The Minneapolis Police Chief Promised Change. He Got a Disaster.
MINNEAPOLIS—When Medaria Arradondo became this city’s first black police chief in 2017, the department was in trouble. His predecessor had abruptly resigned after an officer killed an Australian woman who called for help, and a spate of shootings of minorities was straining an already fraught relationship with the city’s black community. Chief Arradondo, a veteran police officer who once accused his own department of racist employment practices in a lawsuit, promised changes. He made data on the use of force available to the public, required officers to turn on body cameras at the beginning of each call and ended low-level marijuana enforcement.
(snip)
The killing of Mr. Floyd shows how hard it is to alter entrenched police tactics and culture, even by a reform-minded administration. Chief Arradondo, a soft-spoken Minneapolis native known as “Rondo,” had successfully implemented a number of changes long sought by activists aimed at greater transparency, continuing the department’s recent push to hold its officers more accountable. Those reforms mirrored many of those instituted at police departments around the country in the years after an unarmed black teenager was shot dead by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014. Anger over that incident and many others fueled nationwide protests and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Mr. Floyd’s death shows the fragility of those reforms.
Among the most deeply embedded problems that departments including Minneapolis face is a difficulty punishing officers who are too often insulated from repercussions, law enforcement experts and community leaders said. Unions like the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis fight to shield their members from punishment, both through contract negotiations and disciplinary hearings, saying that neither top police officials nor the public understands how dangerous their jobs are. The officer who pinned Mr. Floyd down by the neck, Derek Chauvin, has 18 complaints on his official record, two of which ended in discipline from the department, including official letters of reprimand. The details of those incidents aren’t publicly available.
(snip)
Minneapolis allows police officers to use neck restraints by “compressing one or both sides of a person’s neck with an arm or a leg,” but only on a person who is actively resisting police, which Mr. Floyd didn’t appear to be doing in a video widely shared online. With protests and riots sparked by Mr. Floyd’s death raging, top police officials around the nation, and even unions representing rank-and-file officers who rarely criticize their own, have strongly condemned the killing. Behind those public statements, big city chiefs worry their own reform efforts at mending relations with minority communities are being derailed by what happened in Minneapolis.
(snip)
Like Ms. Harteau before him, Chief Arradondo had a starkly different vision for the department than Lt. Robert Kroll, president of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis since 2015. Like his union counterparts across the country, Lt. Kroll has been a fierce advocate for greater autonomy for officers. Lt. Kroll has criticized the Black Lives Matter movement as a terrorist organization. In his racial discrimination lawsuit, Chief Arradondo, who was then a lieutenant, accused Mr. Kroll of calling former U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison a terrorist. Mr. Ellison, a Democrat who is now Minnesota’s attorney general, is both Muslim and black. In the same lawsuit Chief Arradondo accused Mr. Kroll of wearing a leather motorcycle jacket with a white power badge sewn on it.
The union chief also opposed a 2019 ban by Mayor Jacob Frey on aggressive “warrior-style” training for police, which doesn’t emphasize de-escalation during encounters with civilians. The ban went into effect, but controversy has continued over whether officers are following it, according to local media. Ms. Harteau, the previous chief, said in an interview that the union was the biggest obstacle to making changes at the department.
More..
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-minneapolis-police-chief-promised-change-george-floyds-death-shows-hurdles-11590971860 (subscription)
= new reply since forum marked as read
