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--:-- Host: Protesters torching a Minneapolis police precinct while thousands took to the streets, demanding justice for George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who died in police custody.
--:-- Host: I think what we saw here in the Twin Cities last night and yesterday and really all this week, between just the mayhem, the melee, the chaos, standoff with police officers, there was just this sense that the city was being overrun and was definitely scary for a lot of people.
--:-- Host: This several block area that Morgan and I are in right now is out of control. You were seeing a demonstration in downtown that had been largely peaceful, but quickly grew violent.
--:-- Host: I was following the procession, and there was a group that sort of splintered off at one point. But then a series of police cruisers swooped in and started pepper-spraying the crowd to try to disperse them. And that's when things really started going a different direction.
--:-- Host: We may have gas canisters now. The police are deploying something. All right, there's milk being spread around, so that is Curedass. I'm just going to stick this on.
--:-- Host: Minneapolis police decided at some point to abandon the third precinct. They decided it was no longer safe for the officers who were working there. There is now a person who, excuse me, sir, there is now a person who is going and trying to get physically into the third precinct there. It was overrun. People set a fire and that's when the rest of the city started really going up in flames as well as that started spreading.
--:-- Host: There are fires burning to the left of it at the wine and liquor store. Communities burned down to the ground and deprived of resources like grocery stores, pharmacies, auto parts stores and things like that. And communities that already struggle to attract economic development.
--:-- Host: But a local auto zone also was looted and then set on fire. And auto zone was not alone. I got a text message from the station manager of a Spanish radio station here who said that the building, their station is in, completely burned to the ground. And it's a historic building that had been a pillar in the community there.
--:-- Host: I can't breathe! I can't breathe! I can't breathe! I'm going to be driving around town today just to take a closer look at all the damage. But I was down in the Longfellow neighborhood where the 3rd Precinct burned down, and I can't recognize it. The destruction, the devastation is just really widespread.
--:-- Host: And so in parts of the city, it's going to take a long time to rebuild, I think.
--:-- Ricardo Lopez: These protests were sparked after a police officer in Minneapolis killed George Floyd, an unarmed Black man. Why were the police called in the first place?
--:-- Ricardo Lopez: George Floyd was detained Monday night in South Minneapolis over a call of forgery.
--:-- Ricardo Lopez: This is the cell phone video from America's heartland that's inflaming passions across the country. And so four officers had arrested him and placed him in handcuffs, but the officer kneeled on his neck and kept his knee there for several minutes. Even after Floyd repeatedly said he couldn't breathe.
--:-- Ricardo Lopez: You know, this was all happening with multiple witness bystanders who were pleading with the police to let him up, to let him go, because he was struggling to breathe on the ground and saying as much.
--:-- Ricardo Lopez: He's not even resisting arrest right now, bro. His nose is bleeding. You fucking stopping his breathing right now, bro. You think that's cool?
--:-- Ricardo Lopez: That, I think, is what outraged a lot of people, this idea that you could have a man pleading for his life in the middle of daylight of a busy street and have multiple witnesses pleading for them to let him go. That really outraged people.
--:-- Ricardo Lopez: Before the protests last night, what was the reaction to this killing, this tactic of a cop putting his knee on Floyd's neck?
--:-- Ricardo Lopez: I think what is very interesting about this case is just the widespread and universal condemnation about the tactics shown there. I think police chiefs in cities all over the country have already weighed in and told even their officers that what they saw on video was entirely wrong.
--:-- Ricardo Lopez: I think I thought of what every good, hardworking police officer, quite frankly, thinks. And I was appalled. As leaders in law enforcement, when we see something that we know in our hearts is wrong, we can't remain silent.
--:-- Ricardo Lopez: And have any of the officers been arrested yet or charged?
--:-- Ricardo Lopez: As of just a few minutes ago, getting notifications that Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin, who was the one shown in the video kneeling on George Floyd's neck, has been taken into custody by the State Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
--:-- Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman: Good afternoon. I'm Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman. I'm here to announce that former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin has been charged with third degree murder.
--:-- Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman: We are in the process of continuing to review the evidence. There may be subsequent charges later.
--:-- Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman: And what about the other officers who were there when George Floyd was killed and didn't do anything to stop it?
--:-- Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman: We're still waiting to hear what charges they might face. You know, they've obviously been fired from their jobs.
--:-- Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman: A few years ago, Minneapolis police enacted a reform that called for any officer who was witnessing a fellow officer using excessive force to intervene. And if not, they're just as culpable because Minneapolis police have said this week that all officers are expected to take a leadership role.
--:-- Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman: And so they should intervene when they're seeing fellow officers use excessive force. And obviously, this isn't the only time an unarmed black man has been killed by a police officer in the Twin Cities.
--:-- Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman: How does this fit into the bigger picture in Minnesota?
--:-- Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman: Well, I think, you know, we can remember sort of the bigger situations that have happened here in Minneapolis in recent years, you know, going back to Jamar Clark and Philando Castile.
--:-- Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman: And a lot of these underlying inequalities and equities have continued to address Minnesota for years and years.
--:-- Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman: And obviously, this is a place that sees some of the widest gaps in income, in household education, in household wealth, in home ownership, in car ownership, in health, in education.
--:-- Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman: I mean, name any area, and Minnesota has one of the worst racial disparities. And I think that this is a state that is very largely white. And it's a very nice place to live if you're not black. And that's the reality.
--:-- Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman: I'm a person of color here in the state, and I have faced a number of incidents that I know are related to my race.
--:-- Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman: But it's hard to escape the reality that in Minnesota, your quality of life is very different if you're not white.
--:-- Host: Has the president weighed in at all?
--:-- Host: So President Trump tweeted something that was immediately received as very inflammatory by people who, especially his language around when the looting starts, the shooting starts.
--:-- Host: And so, you know, the president's tweet last night did little to calm tensions here.
--:-- Host: I think in history, we've always looked to the leadership of the United States president to help quell unrest and help try to heal the country.
--:-- Host: But I think that the tweet was very poorly received.
--:-- Host: It took a dig at Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Fry, What was the other tweet?
--:-- Host: There was an earlier one calling you a radical leftist and a weak mayor. Which prompted a press conference by the mayor, who stood by himself as he pushed back on Donald Trump's tweet.
--:-- Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Fry: Weakness is refusing to take responsibility for your own actions. Weakness is pointing your finger at somebody else during a time of crisis.
--:-- Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Fry: Donald Trump knows nothing about the strength of Minneapolis. We are strong as hell.
--:-- Host: Is this a difficult time period?
--:-- Host: Yes. But you better be damn sure that we're going to get through this.
--:-- Host: Like I said, he stood alone and looked pretty visibly tired.
--:-- Host: And I think this morning you saw with the governor's address today, you know, essentially say the state is now the lead element in keeping the city safe and the state safe.
--:-- Host: To ensure that tonight our buildings do not burn, our citizens are secure, and that space that we're going to create allows us to get back to the conversation of serving justice and making sure that we're not adding to that list of unheard names.
--:-- Host: This is very uncharted territory for Minnesota.
--:-- Host: The idea that an entire police station would burn down to the ground is just something that had been until last night unbelievable, inconceivable even.
--:-- Host: But the state has a task force that has issued a number of recommendations around how to improve policing.
--:-- Host: So I think that, unfortunately, the death of George Floyd is going to provide a big, big reason why lawmakers should take a good hard look at these task force recommendations and go about implementing them.
--:-- Host: I think people are hopeful for long-term change what that looks like. It's too hard to say at this point.
--:-- Host: Up next how Minneapolis has tried and struggled to reform its police department.
--:-- Host: I'm Noam Hassenfeld, filling in for Sean Ramaswaram. This is Today Explained.
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--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: You wrote an article for the Marshall Project about how the Minneapolis Police Department has struggled to implement reforms well before George Floyd was killed. What reforms have they tried?
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: So I remember the days when Minneapolis was considered an example of liberal police reform. They had a police chief who was a woman who was openly gay, very into working with academics on police reform, and also invited DOJ to come in when she took over.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: Then in 2015, DOJ found that there were ways to improve, especially with the police accountability. One was fixing their internal tracking system, which flags bad cops.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: And second was fixing something they called coaching, which seems pretty unique. Instead of disciplining all their officers with a long history of complaints, they send them to classes on police policy called coaching.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: What do we know about how effective that early warning system was? Did the police officer who killed George Floyd ever have a warning against him?
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: We don't know if he was ever flagged by the system, we do know that he had a long history of complaints. There were at least 12 that I found on a city database that tracks police complaints, but we don't know if he was ever disciplined or coached for it, so to speak.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: I did speak to police accountability experts who worked with the city on implementing the recommendations from DOJ, and they told me that that has been stalled and a lot of pushback from the police advocacy community to start making those changes.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: And because of sort of the switch in leadership. They have a new police chief who was there during the former person's tenure, but those changes have not really been rolling out.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: If these reforms aren't exactly working, are there better ideas out there?
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: I think it comes to culture, and it's something that police departments are working. How do we change culture?
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: So de-escalation classes is something that comes up a lot. Washington State recently implemented rules that all cops in Washington State now have to do de-escalation training every year.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: It's not just the policy. It's like, how do you change the hearts and minds? Another thing cops and departments have been doing is trying to change who they hire.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: So instead of hiring like this cop in the Floyd case is an older white male who one could argue is a cop's cop. You have departments saying, no, we want to hire bilingual people, people with tattoos, young people, people with graduate degrees.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: So there is this push in policing to say, we're going to stop hiring these sort of hyper-masculine guys, and let's focus on hiring people that better represent our community.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: But that takes years and years to force change like that.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: Yeah, and I guess, you know, reforms need to be put in place, but also holding people accountable, right?
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: I mean this report from Minneapolis from 2015 that you talking about did put in this warning system and then there just no way to know if it working I mean do we know if something like this is working anywhere around the country
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: So there is a lot of work being done and like how do we hold them accountable But cops police departments are notorious for not being transparent
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: So someone like myself and other journalists, accountability experts, we don't really know what goes into these tracking systems.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: Number two, they're not uniform. Like one city may track one thing, another city may track another.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: And number three, if you're flagged, the outcome also varies from department to department.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: So the issue with policing in this country has always been we're not a monolith. There's no one clear rule. There's no one clear best practice.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: So one city could be working and across the line, it's failing.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: You're saying that it's not a monolith yet. We do have the Department of Justice. Is the Department of Justice doing anything? Could it do anything?
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: There's this idea by the public that when you have DOJ come in, they're going to save the day.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: I've written a lot about DOJ and reform. DOJ, their police wing, if you will, who works on reform of police departments, it's a very small group of people who work in the civil rights division.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: They don't have a lot of resources. They don't have a big team. And it takes a lot of work to force a local police department to change.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: So just because you call in DOJ and just because they order reforms doesn't mean they have the resources to force the police department to keep working on those reforms.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: So I keep, it frustrates me when people say, let's call on DOJ. No, city and state officials need to work on this issue. Stop outsourcing it to Washington. It's not working.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: So if the Department of Justice can't solve this, who can?
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: Well, as we pointed out in the story, my colleague talked to Philando Castile's mother. And as he pointed out in his reporting, the cop who shot Philando Castile did go through the court system.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: And juries let him go. Right? He was prosecuted. But so but so what so that's another problem is that even if you have buy-in from prosecutors and they're like yes we're going to indict this guy but this guy did was screwed up you know let's get him let's get him convicted you have to have a group of citizens agree with that and we've written about juries and bias do they believe the cop do they don't believe the cop
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: I was surprised that philando castile the officer who took his life got off i thought it was pretty clear cut what that guy did was wrong.
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: So what is justice in this sense? Would justice be more police reform, which we don't know will work? Will justice be if this cop is indicted and is charged? Is justice that they figure out a fair group of jurors to come in and decide whether or not this person should go to prison?
--:-- Simone Weichselbaum: And that's what we need to think about.
--:-- Host: Okay, so the DOJ can't solve it and police departments can't solve it because they can't control juries. It sounds like it's almost an impossible problem.
--:-- Host: Right. And another point to my colleague Jamiles wrote, he spoke to Keith Ellison, who's the attorney general of the state of Minnesota, and he actually was working on police reform and pushing legislatures to vote to start making uniform laws across that state for de-escalation, use of force training and other measures.
--:-- Host: And he couldn't get the legislation passed.
--:-- Host: So that's another problem. Like, Paula, this is so complicated, right? Like, it doesn't even matter, like Minneapolis, this is a great example.
--:-- Host: They had police reform. They have a new attorney general, Keith Ellison, a big player in the Democratic Party, come in. I want to make changes to the state. I'm the new attorney general. And state lawmakers are like, screw you. It's a white state, 85 percent white. So the people voting to make those changes also have to buy in. And they didn't do anything yet.
--:-- Host: There's just so many elements. And, you know, I am a policing nerd. I've been writing about this for a long time, so I understand it. But I think most people don't understand and it's so hard to change.
--:-- Host: And yes, burning down the city is waking people up, but will that force policing to change? I mean, we burned down cities in 1968, right? After MLK was assassinated and policing is still pretty screwed up.
--:-- Host: So I don't know.
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