According to a two-year inquiry, the Minneapolis Police Department often discriminated against minorities.
The findings of a two-year investigation by the US Justice Department were released on Friday and show that the Minneapolis Police Department often violated residents’ constitutional rights, notably those of minorities. The now-famous death of black suspect George Floyd while in police custody, which occurred on the knee of a white officer named Derek Chauvin, served as the impetus for the investigation to start in 2020.
The 92-page study by the Justice Department accuses a pattern of civil rights crimes, ranging from routine use of disproportionate and frequently lethal force to systematic prejudice against racial minorities, suggesting Floyd’s killing was far from an isolated incident.
The investigation discovered that even Floyd’s final comments appeared to be the norm rather than the exception, with multiple instances where cops allegedly disregarded statements made by individuals who were being held that they were having breathing difficulties.
Merrick Garland, the attorney general, told reporters on Friday that the “patterns and practices we observed made what happened to George Floyd possible.”
According to the report, the force often infringed upon people’ First and Fourth Amendment rights, including by retaliating against reporters who tried to chronicle the aforementioned civil rights breaches. According to departmental regulations “based on race and disability,” residents are most prone to suffer, with people of color, Native Americans, and those who have mental health difficulties being singled out for unusually cruel treatment.
The force’s refusal to penalize its own officers for violating even its purportedly weak behavioral standards, the investigation found, served to further entrench the adversarial relationship between law enforcement and the community. The organizational structure of the force allowed officers who were prone to power abuses of the kind that were well-documented in the report to evade responsibility by choosing to work under enabling supervisors.
The investigation found that the department’s pattern of abuses had been in place for years before to Floyd’s death, which was captured on cell phone footage, saw by millions worldwide, and set off a summer of rioting and racial recriminations. The report indicates that officers used “dangerous techniques and weapons against people who committed at most a petty offense and sometimes no offense at all,” and that simply criticizing the police department was sufficient to result in the use of disproportionate and occasionally lethal force.
Minneapolis has outlawed neck restraints, no-knock warrants, and other contentious practices in the wake of Floyd’s passing. In terms of when and when it is deemed proper to use force as well as how it is documented, the Justice Department report calls for a complete retraining in this area. It is believed that adopting specialized procedures to handle “people with behavioral health issues” as well as including racial information in all documentation of police action are both essential for minimizing the harmful impacts of systemic prejudice.
