The Minneapolis Police Department for years engaged in a pattern of discriminatory law enforcement practices against Black and Native American people, using unnecessary excessive force and violating the rights of protesters expressing their First Amendment rights, a more than two-year investigation by the Justice Department released Friday found.
The results of the sweeping ‘pattern-or-practice’ investigation, prompted in part because of the police killing of George Floyd that sparked racial justice protests across the country in 2020, show that “the systemic problems in MPD made what happened to [Floyd] possible,” the department said in its final report.
The systemic problems continued despite reform efforts, the report said.
Attorney General Merrick Garland speaks, June 14, 2023, in Washington.
Jose Luis Magana/AP
Attorney General Merrick Garland traveled to Minneapolis Friday to announce the findings.
Investigators found the MPD used unjustified deadly force in encounters with suspects, engaged in unreasonable use of force in encounters with young suspects and at times failed to give proper medical aid to people they had taken into custody.
After Floyd’s murder at the hands of Officer Derek Chauvin and as the MPD’s policing practices fell under increased scrutiny, officers suddenly stopped reporting the race and gender of suspects they encountered in law enforcement actions, the report showed, with the percentage of recorded race data dropping from around 71% of encounters to about 35% afterwards through the next two years.
In 2021, Chauvin was convicted of state murder and manslaughter charges and later pleaded guilty to federal civil rights charges both for Floyd’s murder and for holding a 14-year-old teen by the throat and beating him in 2017. A federal jury found three other officers involved in the encounter with Floyd guilty of federal civil rights offenses for failing to save him.
In this image from police body camera video shown as evidence in court, paramedics arrive as Minneapolis police officers, including Derick Chauvin, second from left, and J. Alexander Kueng restrain George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020.
Minneapolis Police Department via AP
A separate state investigation into MPD resulted in a consent decree returned in March that required the department to implement widespread changes after disturbing findings of race discrimination and excessive force by police.
The DOJ report examines the MPD’s use of neck restraints, like the one used by Chauvin against Floyd, and found “numerous incidents” where officers used them even in situations that did not result in an arrest or where they were otherwise unjustified. Of nearly 200 encounters between 2016 and 2022 where neck restraints were used against suspects, officers did not make an arrest in 44 of them, the report shows.
And although in June 2020 the MPD banned the use of all neck restraints and chokeholds, the policy met “considerable resistance” from officers in the force and the DOJ investigation found MPD officers continued to use neck restraints since the ban was implemented, including against racial justice protesters.
The Minneapolis Police logo patch is on the sleeve of an officer, Jan. 15, 2023, in Minneapolis.
Scott Boehm/AP
The report also paints a concerning portrait of MPD’s abilities to repair its strained relationship with the broader public, pointing to instances where officers found to have committed misconduct were never disciplined and complaints from members of the public went disregarded.
One officer told DOJ investigators that morale in the department is “at an all time low,” which is reflected in the increasingly depleted ranks of MPD. As of May 2023, there were 585 sworn MPD officers, the report says, down from 892 in 2018.
The more than two-year investigation included interviews with more than 2000 community members and local organizations, the report says, including family members of people killed by MPD officers. Investigators also interviewed dozens of MPD officers, reviewed thousands of documents detailing police encounters and participated in more than 50 ride-alongs.
Friday’s report includes several disturbing details of racist comments by MPD officers that were described to investigators or captured on video.
In one protest in May 2020 following Floyd’s murder, a lieutenant was caught on camera saying, “I’d love to scatter ’em but it’s time to fu—-‘ put people in jail and just prove the mayor wrong about his white supremacists from out of state,” the officer is heard saying. “Although, this group probably is predominantly white, ‘cuz there’s not looting and fires.”
At times, officers would invoke racist stereotypes in their encounters with suspects, with one officer purportedly telling an arrestee, “we’ll get you Popeyes in a minute.”
One Black officer said he regularly heard his white colleagues making racist remarks, calling Black people “ghetto,” saying “Black people don’t work,” and “you don’t have to worry about Black people during the day ‘cuz they haven’t woken up — crime starts at night.”
Garland previously traveled to Louisville just last March to announce a disturbing series of findings out of the DOJ’s investigation into the Louisville Metro Police Department, that found police engaged in a pattern of violating citizens’ civil rights by conducting unlawful searches and discriminating against residents based on race.