We are being led by deeply unserious people. Not only that, but people who are manufacturing cruelty upon their very own constituents. That’s how bad this has gotten.
This week, the DOJ arrested three people in Minnesota for protesting ICE’s goonish activity in a local church, where the pastor there also heads up the local ICE field office. Among the three is Nekima Levy Armstrong, former NAACP chapter president and a local activist who the DOJ claims organized the protest and instigated the group going into the church during services. Just how true any of that is is anyone’s guess, since it’s become impossible to believe a single thing this government says about ICE protests. For example:
There was no attack. There was no violence. There were words and chants being voiced in a place of worship. You can find that repugnant, if you like. It’s still not an attack.
The law being cited for the arrest makes Armstrong’s detention dubious at best.
The law Bondi cited in her announcement — 18 U.S. Code § 241 — describes it pertaining to when “two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”
While many in the faith community are obediently clutching their figurative pearls over all of this, I’m struggling to understand how walking into a church that’s open to the public and saying words, even interrupting services, violates that law. I don’t think it does, but then I also laughed out loud when I read Bondi’s claim that this was an “attack.” The plain meaning of words doesn’t appear to matter to these people all that much.
But here’s the thing: that picture has been altered by AI. Here is the unaltered picture of Armstrong’s arrest as circulated by the administration’s very own Kristi Noem.
Yes, the White House decided to take an image of law enforcement improperly arresting an American citizen, one of their own constituents, and have AI alter it to make it appear that she is in distress. Oh, and they made her skin tone slightly darker as well. Because they want her to have been in distress. It eats them up inside that she wasn’t crying. That want her to be “blacker” because they want all of their enemies to be people of color. They’re showing you want they want to visit upon American citizens.
And until they are put in check, they will continue to behave like a toddler with unfettered access to the internet and a permanently shitty attitude.
Asked whether the image had been digitally altered, the White House responded by sending a post on X from Kaelan Dorr, the deputy communications director.
“YET AGAIN to the people who feel the need to reflexively defend perpetrators of heinous crimes in our country I share with you this message: Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue. Thank you for your attention to this matter,” he said.
And thank you, Kaelan, for going outside and playing hide and go fuck yourself.
Again, deeply unserious people. Shitposters. Internet trolls. These are the people in charge of the government. The ones sending their goon squads into our cities. The ones threatening to use the military against its own citizens. The ones that believe they are beyond accountability for all they are currently doing.
I worry seriously that the president’s health is such that he won’t be available to stand trial whenever our government returns to sanity and the time for accountability arrives. But the same can’t be said for those beneath him. Bondi, Noem, Dorr, and many others will be held to account for what they are doing in this administration. The ledger will be kept and debts satisfied through the legal system, once actual justice is back on the menu.
For now, the fight against the toddlers continues.
Last week, we wrote about how ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old poet and mother, on a Minneapolis street in broad daylight. We wrote about how the Trump administration immediately began lying about it despite multiple video angles showing exactly what happened. We wrote about how the media called documented murder a “dispute.”
This week, we’re writing about how career Justice Department prosecutors—people who’ve spent their careers putting away fraudsters, drug dealers, and actual criminals—looked at how the administration is handling this case and said: we want no part of this.
Because apparently the DOJ’s response to an ICE agent murdering an unarmed American citizen wasn’t to investigate the agent who pulled the trigger. It was to investigate the victim and her widow.
A federal agent shot an unarmed woman multiple times in the head at close range. Video evidence directly contradicts every administration claim about what happened. And the Justice Department’s priority is figuring out what activist groups the dead woman might have been associated with?
Really?
According to reporting from the New York Times, at least six federal prosecutors in the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office resigned on Tuesday over this approach:
Joseph H. Thompson, who was second in command at the U.S. attorney’s office and oversaw asprawling fraud investigationthat has roiled Minnesota’s political landscape, was among those who quit on Tuesday, according to three people with knowledge of the decision.
Mr. Thompson’s resignation came after senior Justice Department officials pressed for a criminal investigation into the actions of the widow ofRenee Nicole Good, the Minneapolis woman killed by an ICE agent on Wednesday.
Mr. Thompson, 47, a career prosecutor, objected to that approach, as well as to the Justice Department’s refusal to include state officials in investigating whether the shooting itself was lawful, the people familiar with his decision said.
Read that again. Senior DOJ officials pressed for a criminal investigation into the widow. The woman whose wife was just murdered by a federal agent. That’s what prompted career prosecutors to walk out the door.
And Thompson wasn’t alone. The Times reports that Harry Jacobs (Thompson’s deputy on the fraud cases), Melinda Williams (who ran the criminal division and successfully prosecuted sex traffickers and fentanyl dealers), and Thomas Calhoun-Lopez (chief of violent and major crimes) all quit as well.
The Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office wasn’t the only place seeing an exodus.
According to MS Now, at least six leaders of the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division—the unit that’s supposed to investigate police killings—also resigned in protest:
Top leaders of the criminal section of the Civil Rights Division have left their jobs to register their frustration with the department after the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon decided not to investigate the ICE officer’sfatal shooting of Renee Goodlast week.The criminal section of the division would normally investigateany fatal shooting by a law enforcement officer and specializes in probing potential or alleged abuse or improper use of force by law enforcement.
The departures – including that of the chief of the section, as well as the principal deputy chief, deputy chief and acting deputy chief – represent the most significant mass resignation at the Justice Department since February.
So we potentially have twelve or more DOJ officials walking out the door because of how this administration is handling a single case. Career prosecutors who spent years working for the DOJ and at least a year under this administration. People who had no apparent problem with everything else this DOJ has been doing. But investigating a murder victim while protecting her killer was apparently the line they couldn’t cross.
Let me say it plainly: when career prosecutors who’ve stuck around through a year of this administration’s chaos decide this is the moment to quit, it tells you something important about just how far outside normal law enforcement practice this has gone.
Also, remember why ICE supposedly flooded Minneapolis in the first place? Daycare fraud. A viral video from a small-time MAGA grifter claiming day cares were running scams, which the administration used to justify what it called “the largest immigration enforcement operation in history.”
And who was the lead prosecutor on those fraud cases? Joe Thompson. The same guy who just quit because the DOJ would rather investigate a murder victim’s activist connections than the agent who killed her.
As Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara put it to the NY Times:
“When you lose the leader responsible for making the fraud cases, it tells you this isn’t really about prosecuting fraud,”
No shit.
If you want evidence of just how upside-down the Justice Department’s priorities have become, look no further than what they’re actually investigating. A separate Times report from Sunday laid out how the FBI’s inquiry into the shooting is focused not on the agent’s actions, but on Good’s “possible connections to activist groups“:
The decision by the F.B.I. and the Justice Department to scrutinize Ms. Good’s activities and her potential connections to local activists is in line with the White House’s strategy of deflecting blame for the shooting away from federal law enforcement and toward opponents they have described as domestic terrorists, often without providing evidence.
Let’s summarize again: an ICE agent murders a woman in broad daylight. The division specifically designed to investigate when cops kill people has decided not to investigate the murderer. Instead, the DOJ is being told to investigate the dead woman and her widow’s social media connections.
And long term DOJ officials are rushing out the door, wanting absolutely nothing to do with any of this nonsense.
Meanwhile, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon was busy on social media retweeting posts warning people not to “ram ICE officers” because they’ll use deadly force—you know, completely prejudging the case she’s supposed to be overseeing. As former DOJ domestic terrorism counsel Thomas Brzozowski put it to the NY Times:
“It’s not appropriate for officials to characterize this incident as domestic terrorism before the investigation is complete,” said Thomas E. Brzozowski, the former counsel for domestic terrorism in the Justice Department’s national security division. “There used to be a process, deliberate and considered, to figure out if behavior could be legitimately described as domestic terrorism.”
“And when it’s not followed,” Mr. Brzozowski said, “then the term becomes little more than a political cudgel to bash one’s enemies.”
“There used to be a process.” Past tense. That’s where we are now.
The administration’s approach makes sense only if you understand that the goal was never justice—it was narrative control. The White House needs Good to be a terrorist, not a victim, because acknowledging that an ICE agent murdered an unarmed American citizen for no reason undermines everything they’ve been saying about their immigration crackdown. So they investigate the victim. They investigate the widow. They investigate the “activist groups.” Anything but investigate the guy who actually pulled the trigger.
Former Trump attorney and current Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s statement was revealing: “there is currently no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation into the ICE agent.”
No basis. A federal agent shot an unarmed woman multiple times in the head. Video shows her trying to drive away, not toward officers. And there’s “no basis” for investigation. There’s a reason why every time a Trump legal move is flailing around, Blanche seems to show up and wave his arms theatrically yelling “nothing to see here folks.”
What would constitute a basis, exactly? Does the agent need to announce “I am now violating this person’s civil rights” before pulling the trigger?
Minnesota officials aren’t buying it. Governor Tim Walz called Thompson “a principled public servant” and added that his resignation is “the latest sign Trump is pushing nonpartisan career professionals out of the justice department, replacing them with his sycophants.” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called the resigned prosecutors “heroes” and the people pushing to prosecute Good’s widow “monsters.”
Drew Evans, superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension—the state agency that normally investigates police shootings and which the DOJ has deliberately excluded from this investigation—put it simply:
“We’re losing a true public servant,” said Mr. Evans. “We really need professional prosecutors.”
The absence of a credible and comprehensive investigation into Ms. Good’s killing stands to “undermine trust in our public safety agencies,” Mr. Evans added.
We’re well past that point. When the Justice Department investigates murder victims while shielding their killers, “trust” has already been destroyed.
The mass resignations tell us something crucial: there are still at least a few people inside the system who know the difference between law enforcement and state-sanctioned murder. Though, it raises the question of whether there’s anyone left who knows that distinction.
Thompson and his colleagues apparently decided they’d rather walk away from careers they spent decades building than participate in the investigation of a grieving widow while her wife’s killer walks free.
But their departures also mean the fraud cases—the ones the administration claimed justified this whole Minneapolis operation—are now in serious jeopardy. The prosecutor who knew every defendant, every transaction, who’d built those cases from the ground up over years, just walked out the door. If the administration actually cared about prosecuting fraud in Minnesota, they’d be begging Thompson to stay. Instead, they drove him out because protecting an ICE agent from accountability matters more to them than the stated reason they sent ICE to Minneapolis in the first place.
Renee Nicole Good was murdered by her own government. And the Justice Department’s response was to investigate her.
ICE killed a US citizen in broad daylight for the apparent crime of not being sufficiently intimidated when surrounded by ICE officers. Renee Good was shot by ICE officer Jonathan Ross, who selectively leaked his recording to a right-wing news outlet in apparent hopes of shoring up the administration’s swiftly crumbling narrative.
The wagons are circling even tighter — a metaphor that ICE has made extremely apt now that it’s just the extension of the administration’s xenophobic id: an invading force that’s meant to rid America of anyone not sufficiently white enough to “deserve” to live in the United States.
It’s back on its old bullshit, continuing to pretend it’s not legally obligated to allow members of Congress to tour its detention facilities. DHS and ICE have claimed (without legal support) that they need advance notice, citing unspecified “security” concerns of the “national” variety. The government continues to place obstacles in the path of congressional representatives who are engaged in acts that are supported by law and legal precedent: oversight of ICE operations.
To be sure, there are plenty of reasons ICE doesn’t want congressional reps touring its detention facilities. First and foremost, ICE doesn’t seem all that interested in treating its indefinite detainees humanely. Even when confronted by courts about these constitutional deficiencies, ICE has flat out refused to comply with court orders demanding a full accounting of detainee conditions. Not only that, but visiting reps are more likely than not to come across the occasional US citizen who’s being denied their rights while ICE decides whether or not to believe the citizenship documents it’s been provided.
Last December, the DC Circuit Appeals Court ruled against ICE, upholding Congress’s right to inspect immigration detention facilities. Not that it matters to ICE and other federal components (and it’s pretty much all of them) involved in Trump’s mass deportation program. And I’m sure the DHS will just pretend that ruling has no bearing on its recent obstruction efforts in Minneapolis, Minnesota, even though the federal law it’s violating is effective everywhere in the nation — not just in places where the government has been successfully sued.
Three Democratic members of Congress from Minnesota, including House representative Ilhan Omar, were blocked from entering an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center located near Minneapolis on Saturday morning.
[…]
During a press briefing, Omar explained that they were initially allowed inside the facility but were soon told to leave. “Shortly after we were let in, two officials came in and said that they received the message that we were no longer allowed to be in the building and that they were rescinding our invitation to come in and declining any further access to the building,” she said.
First of all, Congress has a right to perform unannounced inspections. No one needs an “invitation.” Since congressional reps don’t need an invitation, ICE doesn’t have the option of “rescinding” something it never had the right to offer in the first place.
Following that by kicking out the people who oversee your work and vote on your budget is so fucked up that it boggles the mind. It’s like a tenant evicting a landlord. Things just don’t work that way and these reps should have called ICE’s bluff and bore witness to any efforts made by officers to restrict access and/or force these representatives to leave the building. So, while it’s nice to have this flouting of the law on the record, the end result looks like a missed opportunity to further expose the administration’s utter disrespect for the rule of law.
At least we have whatever the hell this is to take with us from this secondhand experience:
Omar and her colleagues said they were informed the reason for the denial of access was because the facility’s funding came through the Big Beautiful Bill Act, and that this funding source was being used to justify restricting their visit.
Do what now?
ICE is claiming that because the facility was funded with federal funds derived from a federal budget bill members of the federal government who voted for (or against) this funding bill were not allowed on the premises. Never mind the thing I said about evicting the landlord. There’s nothing in the common vernacular that’s analogous to this bizarre assertion by the government.
Unfortunately, the party in power will make sure violating the law remains the status quo. Court orders are being ignored and violated regularly by federal agencies and officers. And the Democratic party still seems unwilling to deploy some of its more nuclear options, either out of fear of failure or a fear of jeopardizing their own political futures. But we’re well past the point of considering these tactics to be optional. If they’re not willing to sacrifice themselves to save a nation, they’re in the wrong business.
Renee Nicole Good was a 37-year-old award-winning poet, a mother of a six-year-old, and a wife who had recently moved to Minneapolis. That all ended yesterday when a masked ICE agent murdered her in broad daylight, shooting her multiple times at close range in the head. She had stuffed animal toys in the glove box of her SUV that rammed into another car after she’d been killed for no reason at all.
We have video of what happened. Multiple angles. The Trump administration is lying about every single detail anyway.
Donald Trump kicked off with a blatant lie, claiming that Good “viciously ran over the ICE officer.”
Known liar, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, called Good a “violent rioter” who “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.”
Kristi Noem made up a complete fantasy:
It was an act of domestic terrorism. What happened was, our ICE officers were out in enforcement action, they got stuck in the snow because of the adverse weather that is in Minneapolis, they were attempting to push out their vehicle, and a woman attacked them and those surrounding them and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle.
Not a single one of them is telling the truth. They are flat out lying.
Here’s what actually happened. The folks at Bellingcat put together a top down view showing the murder, pieced together from multiple videos:
Using imagery online of the shooting by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, we’ve created an animated sequence which highlights the approximate positioning of officers and vehicles at the scene. The red dot represents the agent who fired the shots. Yellow dots are other agents who arrived at the scene.
This morning (after equivocating all day yesterday, as I’ll discuss below), the NY Times put out a video using multiple bystander videos, showing that the ICE agent (1) was not hit (2) was not in the path of the vehicle and (3) was absolutely fine afterwards (contradicting claims from the administration that he was run over and in the hospital). See it here:
From all the evidence, it’s clear that Good had stopped and when ICE agents started demanding she move, she started to pull around the ICE vehicle in front of her. She paused to let another vehicle drive by her. As that happened (for no apparent reason) the ICE agent who eventually murdered her walked around the right side of her car to the front. As he does that two other ICE agents approach the car, with one telling her to exit the car while another yells for her to move. She then proceeds to try to drive away from the ICE agents. The one who had stepped in front of her car steps aside and then just starts madly firing at her head.
He murdered her. And Trump and his cronies are lying about it with video evidence directly contradicting every word.
This isn’t the first time ICE has killed someone. This is actually the ninth such shooting by an ICE agent since September, every single one of which involved an ICE agent blatantly violating policy by firing into a vehicle. This is at least the second outright murder, as opposed to attempted murder.
While ICE conveniently took down its page describing this (got something to hide?), the official policy is that “firearms shall not be discharged solely to disable moving vehicles.” Also, “discharging a firearm from a moving vehicle is prohibited.” There are some limited exceptions, but they appear to apply solely to a case where the car is driving directly at an ICE agent.
ICE shouldn’t even be in Minneapolis. It shouldn’t be anywhere. It shouldn’t exist. Nor should it ever have existed, as many of us have warned for many, many years. When we first started writing about ICE over 15 years ago, it was already a lawless organization.
This murder of an American citizen on a quiet street—someone who was just there to observe and monitor ICE agents kidnapping people—exemplifies why ICE is fundamentally incompatible with a free society. We’re talking about a masked federal police force, operating in secret, with no apparent limits, no meaningful rules, and no consequences for violence. They’re engaging in lethal force against anyone—citizens and non-citizens alike—because they’ve been given implicit permission by the White House to do whatever they want. MAGA folks mock the Gestapo comparison, but what else do you call an unaccountable secret police force that operates with impunity, murders citizens in broad daylight, and then lies about it with the full backing of the state?
Further, as detailed in the Court’s factual findings, agents have used excessive force in response to protesters’ and journalists’ exercise of their First Amendment rights, without justification, often without warning, and even at those who had begun to comply with agents’ orders…. While the Court acknowledges that some unruly individuals have been present during these gatherings, their presence among “peaceful protestors, journalists and legal observers does not give Defendants a blank check to employ unrestricted use of crowd control weapons,” and, in many of the instances in which agents deployed less lethal munitions, they did not direct the force anywhere near such bad actors…. Agents’ “use of indiscriminate weapons against all protesters—not just the violent ones—supports the inference that federal agents were substantially motivated by Plaintiffs’ protected First Amendment activity.”
Judge Ellis also called out DHS’s systematic lying—the same pattern we’re seeing now:
While Defendants may argue that the Court identifies only minor inconsistencies, every minor inconsistency adds up, and at some point, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to believe almost anything that Defendants represent
And yes, they will lie in the face of directly contradictory video evidence. Judge Ellis again:
Presumably, these portions of the videos would be Defendants’ best evidence to demonstrate that agents acted in line with the Constitution, federal laws, and the agencies’ own policies on use of force when engaging with protesters, the press, and religious practitioners. Buta review of them shows the opposite—supporting Plaintiffs’ claims and undermining all of Defendants’ claimsthat their actions toward protesters, the press, and religious practitioners have been, as Bovino has stated, “more than exemplary.”
A federal judge warned us six weeks ago that DHS and ICE would likely kill people and lie about it even when video proved them wrong. Yesterday proved her right. Again.
I had a few other stories I planned to write up on Wednesday, not to mention taking care of some other work, and I spent most of the day just unable to do anything, feeling sick to my stomach.
Yes, this happens in America (and elsewhere), but it shouldn’t. This is fucked up.
As 404 Media points out, this has become the standard course of action by the Trump admin these days.
This is a pattern. Some event happens as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, DHS rushes out a misleading, wrong, or incendiary statement that does not reflect reality, and it becomes another piece of ammo for the X.com grifters, right wing media ecosystem, or people who just love the idea of others being hurt.
And, again, why the fuck is ICE even in Minneapolis anyway? Because a small-time MAGA grifter YouTuber made a misleading video a few weeks ago claiming day care centers in Minneapolis were running a scam. His “evidence”? The day cares had locked doors and wouldn’t let him in with his cameras—which is what day cares do when random people show up demanding entry.
Noem is claiming that ICE had to be in Minneapolis based on her lies that the city is “dangerous” and full of “criminals” who don’t belong there. But as multiple people have pointed out there has been only one murder in Minneapolis in 2026.
It was the one committed by this ICE agent yesterday.
The Trump MAGA DHS position is that if you don’t immediately submit in every possible way, they will frame you as a “threat” who they can kill with impunity. Defector’s summary is exactly right:
Now that the Trump administration has shown it will immediately make up a flagrant lie in an attempt to justify the summary execution of a U.S. citizen, on video, in broad daylight—and will outright valorize the ICE agent who drew his pistol and killed a civilian for the crime of moving her vehicle a few feet—the message is clear, to ICE agents and everyone else: Nothing constrains these agents except whatever inhibits any individual one of them, personally, from brutalizing and murdering any person who disobeys them….
In the eyes of the state and its agents, all of the rest of us are walking around with a standing presumption, not just of guilt, but of murderous intent. Anything but total and immediate submission is domestic terrorism. It’s punishable by whatever the masked and unidentified government agent pointing a gun at your face decides to dish out.
And, of course, the compliant media is playing its part. Both the NY Times and the Washington Post initially embraced the view-from-nowhere approach of claiming the events around the shooting are “disputed.”
Come the fuck on. Five hours later and the headline is still about a disputed shooting. Just a basic lack of courage to acknowledge the obvious.
The old journalism joke is that if one person tells you it’s sunny outside and the other says it’s raining, you don’t report that the weather is disputed. You go the fuck outside and check. We have the video here. Multiple angles. It shows exactly what happened. But the Times and Post were treating the administration’s obvious lies as equally valid to the documented evidence because… why? Because acknowledging that a federal agency will murder a citizen and then lie about it in the face of video evidence is too uncomfortable? This isn’t neutral journalism—it’s active complicity in state violence. When the media treats documented murder and transparent lies as a “dispute,” they’re telling every ICE agent that there will be no accountability, no matter how clear the evidence.
Yes, eventually, this morning, both the NY Times and the Washington Post published more thorough investigations, showing that the administration is lying. But they let the “dispute” stand for 24 hours, allowing the administration to set the narrative that will live on. And even now they’re using equivocal language. The Post’s story talks about how the video evidence “raises questions about” what the admin is saying, rather than just coming out and saying that they’re LYING.
And I won’t get into how state media like Fox News is reporting on this: focusing on whatever it could dig up about Good to mock her, as if anything in her personal life or views somehow justifies her being murdered. Or all the GOP elected officials going on TV trying to pretend that she might have deserved to have been murdered in the street.
Yes, I know that in these tribal times so many people are playing the team sports thing of just immediately defending their cult leader. Going on X and looking around, you see just an overwhelming flood of absolute bullshit from MAGA folks cracking jokes (remember when they wanted people fired for joking about Charlie Kirk’s murder?) and trying to spin the story, knowing full well it’s all bullshit.
But some are seeing through it. A neighbor near where the murder happened, who identified himself as “right leaning,” admitted that the situation shook him, as “this is not how we’re supposed to be doing things in America.”
Really worth watching this interview with a bystander who witnessed the ICE shooting in Minneapolis: "I'm pretty right-leaning. But seeing this, this is not how we're supposed to be doing things in America.”
He’s right. And it is beyond disgusting that so many powerful forces in our government and the media are trying to twist and manipulate the story to justify an out of control ICE.
The only appropriate response here is to shut down ICE. Shut down DHS. Yes, there are important and necessary roles in DHS, but they existed without DHS before it was formed two decades ago, and we can redistribute those roles elsewhere in the federal government. But we don’t need ICE. We don’t need a secret federal police that goes around in masks kidnapping and murdering people.
It’s about as un-American as you can imagine.
This murder has at least appeared to wake some politicians from their slumber. We’ve seen multiple Democratic politicians, especially in Minnesota, speak out as forcefully as I’ve seen politicians speak out in years, telling ICE to get the fuck out of Minneapolis and calling out the administration’s lies directly. That matters. When officials with actual power are willing to name the truth—that ICE murdered a citizen and the administration is lying about it—it creates space for others to do the same.
But also thousands came out to memorialize Renee Nicole Good, in the freezing cold in a Minneapolis January. Hundreds turned up at a training session for legal observers, even as hundreds more are already patrolling Minneapolis, observing ICE’s illegal actions, and doing so knowing that ICE and DHS won’t hesitate to shoot them dead.
That’s what a movement looks like when institutions fail. Not waiting for someone to save us, but showing up in the freezing cold to say: you will not do this in our name. You will not kill our neighbors without witness. You will not lie about it unchallenged.
I’m going to leave this post up for a while before we post anything else. This matters more than the usual tech policy stories right now.
There are plenty of things going on that are infuriating. Ever day this administration finds new ways to spit on the Constitution. We’re still dealing with the illegal invasion of Venezuela, and apparent plans to attack multiple other nations around the Western Hemisphere.
But Renee Nicole Good’s murder cuts through all of that noise. A masked federal agent murdered an American citizen in broad daylight for no reason at all. The administration lied about it with video evidence directly contradicting every word. The media called it “disputed.” And thousands of people said no.
The institutional guardrails have failed. The courts warned us this would happen and it happened anyway. The media won’t hold power accountable. So the work falls to us—to show up, to document, to refuse to accept the lies, to make the cost of this violence too high to sustain.
ICE must be abolished. This cannot stand. And anyone who makes excuses for what happened yesterday has chosen a side, and it’s not the side of America or freedom or anything resembling justice.
Renee Nicole Good was a poet, a mother, and a citizen murdered by her own government for the crime of existing near an ICE agent having a bad day. Remember her name. Remember what they did. And remember that they lied about it even with the cameras rolling.
Trump was always going to target Minnesota and, specifically, the home of its most liberal residents, Minneapolis. Trump hates the state’s governor, Tim Walz. He also hates one of the state’s congressional reps, Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia.
This is only part of Trump’s recent hateful statements targeting Somalians, Tim Walz, and Rep. Ilhan Omar:
As an example, hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia are completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota. Somalian gangs are roving the streets looking for “prey” as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone. The seriously retarded Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, does nothing, either through fear, incompetence, or both, while the worst “Congressman/woman” in our Country, Ilhan Omar, always wrapped in her swaddling hijab, and who probably came into the U.S.A. illegally in that you are not allowed to marry your brother, does nothing but hatefully complain about our Country, its Constitution, and how “badly” she is treated, when her place of origin is a decadent, backward, and crime ridden nation, which is essentially not even a country for lack of Government, Military, Police, schools, etc…
That was delivered via Trump’s favorite outlet for his unhinged rants, Truth Social. He followed that up by making these statements where anyone could hear them during a press briefing:
“They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country,” Trump told reporters near the end of a lengthy Cabinet meeting. He added: “Their country is no good for a reason. Your country stinks and we don’t want them in our country.”
[…]
“We can go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way, if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” Trump said. “Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage.”
That put another target on Minnesota’s back. The state is home to nearly a third of the nation’s 260,000 Somalians. It’s not as though they’re here illegally, though.
Almost 58 percent were born in the U.S., and 87 percent of those born elsewhere are naturalized citizens.
Not that any of that matters to Donald Trump or ICE’s collective of masked thugs. So, these are the sort of things that are happening now in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area as Trump’s hatred becomes personified.
Federal agents used chemical irritants to push through an angry crowd that blocked their vehicles as they checked identifications in a heavily Somali neighborhood of Minneapolis on Tuesday, amid the Trump administration’s ongoing crackdown targeting the community.
City Council member Jamal Osman, a Somali American who represents the neighborhood, witnessed the confrontation, as did an Associated Press videographer.
[…]
He also said he spoke with one young Somali American who was dragged to a vehicle, detained and taken to an ICE detention center. There, officials finally looked at his U.S. passport, fingerprinted him, and released him but told him to find his own way home, about 6 miles (10 kilometers) away in snowy weather.
The DHS also made some noise about an arrest that supposedly justified the violent actions taken by ICE officers (who not only deployed chemicals but also arrested two people who were simply recording ICE officers and/or asserting their Fourth Amendment rights). But the statement seems extremely light on facts, as is often the case when DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin decides to open her mouth:
The Department of Homeland Security’s Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said in an emailed statement that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers arrested Jesus Saucedo-Portillo, whom she described as an unauthorized immigrant, on Dec. 6 while he was getting into his vehicle in a campus parking lot.
In a divergence from what school officials have said about the incident, McLaughlin said officers had a warrant and were obstructed by a university administrator and campus security during the encounter.
McLaughlin said Saucedo-Portillo “is a registered sex offender and has a previous arrest for driving while intoxicated.” A search of Minnesota court records by the Minnesota Star Tribune found no record of a DWI case under that name, and Saucedo-Portillo does not appear in the national sex-offender registry.
Some journalists who got an inside look at this operation could have tried to undercut McLaughlin’s narrative about targeted arrests and “worst of the worst.” Instead, NBC News embedded with ICE for a day and ended up generating an article headlined “ICE operation shows the difficulty of immigration arrests amid pushback in frigid Minnesota.”
The article isn’t nearly as bad as the headline, but it allows ICE and their spokespeople to flat out lie about what’s been happening all over this nation, but has most recently focused almost exclusively on cities or states run by members of the Democratic Party.
“It is not an operation targeting the Somali community,” [ICE Acting Executive Director Marcos] Charles said. “We’re looking for people that are here illegally.”
Right. And that’s why the raid that made all the headlines (and generated a handful of bullshit arrests) just happened to have occurred in a neighborhood that is primarily populated by Somalis.
Then there’s this, which is directly contradicted by NBC’s reporting, even if NBC tries to present its observations as supporting Marcos Charles’s assertion:
“The biggest misconception is that we’re out there just randomly arresting people, which we’re not,” Charles said.
[…]
During NBC News’ roughly eight hours with ICE, fewer than a dozen people were arrested despite not being the initial targets of the operation. They just happened to be at the scene when agents showed up.
Given the wording, I would assume eleven people who weren’t ICE targets were arrested. If it were less than that, I assume NBC would have used wording like “ten people” or “less than ten people.” Either way, it’s like more than one “collateral” arrest per hour, which is crazy considering this is an article involving officers griping about the cold keeping people indoors, being prevented from entering homes by property owners multiple times due to the ICE’s lack of actual judicial warrants, and double-tap home search that revealed the targeted person had already fled. The officers decided to arrest the other person there just because.
Minneapolis is pushing back, which is exactly the way it should be. Here’s an incredible recording of anti-ICE protesters shielding a Minneapolis store from being entered by ICE officers, who collectively can’t even explain why they need to enter the building. The officers are eventually shamed into leaving, and showered with nothing but expressions of love, sympathy, and offers of prayer:
Resistance works. ICE officers work best when there’s no friction. When confronted or slowed, they’re far more apt to give up and leave than continue their likely illegal actions. In some cases, being confronted results in unprovoked acts of violence by federal officers. Fortunately, nothing like that happened here.
And just because we’re talking about Minneapolis, “Minnesota Nice,” and ICE activity largely fueled by xenophobic hate, here’s a palate cleanser. I don’t agree with my dad on nearly anything political, but he’s one of the most helpful people you will ever meet. He recently made the news in Minneapolis for doing what he’s always done: pitching in wherever needed.
Former officer/current prisoner Derek Chauvin decided to personify endemic police racism by pressing his knee to the neck of an unarmed black man for nearly ten minutes. This display of power continued for three minutes after another officer told Officer Chauvin he could no longer detect a pulse.
Minneapolis PD officers responded as cops almost always do when a “bad apple” further turns public sentiment against them: they simply refused to do their job. Officers decided that if people didn’t love the police, they weren’t going to avail themselves of the benefits (whatever they are) of an organized police force. Of course, most officers were unwilling to give up their incomes in exchange for abdicating their responsibilities. They expected to get paid for doing nothing.
Others saw the writing on the likely burning wall: casual abuse of citizens and their rights was no longer being tolerated to the extent it had been previous to Officer Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd. They decided to exit the police business altogether, rather than deal with any minimal increases in transparency and accountability.
These officers assumed the city would bend to their will in order to maintain the status quo, assuming legislators would rather retain bad cops than deal with chronic understaffing. Things went the other way, though. The PD remained under the microscope and further limits were placed on police and policing.
But following the murder of George Floyd, a unified message was sent out by police officials, police union reps, and the bootlicking contingent of the Minnesota/Minneapolis legislatures: “Fewer cops means more crime, folks. That’s just simple math.”
And, for a relatively brief moment, that simple math held. Crime did go up while the city was still dealing with 24/7 protests and an observable spike in disrespect for police officers and everything they stand for.
But that assertion has since been proven false. Reports flowing in over the last couple of years show cops aren’t all that essential to lowering crime rates. In April of this year, it was reported that crime rate decreases first noted in 2022 weren’t an anomaly.
According to MPD data, carjackings are down 46% year-to-date, robbery has dropped 34%, gunshot wound victims declined nearly 38% and assaults are down 7%.
The city’s mayor, Jacob Frey, credited this drop to a new task force and a renewed focus on subjecting repeat offenders to harsher sentences. Maybe. Maybe not. But it definitely wasn’t related to an increase in officers on patrol, contrary to the predictions of the self-interest groups listed above.
The city has recorded 20 fewer homicides than at this time last year, on pace for a 33% decline.
Other metrics show similar positive trends, according to city data analyzed by the Star Tribune: 9% fewer aggravated assaults, 26% fewer robberies, 30% fewer gunfire reports, 33% fewer shootings victims and 52% fewer carjackings.
Violent crime — murder, aggravated assault, rape and robbery — is down 12% overall from last year to its lowest point of the 2020s so far, the data show. Only a record-breaking surge in auto thefts bucks the pattern.
Once again, the same law enforcement agencies that declared the city would devolve into anarchy due to officers leaving and/or simply refusing to the do the job they were (still) being paid to do were quick to take credit for something that directly contradicted the scenario they had presented two years earlier. MPD Chief Brian O’Hara claimed this decrease was the result of “data- and partnership-driven strategies” for taking guns off the street.
Again: maybe! I mean, we can hope cops are doing smarter, more meaningful work rather than just hassling minorities simply because they can. If constraints in resources have actually forced cops to be smarter (rather than just claiming they’re being smarter), I’m here for it.
There’s little that ties these crime decreases to law enforcement activity. Correlation, causation, etc. But one thing is undeniable: adding more cops isn’t the answer.
Violent crimes through the first nine months of 2023 in Minneapolis, compared to this same time a year ago, are trending downward, while the number of sworn officers available for patrols has now dipped to just 515.
Assistant MPD Chief Katie Blackwell, told a Minneapolis City Council committee the violent crime trends, including violence committed with guns, are headed the right way with homicides, robberies, and the gun violence index all down significantly from a year ago.
Blackwell goes on to say that that department is facing a “significant burden” and that “cops are getting tired.” I don’t doubt that’s true. But not a single police official — when faced with an uptick in attrition following the murder of George Floyd — ever bothered to consider the possibility that a mass exit in officers simply meant the PD was ridding itself of its most useless employees. The officers first to press the eject were most likely the same officers who routinely violated rights and/or engaged in cop busywork that did nothing to reduce violent crime, but definitely continued to deteriorate citizens’ opinion of law enforcement.
Leaner is cleaner. When resources are strained, they have to be utilized effectively. When there’s an excess of officers, people just tend to do what they want or whatever is easiest. It’s the way it works in the private sector. There’s no reason to believe the same thing doesn’t happen in the public sector.
Again, correlation is not causation. But law enforcement agencies continue to insist, despite evidence to the contrary, that the only way to effectively fight crime is to put more cops on the street. What’s happening in Minneapolis says otherwise. And it might be ok to simply let disgruntled cops walk off the job rather than subject themselves to additional accountability. The people leaving will generally be officers not worth keeping: the kind of employees who opt for easy/abusive as often as possible. Those who remain will work harder. But, more importantly, they’ll be forced to work smarter. And that’s when you’ll start seeing positive results. Flooding the streets with cops is nothing more than dilution which, as everyone knows, is a process that weakens whatever’s subjected to it.
Any investigative report of any police department in the United States composed by the DOJ’s Civil Rights division can be described as “scathing.” Bad cops doing bad things trigger these investigations, which invariably find evidence of biased policing, excessive force deployment, and a general disregard — if not actual disdain — for the people these departments are supposed to be serving.
This investigation of the Minneapolis PD was triggered by the rarest of occurrences: the murder conviction of Officer Derek Chauvin for spending nearly 10 minutes with his knee pressed to unarmed black man George Floyd’s neck — an act that would have been considered, at minimum, metaphorically reprehensible even if it hadn’t continued for three minutes after another officer informed Chauvin he could not detect a pulse.
Minneapolis burned, much like Los Angeles did thirty years ago following the brutal beating of a black man by white cops. Los Angeles is still overseen by terrible cops, showing it takes more than a few weeks of civil eruption to change the status quo. And, if history is any indication, it takes far more than a strongly worded report from the DOJ to change cop culture.
The system that emboldened Officer Chauvin to the point he was willing to take a life while being recorded by citizens still thrives. The DOJ report [PDF] makes it clear Derek Chauvin is no anomaly. He’s only the most visible symptom of a terminally ill system.
For years, MPD used dangerous techniques and weapons against people who committed at most a petty offense and sometimes no offense at all. MPD used force to punish people who made officers angry or criticized the police. MPD patrolledneighborhoods differently based on their racial composition and discriminated based on race when searching, handcuffing, or using force against people during stops. The City sent MPD officers to behavioral health-related 911 calls, even when a law enforcement response was not appropriate or necessary, sometimes with tragic results.
Overseeing the largest city in Minnesota (and one of its most diverse), the MPD has repeatedly failed to serve and/or protect. Instead, the past decade has been marred by acts of violence by officers that have only destroyed what little trust remains between the MPD and the people it’s supposed to be serving.
On May 25, 2020, MPD officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in broad daylight and on camera. Three other MPD officers failed to save Mr. Floyd. Widespread protest followed in Minneapolis, across the country, and throughout the world.
George Floyd was one of several people whose death at the hands of MPD officers garnered heightened public attention in recent years. For example, in 2015, MPD officers shot and killed Jamar Clark, a 24-year-old Black man, triggering 18 days of protests, including an occupation of MPD’s Fourth Precinct station. In 2017, an MPD officer shot and killed Justine Ruszczyk, a 40-year-old white woman, while responding to Ruszczyk’s 911 call. In 2018, MPD officers fatally shot Thurman Blevins, a 31-year-old Black man, following a foot chase. In 2019, MPD officers shot and killed Chiasher Vue, a 52-year-old Asian man, during a standoff at his home. In 2022, an MPD officer shot and killed Amir Locke, a 22-year-old Black man, during a no-knock raid on an apartment.
The DOJ report runs 92 pages. And it depicts yet another law enforcement agency that considers itself to be above the law. Unjustified force deployment is MPD standard operating procedure. And when officers aren’t shooting people for startling them (i.e, the killing of Justine Ruszczyk), they’re endangering citizens and other cops just because they’ve been startled by man’s best friend while intruding on people’s personal property.
In another case, an officer created unnecessary danger when he shot two dogs in the back yard of a home in a residential neighborhood. At least two people were inside the home at the time, and the home was flanked on both sides by neighboring homes and other structures. The dogs did not present an imminent threat.
MPD officers view excessive force as a means to an end, no matter what that end might actually be. Rather than being far down the list of acceptable responses to encounters with uncooperative individuals, violence appeared the first, if not only, option considered.
De-escalation, if it occurred at all, was poor; officers shouted commands, gave multiple conflicting orders, demanded immediate compliance, or threatened force. Officers made tactical decisions that endangered community members and officers alike. Officers often used neck restraints on people who were accused of low-level offenses, were passively resisting arrest, or had merely angered the officer. And, most troublingly, officers used neck restraints on people who were not a threat to the officer or anyone else.
“Less-lethal” does not mean any less excessively violent.
From January 1, 2016, to August 16, 2022, MPD officers used their tasers 564 times and pointed or unholstered them 1,039 times. We reviewed a sample of these incidents. Many of those encounters involved people known to have behavioral health issues. In a significant number of encounters, the associated offense was non-violent or did not involve a weapons-related offense. Sometimes, the only charge was obstruction of process.
MPD officers couldn’t even restrain themselves when patrolling with DOJ ride-alongs. One incident detailed in the report says an officer tased a man for filming an accident scene, despite the fact he was complying with their orders to move away from scene.
The DOJ notes MPD officers are complaining about low morale and are concerned the department is unable to retain long-time officers. If this is how the MPD operates on a day-to-day basis, then it’s better off without officers like the one described below, who are far more likely to abandon ship rather than suffer through any minimal increase in accountability.
In another incident, an officer expressed no remorse after using excessive force against a restrained person. A white man experiencing a behavioral health crisis was handcuffed to a stretcher. The man spat on an officer, who slapped and punched him in the face. After the man had been transported to a hospital, the officer said on body-worncamera: “I’m really proud of myself; I only hit him twice.” The supervisor did not refer the officer for a misconduct investigation.
And so it goes for the rest of the report:
MPD Fails to Render Medical Aid to People in Custody
MPD Encounters with Youth Result in Unnecessary, Unreasonable, and Harmful Uses of Force
MPD Unlawfully Discriminates Against Black an Native American People When Enforcing the Law
MPD Unlawfully Retaliates Against People During Stops and Calls for Service
MPD Violates People’s First Amendment Rights
MPD Fails to Conduct Thorough, Timely, and Fair Misconduct Investigations
This is the policing that’s costing Minneapolis taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars every year. Violence inflicted for any or no reason. Bigotry pretending to be good police work.
MPD leadership has persistently encouraged using traffic enforcement and stops of “suspicious” people and vehicles as a way to reduce violent crime and get guns off the street. One MPD presentation we reviewed described traffic law enforcement stops as the “top tactic used by MPD for illegal gun recovery.” But only a small percentage of MPD’s traffic stops resulted in recovering guns. For example, in 2018, MPD conducted roughly 32,000 vehicle stops, but recovered only 97 guns—meaning just 0.3% of traffic stops resulted in MPD recovering a gun.
Moreover, from November 1, 2016, to August 9, 2022, MPD data showed no record of a citation or arrest of any kind for 71.7% of traffic stops. The burden of these stops fell most heavily on Black and Native American people. MPD stopped but did not cite or arrest Black people at 5.7 times the rate at which it stopped but did not cite or arrest white people, given their shares of the population. And Native Americans were stopped but not cited or arrested at 5.9 times the rate.
Having been forced to confront this internalized bigotry following the murder of George Floyd, officers simply decided to stop complying with their employer’s policies.
Starting in late May 2020, officers suddenly stopped reporting race and gender in a large number of stops, despite MPD policy requiring officers to collect the data. We estimate the percentage of daily stops with known race data recorded dropped from about 71% just before May 25, 2020, to about 35% afterwards, a drop of roughly 36 percentage points. This sudden decrease in MPD officers recording racial data continued throughout the next two years.
This is what this kind of cop culture (which is pretty much the same cop culture no matter where in the nation you are) gets you: cops who know they won’t be punished no matter what they do.
Some officers act as though they are unconcerned about being held accountable for even egregious discriminatory misconduct. For example, in late 2020, a woman called MPD to ask about a man she believed was putting flyers threatening Black Lives Matter supporters onto vehicles. She told us that the officer who answered said Black Lives Matter was a “terrorist” organization and stated: “We are going to make sure you and all of the Black Lives supporters are wiped off the face of the Earth.” He said, “I think you should file a complaint, and I want you to do it well, so let me spell my first and my last name so you get it right. Then I’ll give you my badge number.” The woman asked to speak to a supervisor, but the officer refused to transfer her or take her contact information. The woman filed a complaint the next day but was not interviewed for seven months.
It’s not someone “acting” like they are “unconcerned” about potential punishment. This is an officer who knows he had nothing to fear in terms of reprisal.
The Minneapolis PD is headed towards a consent decree, something meant to reverse years of negative cop culture but generally just means citizens will be shelling out tens of millions of dollars for negligible reforms. All the MPD needs to do is maintain the status quo until court orders expire and the city residents find something else to focus on. The only thing that can truly change the MPD is the MPD itself. And it’s made it this far without changing so why bother doing it now?
The brightest light in Flyover Country, USA underwent the growing pains of a coastal megatropolis following Minneapolis PD officer Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd — something that began as a response to allegedly fake $20 bill being passed at a local shop, but ended nine minutes later with Floyd lying dead under Chauvin’s unmoving knee, which was still pressed to his throat.
A few years later, and only a few of those Floyd-inspired reform efforts have materialized. But one of the most common instigators of random cop violence — the pretextual traffic stop — has been reined in by the city government.
Pulling people over for tiny violations in hopes of stumbling upon bigger crimes is the way cops do business, especially when asset forfeiture is in play. Cops will be the first to remind you traffic stops are incredibly dangerous, something they deliver in mantra-esque tones following traffic stops turned deadly by the people that instigated them. If traffic stops are truly that inherently dangerous, you’d think cops would focus on actually dangerous drivers/driving, rather than a failure to come to a complete stop at a quiet intersection or driving around with expired plates.
Under the terms of a new settlement agreement between the city and the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, MPD officers cannot pull over drivers for the sole purpose of expired tabs, license plate issues, broken lights or mirrors, or failing to signal a turn, among other issues.
There’s a big asterisk attached, however.
However, officers can still make these stops if they determine a risk to public safety.
I don’t see how any of these infractions (jointly or severally) could possibly add up to a “public safety risk,” but I’m not the guy expected to generate justifications on the fly for violating a city settlement with a state agency. That’s on the officers who will almost certainly violate this agreement immediately and perpetually.
But, if nothing else, it helps solidify changes the city and its police department agreed to in 2021. That policy change took inoperable license plate lights and items dangling from the rear view mirror out of the pretextual stop equation.
The better stuff comes later in the agreement. It goes farther than limiting pretextual stops. It’s going to have a definite impact on cops who do Toucan Sam policing, following their snoots to flavors of Fourth Amendment violations. (It doesn’t rhyme. I’m sorry.)
The new agreement also bans MPD from searching people, or their vehicle, solely based on the smell of marijuana — which will soon be legal in Minnesota anyway for adults 21 and older.
“Odor of marijuana” has always been a handy pretense for a roadside vehicular strip search. It’s also been a handy justification for any violence that might be inflicted by officers prior to, during, or following a warrantless search. That’s no longer an option, and unless these old dogs (or their old drug dogs) are willing to learn new tricks, officers are just going to have to start playing by the same set of rules the rest of us are expected to follow. You know, the law.
I don’t often highlight the things that cops do right. That’s for several reasons. First, I don’t think it’s worth applauding officers for managing to do their jobs without violating anyone’s rights. Second, I don’t think it’s cute when cops pull over people to give them Thanksgiving turkeys or aid and abet marriage proposals. That’s just hideous. And third, cops generally don’t go above and beyond too often, so there’s a limited amount of content to work with.
“I am sorry,” former Minneapolis police officer Justin Stetson said Wednesday in a Hennepin County courtroom.
Stetson’s apology was a remarkable turn in a case that began nearly three years ago with police and prosecutors describing Stetson’s victim — Jaleel Stallings — as a would-be cop killer.
Also striking: Stetson’s admission, in a letter of apology to Stallings, saying his actions reflect a “deeper, historical and institutional problem with the Minneapolis police and how some officers have responded poorly to the urban communities.”
“I have realized there is a lack of trust in police, especially on the part of nonwhites, and that this lack of trust is foundationally related to interactions that individuals, like yourself, have had with particular officers, like myself,” he wrote. “The violence visited upon you that night has been felt by all our citizens.”
This is indeed out of the ordinary. Not only did the officer admit he was wrong, he admitted the department he worked for — as well as cop culture in general — was part of the problem. It’s the latter admission that’s more astounding: that it’s an institutional problem, rather than just a few “bad apples.”
The former officer was one of several Minneapolis PD officers who assaulted Jaleel Stallings while roaming the street in an unmarked van, casually popping off non-lethal rounds at anyone they happened to see on the streets during protests that erupted in the city following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.
They hit Jaleel K. Stallings, 29, a St. Paul truck driver, who says he didn’t know they were cops because they were inside an unmarked white cargo van with the police lights off. He thought they were real bullets. And, he says he was mindful of warnings earlier that day from no less than Gov. Tim Walz that white supremacists were roaming the city looking for trouble.
Stallings was not only brutalized by cops but charged with second-degree murder, first-degree assault, and second-degree riot. He fired off one round well over the top of the unmarked van. For that act of self-defense, he was beaten, even though he dropped his gun and laid facedown on the ground as soon as he realized they were police officers. For his innocent mistake, he was brutalized and jailed until a prosecutor — having viewed the officers’ body cams — dropped the charges that could have netted Stalling more than decade in prison.
The city of Minneapolis was not nearly as apologetic when it settled Stallings’ civil rights lawsuit for $1.5 million. The payout came coupled with the city’s refusal to admit guilt or take any responsibility for its officers’ actions on that night.
Now, as remarkable as former officer Stetson’s admission and apology are, there are several caveats that detract from its power.
The first is the settlement above, which has already absolved the city and the PD of any wrongdoing. It may be an implicit expression of guilt, but it’s not an explicit admission, which is what matters when it comes to holding the city and PD accountable in the future.
Then there’s the effect this admission has on the officer himself. His admission came with a plea deal on lesser charges, meaning that — no matter how sincere his statement might be — this rare admission of guilt was in the officer’s best interests.
The officer, who testified he beat Stallings so severely he wondered whether he had broken his own hand, pleaded to lesser charges to ensure he won’t face any jail time. That plea deal came coupled with some other stipulations, which also detract from the impact of his apology.
He must enroll in an anger management course; will never be allowed to be a Minnesota police officer again; cannot use firearms; and will serve 30 to 90 days of community service.
Being blocked from further law enforcement employment in Minnesota likely contributed to this admission of guilt. If he had an opportunity to return to the force, it’s unlikely Officer Stetson would have thrown himself and his employer under the proverbial bus while awaiting sentencing. Even if the court had not stipulated his ousting from state law enforcement work, his statement would have assured his inability to secure a law enforcement job.
Finally, there’s the point made by Stallings — the victim of this officer’s assault and the recipient of a $1.5 million settlement from the city:
Stallings noted he will have served more jail time than all the officers in the SWAT team combined.
That undercuts all of this. The only actually innocent person in this incident is the only person who spent any time in jail. There is no deterrent to officers like the belatedly regretful Stetson. And that means officers will continue to behave carelessly and casually violate rights because the odds of them actually being held personally accountable for their actions hovers near zero percent. It’s the policed that pay, not only in terms of the violence inflicted on them, but for the defense of those who engaged in this violence.
Thanks for the nice words, former Officer Stetson. But until we start hearing this more often and from officers not trying to dodge jail time, they’re almost as worthless as the pixels they’re printed on.
Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin isn’t done hurting city residents. He may be imprisoned but he’s still costing the city millions of dollars. And these cases aren’t related to the brutal act that saw him charged and convicted for murder.
Officer Chauvin did this to himself. He may have been aided and abetted by officers who decided Chauvin’s choking of a person to death by placing his knee on the putative arrestee’s neck for nearly 10 minutes did not create the sort of incident in which they should intervene. Those enablers are facing their own criminal sentences.
But the image of a white cop pressing a knee to a black man’s neck for an extended period of time — and for nearly three minutes after another officer told Chauvin he couldn’t detect a pulse — unleashed a summer of powerful protests and ushered in a movement to drastically alter the terms and conditions of being subjected to force deployment by cops.
Two people who sued former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, seven other officers and the City of Minneapolis over excessive force, racial discrimination and misconduct will receive millions of dollars as part of a settlement agreed upon by the city Thursday morning.
During a closed session of a meeting Thursday, city councilors agreed to settle with John Pope and Zoya Code for a combined price of $8.875 million. Pope will receive $7.5 million, with Code set to end up with $1.375 million.
This looks like a cop with a criminal record. Maybe no criminal charges were ever sustained, but his employer had to know the (litigation) problems Officer Chauvin created. And yet, nothing was done until after he was caught on camera murdering a city resident.
Sure, it’s the city paying for this. But the city doesn’t generate its own income. It collects taxes. And money that actually might have helped city residents is instead being spent to settle lawsuits generated by a cop the city should have cut loose long before he racked himself up on a murder beef.
While the city has agreed to pay victims of Chauvin millions, it has been much more cagey about the documentation involved with the incidents that lead to a nearly $9 million payout.
A spokesperson says the City of Minneapolis hasn’t released the body camera footage for both incidents as of this time, saying it is private data under a state law. However, both Pope and Code may release the video as soon as Thursday due to them being subjects of the footage.
The people who will provide needed transparency are the people who were the victims of Chauvin’s unconstitutional acts. They’ve secured this footage during litigation and they’ve stated they’re willing to release it.
Meanwhile, the city has decided to side with cops by not releasing footage litigants have had for months, if not years. And for what? To protect one of its worst cops?
The city — the employer of the officer formerly known as “Officer Chauvin” — ignored these early warning signs, sent its own lawyers out to defend him, and have only paid up because a murder conviction isn’t the sort of thing you can easily shrug off, even when you’re in the business of stifling accountability.
The allegations are disturbing. One of the recipients of a settlement is John Pope, who was only 14 years old when Chauvin “rushed Pope,” struck him multiple times with a flashlight, and ended the “encounter” by pinning Pope to the ground with his knee on his neck.
All of this leads to the kind of questions no government, at any level, appears willing to answer honestly. This litigation arrived years before Chauvin was charged and convicted. Does it take murder charges to finally admit (at least monetarily) you’ve been employing a bad cop for years? Or did the city consider Chauvin to be a good cop until it became politically inconvenient to do so?
The city had prior warning. So did his cop shop employer. And yet, neither entity did anything until after Chauvin was convicted on murder charges. If that’s the line cops must cross before being written off, Minnesotans are in for a world of hurt — both as victims of police misconduct and as benefactors obliged to let the city buy forgiveness with their money.
