Police in Minneapolis, the northern US city in which George Floyd was killed by a law enforcement officer in May 2020, “frequently use excessive force”, including lethal force, and “discriminate in a manner illegal black and Native American people,” states an investigative report released Friday, June 16.
This report is the result of the official investigation launched by the United States Department of Justice one year after the death of George Floyd, on May 25, 2020, suffocated under the knee of Derek Chauvin, who remained leaning on his neck for more than nine minutes. The investigation was to determine whether, beyond individual acts, there were systematic problems among the police in this city of 425,000 inhabitants, among the most unequal in the United States.
For two years, investigators combed through reports of incidents between 2016 and August 2022, studied footage from police cameras and heard from thousands of witnesses. And the conclusion of their report is final. “Many officers do their difficult jobs with professionalism, courage and respect. Nonetheless, our investigation concluded that systemic issues made possible what happened to George Floyd,” they write in the introduction.
Des « cow-boys »
“For years, the Minneapolis police have used dangerous techniques and weapons against people who have committed only minor offenses or no offenses,” they note, referring in particular to choke keys – now banned. Officers sometimes use their service weapon for no reason, they also note, citing the example of a man in custody who began cutting his throat with a knife and was shot four times by two officers .
They “use force to punish people who anger them or criticize them,” the report’s authors continued, deploring the use of tear gas or rubber bullets on protesters or journalists. They also “patrol the neighborhoods in different ways depending on their ethnic makeup,” with “cowboys” volunteering to go into the predominantly African-American borough.
“The data shows that in non-arrest situations, Minneapolis officers screen black and Native American people six times more than white people,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said. However, since the death of George Floyd, officers often obscure the ethnicity of the people they interact with in their reports, “making it more difficult to detect and counter discrimination”.
Twenty-eight recommendations presented
Finally, the police too often remain deployed in the event of a crisis of dementia, although they are not equipped to calm the sick, which often results in violence, regret the authors of the report. At the structural level, impunity reigns, they further write: the system of internal controls is “an opaque maze, with many dead ends, so that many justified complaints are dismissed without investigation or clear reason. “.
All this at a cost for the city: first because it complicates relations with the population and makes the police less effective. Then because the city had to pay $ 61.5 million between 2016 and 2022 to put an end to civil lawsuits against its agents.
“To the credit of police and city leaders, significant changes have been introduced,” but “there is still work to do,” Mr. Garland told a press conference, presenting twenty-eight recommendations . The local authorities and the ministry will now negotiate an agreement on the reforms to be undertaken, the implementation of which will be subject to the supervision of a court.
