists from stem to stern and Americans just don’t want to deal with the core fact that they have entrusted public safety to the worst people in the country, which then create cultures that even you aren’t bad when you enter the department, you will break bad or not survive in your job.
The US Department of Justice report says that problems within the MPD “made what happened to George Floyd possible”.
The death of Floyd at the hands of police sparked mass protests in 2020.
The investigation was launched a day after the trial of his killer.
US Attorney General Merrick Garland said the department’s conduct uncovered in the report “is deeply disturbing, and it erodes the community’s trust in law enforcement”.
Following the investigations, the city has agreed to negotiate an agreement, known as a consent decree, with the Justice Department on reforming its police department.
Footage of Floyd’s fateful arrest – in which convicted ex-officer Derek Chauvin trapped Floyd’s neck under his knee for more than nine minutes – led to protests nationwide, and a broader reckoning with racial injustice.
Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was arrested on 25 May 2020 on suspicion of using a counterfeit $20 bill to pay for cigarettes at a corner store in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
“As I told George Floyd’s family this morning, his death has had an irrevocable impact on the Minneapolis community, on our country, and the world,” Mr Garland said on Friday, as he announced the findings of the federal investigation.
The Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation into the city’s police department in April 2021, one day after Chauvin was convicted of murder and manslaughter.
Three other officers have also since been convicted on federal charges for their roles in the arrest.
The 92-page report concluded that, for years, city police “used dangerous techniques and weapons against people who committed at most a petty offense and sometimes no offense at all”.
It also claimed the MPD had “patrolled neighbourhoods differently based on their racial composition and discriminated based on race when searching, handcuffing, or using force against people during stops”.
The report further alleges that the city of Minneapolis sent officers to behavioural health-related emergency calls “even when a law enforcement response was not appropriate or necessary, sometimes with tragic results”.
Findings from the report are based on a review of city-provided documents, police incident files and body-camera footage, as well as conversations with officers and local residents.
“Now things have to be different. Now things have to change,” the city’s mayor Jacob Frey said Friday, standing alongside Mr Garland.
Not that there will be any pressure for things to change, as support for Black Lives Matter have plummeted among non-Black populations in the last three years. Talking about race, it just makes me so….uncomfortable.