Tag Archives: Minneapolis police

Bold Prediction: Police Reform (i.e. “Question Two”) Will Lose by at Least 10%

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Despite what you read here, I am not auditioning to be some kind of trans Debbie Downer. Good things, improvements even, are happening … somewhere. But just not now in Minneapolis if we’re talking police reform.

My joyless prediction for the upcoming vote on fixing The Problem with Minneapolis Cops is that Question Two will be defeated by at least 10%, essentially a wipe out. And that folks, will be the last time for a long time that voters will be able to do anything directly about, dare I say, one of the most notorious police departments in the USA.

The reasons for this crushing defeat are painfully obvious.

A: Based on my highly unscientific anecdotal research, way too few people understand what comes next if they in some way reduce the size and authority of the cops we have. (Since I live in Edina, so I should say “they have.”) People I hear and talk to seem to agree that the average Minneapolis cop is a poorly-vetted, poorly-trained “thumper”, a national embarrassment with a hair-trigger penchant for racially-based violence. But …

Murder of George Floyd - Wikipedia

B: … fear of street crime and personal assault is as high right now as I can remember it. Upscale residents of southwest Minneapolis (one of the safest neighborhoods in the country) can’t tell you how a “public safety” force would protect them from Hollywood-style gang banger shoot-outs in moving vehicles or crowded bars. And voters over on the north side don’t care if the average cop is a racist Trumper as long as they chase down the thugs turning grade school kids in to collateral damage.

Union head draws ire after calling George Floyd a criminal - New York Daily News

And C: The excruciatingly naive cry to “defund the police” is the most poisonous egg from a toxic goose any group has squeezed out since free love hippies raged about dismantling the military. Paranoid, status quo cop supporters couldn’t have invented a more potent slogan to prevent any kind of change in how Minneapolis goes about “protecting and serving.”

Making matters worse — more Downer here — is that Minneapolis is a national test case. When, not if, this “reform movement” goes down in flames, it’ll chill similar campaigns across the country.

That of course is the voter referendum variation on reform. City councils could, if they dared, initiate reforms. Somehow they could decertify police unions. It would not be easy, (what is?), but it would clear away the single most effective barrier to cop accountability.

Minneapolis police union president Lt. Bob Kroll at the union's headquarters.

Cops would howl and their fear-addled supporters would throw countless expensive law suits in the city’s face. But it has always seemed to me that selling “police accountability” and “transparency” is an easier argument than “replacing” the force with some nebulous “public safety” corps. The latter is a wishful(ly) concept which many residents think of as where sweet little Indivisible ladies and wispy-bearded grad students sit down for chai tea with the Crips and the Bloods.

One short-term upside to the crushing defeat of Question Two is that by not being in effect next November it will tamp down “crime” (which always means black street crime and never big money white collar fraud) as a Republican vote-stoker in the 2022 election cycle.

Question Two’s ignominious defeat won’t eliminate crime as the biggest issue, because “law and order!” is as evergreen a campaign rallying cry as you can get. But it would shave — says Mr. Downer — a few degrees off the fear fever, and maybe a few votes from anyone vowing more money and fewer restrictions on “our” valorous cops.

“Cops for Trump”

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As I sit here sharpening the points of my pitchfork and adding a couple quarts of fuel to my XL Tiki torch, in preparation for tonight’s Trump rally downtown, I’m reminded again of the angriest and funniest book written so far on The Trump Degeneracy.

“Everything Trump Touches Dies”, by longtime Republican campaign strategist/hit man Rick Wilson, is a pitiless, acid-tipped dagger assault on Trump and every know-nothing tribal toadie who ever signed on to the reality TV huckster’s bald-faced racism, corruption and incompetence. Sadly, that’s a sub-set of people that now includes at least a portion of the Minneapolis Police Department. (Wilson gets off a hilarious, coffee-out-the-nose line every other page.)

Whether some of Minneapolis’ finest are actually stupid enough to show up downtown tonight wearing their “Cops for Trump” t-shirts, (it is a bit chilly), it almost doesn’t matter. The fact that their union president, Bob Kroll, everyone’s caricature of a right-wing thug cop, has made a point of his and his
“brotherhood’s” full-throated support of Trump is all that matters.

I mean the t-shirts could just as easily read: “Cops for Career Criminals”, “Cops for Shameless Racists” or “Cops for Any Fool Who’ll Stick it to the Libtards.”

Over the past couple decades a few groups in particular have seriously degraded their credibility with the general public. Along with (white) evangelicals blind to the sexism, racism and sewer-level morals of Trump and his ilk, American cops have done a startlingly effective job of discrediting their profession and the pretense that they are politically neutral public servants.

A couple days ago I was listening to (yet another) Ezra Klein podcast, this time with New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell on the event of his latest book, “Talking to Strangers.” At one point Gladwell dives into the serious problem American cops have properly and reliably interpreting the demeanor of people they stop and confront. (Gladwell emphasizes that far too many of the stops are for reasobns that amount to “ticky tack bullshit”.) The case of Sandra Bland, a thoroughly innocent Texas woman stopped (mainly because she was black, let’s be honest) and who later hung herself in jail, is a key drama Gladwell explores.

He dives into the rippling effects of The Kansas City Experiment, an early ’70s protocol that did prove successful in driving down crime in tough neighborhoods. Key was a more intrusive, predictive brand of policing that had the person-to-person effect of treating every police-citizen interaction as a criminal erncounter.

Gladwell

‘s larger point is that the “Minority Report”-like concept of stopping crimes before they happen has seriously mutated over the years into the kind of militarized, nakedly-racist profiling now seen in dozens of “cop-involved” killings across the country. I refer you to Philando Castile here in Minnesota, an interaction that also involved the average not too well trained/inexperienced cop’s role as a revenue-producer for his municipality.

Gladwell points this out as well as a key part of the perversion of police work in recent years. (Over the last 14 years of his life Castile was stopped by cops 46 times, resulting in several thousand dollars of fines. You’re free to check it out and decide how “ticky tack” most of these stops were and ask if any white guy in a Mercedes would have been stopped even once.)

Bad as all that is, Kroll and company’s unabashed, in-your-face-pointy-headed-liberal-wusses “Cops for Trump” move reasserts to every Minneapolis citizen the high likelihood that the cop cruising down the street is carrying a heavy baggage of greivances, along with a badge and a loaded gun. Far from being apolitical and color blind, “Cops for Trump” strongly suggests a fellow traveler/sympathizer with not just appalling corruption and criminality, but what history will eventually conclude is the most open and unapologetically racist Presidency since, well, since Andrew Jackson.

By so shamefully linking themselves to Donald Trump, Bob Kroll’s Minneapolis cops have significantly accelerated the death of their own legitimacy.

Guilty or Not, Mohamed Noor is Not the Most Culpable Party

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As of noon Tuesday the fate of Mohamed Noor was, to borrow a lyrical phrase favored by polite journalists, still “in the hands” of a Minneapolis jury. If I had a service revolver pointed at my head, I’d predict Noor walks, on the by now familiar grounds that he is a cop who “feared for his life” when he saw something blonde and pink raise a hand outside his police cruiser two years ago.

Among beard-stroking legal theorists, the fundamental twist in this case is whether Noor’s conduct — a plainly terrified young cop, his gun out of its holster while responding to a fairly routine call to a reasonably well-lit alley in an upscale part of town with remarkably low levels of violent crime — constitutes a criminal action on his part.

The third-degree homicide charge seems to be a stretch, given the evidence and the average jury’s inclination to give cops every possible benefit of doubt.

The second-degree manslaughter seems a better bet, but to my mind hinges on the part that requires, ” … the person’s culpable negligence whereby the person creates an unreasonable risk and consciously takes chances of causing death or great bodily harm to another.”

This issue there is who created “unreasonable risk” and the mindset that “consciously takes chances of causing death … .” Was young, inexperienced Mohamed Noor wholly responsible for that kind of thinking?

Were I juror, I’d be annoying the hell out of the other 11 by arguing that the “consciousness” that killed Justine Damond was created at least as much by Minneapolis police training/or lack thereof as Noor himself. After all, his defense has heavily emphasized how carefully and completely he followed police training … to protect himself and his partner.

While the jury deliberates, the Mayor and the police union, led by the medieval consciousness of Lt. Bob Kroll, are squabbling over the department’s shall we say, “highly problematic” training practices, specifically the hyperbolic “warrior” training that instills an amped-up combat zone mentality on recruits.

Part of the training, as we’ve learned, involves stark reminders of the ambush killing of Minneapolis cop Jerry Haaf, 27 years ago in what was then a rough section of Lake St. It was a notorious case and a tragedy. But what exactly makes it so relevant to daily police work in 2019 that it is seared into young cops as the sort of thing they must be prepared to deal with every moment they’re on duty, answering routine calls in quiet, upscale neighborhoods on warm summer nights?

Insurance companies, with all their data-driven underwriting may be a bane of modern American life, but the weird thing is that the numbers — the probabilities and risks — usually don’t lie. Which is why I have to wonder what the real world statistics are on the likelihood of another Jeffry Haaf cop ambush in Minneapolis?

Think of it this way: since Haaf’s murder in 1995 how many Minneapolis cops have answered how many calls, eaten at how many greasy spoons, rolled through how many dark (and not really so dark) alleys without being ambushed? Add all that up and what are the odds — really — that a Haaf-like ambush will happen again? Are we into winning-the-lottery odds yet? Lightning strikes twice odds? Peace breaking out in the Middle East odds? Donald Trump saying anything truthful odds?

Your average Bob Kroll will of course fly into a red-faced rage about how, “It only has to happen once! You goddam elitist pussy!” which is an echo of Dick Cheney’s famous “One Percent Solution”. That’s the one where you go to war with an adversary if there’s even a 1% chance he’ll do something nasty.

Where this leads is the obvious answer to who is most responsible for the death of Justine Damond? A young, inexperienced cop with an overactive paranoia? Or the city that selected and trained him, firing his imagination him with a war zone mentality?

Even a conviction of Noor will do little to nothing to prevent the next cop, “fearing for his life”, from gunning down some unarmed  citizen. What will have some impact though is an enormous civil verdict — $10, $15, $20 million or more — against the city for its responsibility in consenting to police recruitment and training that instills more terror than competence in the people it badges and arms to “protect and serve.”

 

Every Day, A Higher Level of Infuriation with the Justine Damond Case

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We should be able to agree that the entire police culture is on trial in Minneapolis these days, and not just Mohamed Noor. With every passing day of trial testimony the natural reaction — certainly from me — is greater and greater infuriation.

Few incidents put “the blue wall of silence” and the truly horrifying inadequacy of police hiring and training in starker relief than the killing of Justine Damond and the “professional response” by Minneapolis police in the minutes and months afterward.

As we’ve learned through the first weeks, the two cops immediately involved, Matthew Harrity and Noor, ignored police procedure about body cameras, as did virtually every other cop who arrived on the scene, turning them on and off as they saw fit. Likewise, we’ve learned that contrary to the original, long-standing police version of the event, the alley in which Damond was killed wasn’t pitch dark, but so well illuminated by street lighting that the next wave of arriving cops could plainly see her lying dead on the ground as well as the surrounding area.

Then there’s the “startling” slam on the police car that so terrified Noor he fired at the first shape he saw outside Harrity’s window. We now learn that the slam on the car was something that only churned up into the story days after the event, by which time the whole case was pretty much in lockdown by “the blue wall”, with Noor refusing to explain himself and other officers forced to give testimony by a grand jury.

The credibility of police in a civilized society is a pretty damned important matter, and here in Minneapolis, and all over the USA, that credibility continues to take a ferocious beating. Why? Because tech advances and social media are more and more able to transmit real-time evidence of actual police behavior. The taxpaying public can now see — fully, as in the case of Philando Castile, and intermittently in the Damond case — how more or less average cops go about their daily business. And, frankly, it’s terrifying.

When the Noor trial started it was estimated at a straight-up 50-50 call on his guilt. I doubt that has changed. Noor’s Somali ethnicity may play a role in this case that the Hispanic ethnicity of officer Jeronimo Yanez didn’t in the Castile case. But it’s likely that typical jury respect for anything with a badge will again be a powerful counter-balance to the appalling behavior of Harrity, Noor and so many other cops on the scene in quiet, leafy southwest Minneapolis that fateful night.

I mean, FFS, what goes through a trained cop’s mind when they can’t bring themselves to tell the arriving EMT crew what actually happened?

Clearly, a lot of rethinking of the basic cop code has to be done to relieve public concerns that too many of these people are poorly vetted, ill-trained, demonstrably terrified individuals playing out a bizarre kind of military adventure on city streets, with themselves as executioners routinely exempt from punishment.

What to do?

1:  Offer significantly better compensation to attract a much higher quality of police candidates. Give communities a true choice in the quality of people they’re (arming) and putting on the streets, rather than forcing cities to pretty much take (and keep) whoever walks in the door.

2: Vet out the most militaristic “Bulletproof Warrior” crowd, the people itching for the authority a badge and a gun gives them. Don’t try to adapt them to police procedure, simply red-line them at the get-go.

3: Never, ever, allow two newbie cops in the same car on the same beat. Neither Harrity or Noor had the emotional stability or experience to deal with Damond situation, and that’s with the reminder that they supposedly “feared for an ambush” in southwest [bleeping] Minneapolis, a neighborhood with one of the lowest violent crime rates in the country.

4: Multi-projectile police revolvers. Service weapons with two separate loads of ammunition. The default position being either rubber bullets or chemical darts. If cops are responding to a Hollywood-style shoot-out they can switch their weapons over to the real thing. (Harrity and Noor had a military-style rifle in their car.) In the meantime, given the horrifying tally of citizens executed by inexperienced cops “fearing for their lives”, a rubber bullet fired in terror at a nice lady in her pajamas would have a much different ending than … her being dead on the spot.

5: A fresh re-writing of the city’s police standards and legal consequences. As in:

a:  fail to turn your body camera on when responding to a possible crime — you’re fired.

b:  fail to fully describe the events of a shooting to arriving back-up, EMT and supervisors — you’re fired.

c: “decline” to give any statement or testimony to police or state investigators after a police-involved shooting — you’re fired. Likewise, counsel an officer involved in a shooting incident not to speak to investigators — you’re fired.

In a fair world, where as Randy Newman said, “It’s money that matters”, a massive, eight-figure pay-out to the Damond family for the actions of Noor and the Minneapolis police might get the gears turning on some of these reforms.

Not that I’m betting on it.