Report reveals decade of ‘repugnant’ police racism in Minneapolis

Isn't it interesting that so many people came up north to escape Jim Crow only to have deep seated problems up here. Milwaukee is one of the most segregated cities in the US and we have had our own issues with this type of activity

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
..."Josh Marcus
Wed, April 27, 2022, 6:37 PM·5 min read

The city of Minneapolis and its police department has spent years engaging in systemic racial discrimination against Indigenous people and people of color, 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 discrimination and abuse at all levels, ranging from excessive, paramilitary-style training to officers using disproportionate force on people of color, to police maintaining secret social media accounts to criticize politicians and organizations 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 previous findings 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 color, 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."...