From Justice for George Floyd to Disbanding the Police: Minneapolis Sparks an International Movement
Five Decades of Activism
If you had told me a month ago that a major U.S. city was soon going to defund their police department, I probably wouldn't have believed you. If you had said that this city would be Minneapolis, the "twin" neighbor to my hometown (St. Paul, Minnesota), I probably would have said you were dreaming. And yet, on June 7th, the Minneapolis City Council did just that, announcing plans to disband the city's police department.
How did we go from justice for George Floyd to disbanding the Minneapolis Police Department in a matter of two weeks? The short answer is: we didn't.
Although it's still surprising to see a major city talking seriously about taking an important step towards dismantling white supremacy, it's not that surprising that Minneapolis is the place doing so. For starters, the state of Minnesota is one of the most segregated states in the country. Minnesota is also home to at least 12 known hate groups, and a prison system disproportionately populated with people of color. As Minnesota poet and activist Su Hwang writes, "High quality of life" here, "has always been colonial and conditional."
Minneapolis itself also has a long history of Black and Native led efforts against police brutality, going back to at least the mid 1960s. An uprising in North Minneapolis in the summer of 1967 galvanized young Black activists, who spent the following decades working on a variety of issues, including failing schools, segregated housing, and limited economic opportunities. Where there had once been a thriving community of Black owned businesses and organizations, by the late 1960s, North Minneapolis became a community cut off from the rest of the city by multiple highways. Mahmoud El-Kati, grassroots activist and future African American history professor, described that time as "the spark, '66-'67. That was the thing that shook stuff up." Ron Edwards, another activist who got his start during the 1967 Uprising, was for many years a bridge between those days and the city's current generation of Black activists. While his own work ended up being primarily within the system, Edwards was sympathetic to the current generation's focus on more radical visions and pressuring from outside the system. Nearly 50 years after the North Minneapolis uprisings, this new generation of young Black activists, already having been inspired to action by the Black Lives Matter movement, found their local spark in the police murder of Jamar Clark. After occupying North Minneapolis' police precinct building for 18 days, and helping to lead additional protests over the next few years under the Black Lives Matter banner, this new generation began creating their own racial justice organizations, including Black Visions Collective, to spread their visions and efforts far and wide. Black Visions Collective is helping to lead the current protests, as well as efforts to defund the city's police department.
Although the city's northside has been a hub of activism against racist policing, it's definitely not been alone in that work. In the center of the city, where multiple neighborhoods meet along the Franklin Ave corridor, Native Ojibwe and Lakota activists formed the American Indian Movement in 1968. While AIM would expand its focus in the coming decades to also address broader issues such as treaty rights and environmental justice, the original focus was similar to the work being done by Black residents in North Minneapolis. The combination of systemic racism, police brutality and lack of economic opportunities had made life for Native folks living in Minneapolis extremely difficult. Co-founder Dennis Banks said the following about an early AIM anti-police brutality action:
"We found strength in 200 of us, all Indian people, who had been beaten, mugged, arrested. Now here we were, we were going back to that same police department that arrested us and we were demanding action. It felt good to finally sense that there was power in unity, power in numbers."
Similar to their Black neighbors, a new generation of Native activists in Minneapolis have risen to take up the cause. Some of them can be found working under the banner Native Lives Matter, which focuses on "advocating awareness and justice for Missing Murdered Indigenous women and Native Lives killed by police violence." The fact that the two racial groups most likely to be murdered and terrorized by police in the U.S. both have strong activists presences in Minneapolis going back two generations, gives context to what's happening in the city today. Although the brutal murder of George Floyd by white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was the spark, fifty plus years of Black and Native led grassroots activism are responsible for both the fierceness of the current protests, and the speed of the shift in conversation from minor reforms to defunding and disbanding the Minneapolis Police Department.
A Movement Spreads Like Wildfire
"As expressed in Buddha's second noble truth, there are underlying causes and conditions of chaos and homelessness in all their variations. It is not by chance ... If we study the patterns and conditions of pervasive homelessness, we can predict the moment of the next economic upheaval, whether it's war, famine, climate imbalance, annihilation of a tribe, or other kinds of disaster. Those without resources become refugees. Over and over, impending displacements are ignored until the crisis becomes unbearable."
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, from Sanctuary: A Meditation on Home, Homelessness and Belonging
Watching the rapid spread of the protests over the past two weeks, it's fairly easy to see why this is the moment something like the police murder of a Black man would finally lead to a full scale uprising. Nearly three months of quarantine due to Covid-19, an unemployment rate of at least 16% and probably higher, over a decade of increased violent activity from white supremacist and hate groups, patterns of gentrification driving up home prices and rents in most U.S. cities, increased severe weather patterns due to climate change, plus a two decade long pattern of increased police militarization all came together with other causes and conditions to bring us to May 25th, 2020, the day George Floyd was murdered. The same can be said of the fruiting both of possible justice for Mr. Floyd (all four officers have been charged with murder and aiding and abetting murder, a first in Minnesota state history), and also of the beginning of changes for police departments across the nation (in addition to Minneapolis, Los Angeles is planning on making significant cuts in their police budget, San Francisco is also considering cuts, and Democrats in both the U.S. House and Senate are attempting to get a new police reform measure passed through Congress).
All of this and more has come in response to hundreds of protests across all 50 states, in urban, suburban and even more rural areas, plus internationally in cities such as Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro, London, and Pretoria, South Africa. Many crises of displacement present in the world have clearly become unbearable. What started as a protest in a single city has spread like wildfire, igniting the flame of justice seeking people across the globe.
Another World is Possible
Police departments in the United States were born out of violence. Brought together by the twin flames of white supremacy and capitalist land and resource theft, policing in this country has always been tainted by the legacies of slavery and Native genocide. In more recent years, police departments across the country have again become hotbeds of overt white supremacists or those sympathetic to white supremacist groups, such as current Minneapolis Police Federation President Bob Kroll.
Attempts to reform U.S. police departments have been on going for decades now. In Minneapolis, efforts at reform were frequently blocked by the department, and the recommendations of civilian oversight boards were routinely ignored. During the 1990s and 2000s, the department made targeted outreach efforts to communities of color designed to promote goodwill between the the MPD and those communities. These efforts sometimes lead to brief periods of increased community trust, which were inevitably shattered by a police shooting or some other form of racialized police violence. After Michael Brown's murder by Ferguson police lead to nation-wide protests in 2014, police departments (including Minneapolis) invested heavily in a variety of police training regimes, including racial bias, mental health intervention, and mindfulness trainings. In addition, there was an increased emphasis placed on the use of technologies such as body cameras, believing that more monitoring and documenting of police behavior would lead to less violent interactions in the community. However, all of it has proved to be fairly cosmetic, and little has improved in the last six years. Which, if you think about it, shouldn't really be a surprise. These reforms were never intended to transform the white supremacy and economic violence at the root of police departments and policing in this country. They were designed to take the most unpalatable (to the public) edge off of policing, and to help departments identify and remove the worst apples from the force. However, even in that much more modest vision, the reforms of the past several years were a resounding failure for the most part.
Although the origins of alternative visions to policing probably came before them, one of the first U.S. groups to demonstrate what could be possible was the Black Panthers, founded in Oakland, California in 1966. They sought an end to police brutality in Black communities and community control of police departments. In addition, seeing the need to get at root causes behind violence and struggles in their communities, the Panthers started free food programs, health clinics, and grassroots Freedom schools in cities across the country. Community led, mutual-aid-driven projects like these continue to be a centerpiece of visions for police free communities, or communities far less dependent on police.
Kandace Montgomery, director of the Black Visions Collective in Minneapolis, offers one form of the current visions driving the conversations to defund police departments:
"A world without police would look like safety that is controlled and is led by our community, that focuses on transformation and transformative justice. A world without police means that everybody has what they need to survive and what they need to live healthy lives. It means we have the money that we need for education, health care, housing, workers’ rights. It is a total transformation away from a racist and violent system into one that truly fosters our safety and well-being."
Another Minneapolis based group, MPD150, offers both transition steps for community members to begin moving away from reliance on police, and also resources for moving beyond police departments and the prison industrial complex tied to them.
Suggested transition steps include the following:
1. An easy one: STOP calling the police when it’s clearly unnecessary.
We can’t tell you to never call the police (though some do make that choice). We can challenge you, however, to reflect on that choice, to make sure that calling them isn’t an automatic response to each and every moment of personal discomfort or uncertainty. Never forget: an inconvenience for one person, once police are involved, can become a death sentence for another person.
2. Get trained in first aid, crisis de-escalation, restorative justice, etc.
The more skills we have to share with our neighbors and family, the less we have to rely on unaccountable armed paramilitary forces! Find or organize local trainings, and share that knowledge.
3. Build community all the time, not just in times of trouble.
It isn’t just about building capacity as individuals; it’s about cultivating resilient communities. One of the first steps we can take toward communities that no longer need police is meeting one another. We can know our neighbor’s names. We can hold potlucks, volunteer to help our neighbors with simple things like shoveling snow or carrying groceries, and build real relationships. That way, when crises happen, we have other resources to call upon besides the police.
Along these lines, one of the most heartening developments in Minneapolis during the past two weeks has been the rapid rise of neighborhood mutual aid and protection networks. Some of these networks, like the American Indian Movement's community patrol groups, have been around for decades in some form or another. Other networks, such as the community watch group in my own sister's neighborhood less than a mile and a half from the spot where George Floyd was murdered, sprung up in a matter of hours as the Minneapolis Police Department abandoned its supposed role of protecting the city, leaving residents to fend for themselves. In North Minneapolis, Black led street patrols kept local businesses, especially food stores, safe so that the community would be able to eat, while one neighborhood in the south part of the city created a pop-up food bank for residents in need of groceries. Even under extremely challenging conditions, and very short notice, residents in Minneapolis neighborhoods demonstrated that they can step up and help keep each other safe and cared for in ways police departments can't, even under the best of conditions.
Although the Minneapolis City Council made a bold announce a few days ago, they alone don't have the authority to disband the MPD. Community groups plan on spending the summer working on concrete proposals to offer, so it remains to be seen what will come of efforts to transform the city's police department. One city that has been raised as an example is Camden, New Jersey, where the old police department was disbanded in 2013 and replaced by a new one built with a focus of community service.) Police abolitionists would consider this move a reform effort. Furthermore, with policing now heavy on surveillance and aggressive ticketing for small law infractions, Camden really doesn't offer a good model going forward. Perhaps there are still lessons from the Camden plan, such as the process of disbanding their previous police department, that could be useful in transition efforts to help communities become resilient enough to move beyond policing all together. However, the more immediate goal of drastically slashing police budgets and re-allocating those funds into community led social programs is most paramount.
Whatever it ends up looking like in different places, the upheaval of the current protests has given all of us the opportunity to radically rethink what community safety means, and what it looks like in operation. Instead of a model built on violence and punishment, we can build communities of care for all, where justice is based on repair and reconnection, not incarceration. Let's make it so.
What you can to do support the movement
From learning more about alternatives to policing to donating to grassroots groups doing the work on the ground, there are several ways you can help, both now and in the coming weeks and months.
1. If you are able, attend a local protest. Here are some protest guidelines and tips to consider if you are planning on attending one.
2. Write or call your local school board and university officials, and tell them to join Minneapolis Public Schools and the University of Minnesota in cutting ties with their police departments.
3. Write or call your Mayor and City Council and ask them to commit to defunding and transforming your local police department. You can use the information in MPD150's Frequently Asked Questions Section as a way to help address possible concerns your elected officials might have.
4. Donate to organizations doing the work on the ground. This comprehensive list is a great place to start, if you haven't already chosen a group to donate to.
5. Learn more about alternatives to police and prisons, and talk with your friends and family about what you're learning.
Another world is possible. Together, we can build it!