The Department of Justice review of the Minneapolis Police Department is out, and they find that the department is a morass of racism, bigotry, and corruption.
This is not a surprise, the dysfunction of the MPD is a common knowledge in the Twin Cities.
The only question is what, if anything, will be done. My money is on nothing at all being done:
The Minneapolis Police Department routinely used excessive force and discriminated against Black and Native American people in the years before one of its officers killed George Floyd, federal authorities said Friday.
In an 89-page report that followed a more than two-year federal civil rights investigation, the Justice Department excoriated the Minneapolis police force as an agency that put officers and local residents at unnecessary risk, failed to act upon repeated warnings about biased behavior and countenanced the “systemic problems” that gave way to Floyd’s death in 2020.
The report’s release came a little more than three years after Floyd, a Black man, was filmed gasping for air while pinned down by Derek Chauvin, a White police officer in Minneapolis, on Memorial Day in 2020. Floyd’s death helped ignite nationwide protests over policing and social and racial injustice, and Chauvin was convicted of murder the following year.
The Justice Department launched its civil rights investigation immediately after he was convicted. Appearing Friday at a federal courthouse in Minneapolis, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the investigation’s results and depicted Floyd’s death not as an isolated episode, but instead a tragedy enabled by the deep-rooted issues within the Minneapolis police.
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Garland said the Justice Department, the city of Minneapolis and the Minneapolis police had agreed in principle to negotiate toward a federal consent decree — a court-approved reform order that can be used to ensure changes within a local law enforcement agency.
The MPD should not be a part of the negotiations on the consent decree. They work for the city of Minneapolis, not the other way around.
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The Justice Department report presented a dire portrayal of the Minneapolis department as a place where officers use force recklessly, including against people who criticized or questioned them; face little to no accountability for allegations of wrongdoing; and patrolled the streets with “deficient and inadequate training.”
Investigators concluded that they “have reasonable cause to believe that” the city of Minneapolis and its police department “engage in a pattern or practice of conduct that violates the Constitution and federal law.”
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A lack of accountability is presented in the report as a pervasive problem for the Minneapolis police, and one that directly contributes to the other issues highlighted in the report, the Justice Department said. The Minneapolis police “accountability system is fundamentally flawed,” the report said, calling it “an opaque maze.”
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The Justice Department’s findings echoed repeated claims made by residents over the years about the Minneapolis police, and they also are similar in many ways to a state investigation that concluded last year that the department was riddled with unnecessarily aggressive behavior and lacking oversight.
Training won't make a difference.
Firings and prosecutions might.
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