Law Enforcement: Hard Questions Require Hard Answers

I live in Saint Paul Minnesota, which means that I live near Minneapolis, where George Floyd was murdered in cold blood. 

Most of you know what happened afterwards, but for those of you who don’t, here is a quick recap.

I live in Saint Paul Minnesota, which means that I live near Minneapolis, where George Floyd was murdered in cold blood. 

Most of you know what happened afterwards, but for those of you who don’t, here is a quick recap.

Recap

Protests in the hours after George Floyd’s murder were calm and controlled. Everyone was wearing masks, there was plenty of hand sanitizer and water, social distancing was being practiced as much as possible, and there was even pizza. 

I was dropping off someone to serve as a legal observer, and I stuck around for a little while before feeling overheated. Turns out that was a good move because a few hours later, the Minneapolis Police Department would start an inferno by using excessive force against these people. 

I don’t know or really care whether or not the MPD intentionally created the conditions for the riots that poured more agony onto people already in excruciating pain from seeing George Floyd’s murder. Personally, it’s a distinction without a difference if the MPD meant to start the riots or not; they are still immediately responsible for creating the conditions for white supremacists, anarchists, cosplay revolutionaries, and professional criminals to burn Minneapolis. 

Not too long after the murder, an overwhelming majority on the Minneapolis City Council indicated that they would be in favor of disbanding the MPD, and Mayor Jacob Frey indicated that he was not in favor of disbanding the MPD. He got booed by a crowd. 

A few months later, Jacob Blake would be shot seven times in Kenosha, triggering similar unrest in southeastern Wisconsin.

Some Modest Proposals

The MPD has serious and fundamental problems that cannot afford to wait. 

This department has a well-earned reputation for racism, brutality, corruption, and not being very good at solving major crimes, rape and sexual assault cases especially. Their actions in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s murder indicate that they were eager to hurt the residents of Minneapolis, considering how many of them targeted people just sitting on their front porches. MPD officers also went after journalists, including a CNN reporter. Governor Tim Walz, my governor, had to issue an apology to CNN for what happened to their reporter. Overall, the situation was so badly handled that the Minnesota National Guard and other police departments (Saint Paul PD included) had to be called in to help contain the situation. 

Truth be told, I don’t know if it can be fixed as it currently exists. 

However, the Minneapolis City Council made a grave mistake when they announced that they were going to disband the MPD. They did it without a plan on how they were going to do it, and they failed to explain to a public exhausted by days of riots how they were going to keep people safe without a police department. There was no explaining how this process was going to work other than “conversations.” Conversations are, without a doubt, necessary, but they are not sufficient. Plans are required as well, even if they are first-draft plans. Fact of the matter is that I have no confidence in the Minneapolis City Council to solve this problem (though I have little confidence in the Minneapolis City Government given how it is set up anyway). 

One of the best and most unexpected things I learned from my capstone project was that it is better to have a crappy product close to the deadline than no product at all. It is easier to fix a plan or product than it is to come up with one at the last minute. 

To say that Mayor Frey handled the situation poorly is an understatement. He gave the impression of both weakness and a lack of compassion (the worst possible combination), and he waited too long to address a city in person that was in a world of pain. I know these types of situations are never easy for mayors, but if you want an excellent example of how to minimize the damage and keep yourself secure for reelection, look to Mayor Melvin Carter of Saint Paul.

A Message to My Fellow White Liberals

Stop throwing police chiefs of color under the bus because they could not single-handedly fix decades of institutionalized racism in their respective police departments. It happened in Seattle, Dallas, and, in 2017, Minneapolis. It is vital that these trailblazers are not thrown out the moment something goes wrong, especially if it’s, gasp, a white woman who gets shot by the police. I am of course referencing when Justine Diamond, a middle-aged white woman, was shot and killed by Minneapolis Officer Mohamed Noor. Horrific as that was, and I do agree with the consequences given to Noor, he would have gotten off easy if he had shot someone who was BIPOC.

What Needs to be Done in Minneapolis

At the very least, the MPD needs drastic overhaul, if not rebuilding from the ground up. As it currently stands, the MPD is beyond saving. I would argue for busting up the Minneapolis Police Federation, the union representing the officers of the MPD. This is because they are the biggest obstacle to even the most basic reforms (as are all Police Unions).

Ideally, Chief Arradondo, current head of the MPD, would be the best person to this law enforcement agency. 

Chief Arradondo was handed a Herculean task at best. He must not be thrown under the bus by white liberals (or anyone else) who want him to fix a deeply problematic department overnight. 

On top of rebuilding the MPD from scratch, the people of Minneapolis, and the Twin Cities Metro Area more broadly, need to decide who is a threat by default and what types of crimes we need to prioritize. 

The Minneapolis City Government needs more drastic reforms on its own, but that is another conversation. 

What Needs to be Done as a Country

In addition, we as a society need to think very hard about what we want from law enforcement. I am defining law enforcement as “the generic name for the activities of the agencies responsible for maintaining public order and enforcing the law, particularly the activities of prevention, detection, and investigation of crime and the apprehension of criminals.”

Useful place to start. 

It is also useful to understand that every country and every system of government has a legal system and, thus, law enforcement. Communist and fascist governments alike have systems of law enforcement, Cuba included (a lot of my friends think Cuba is a country to emulate). Democratic countries, such as South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Germany, France, and Canada, have systems of law enforcement as well (systems that appear to work far better). 

One thing to consider is whom we consider a threat by default. American law enforcement, like every system in the United States, was built in part using white supremacist assumptions. In this case, it means that BIPOC, especially black people, are assumed to be dangerous and criminal by default. This means in practice that if you are not white, you are more likely to get harsher sentences than your white counterparts when convicted of the same crime, less likely to get justice if you are the victim of a crime, more likely to be the victim of police brutality, and in general get treated quite poorly by the criminal justice and legal system. 

The assumption that anyone who is not white is inherently dangerous must be destroyed. BIPOC are not the enemy we need to contain or destroy. 

That enemy is the far right and, to a lesser extent, the far left. These people are inherently dangerous. 

Organized crime qualifies as something that needs to be contained and destroyed as well, though that needs to be more clearly defined. 

Some Information on Violent Crime in the United States

Many violent crimes are never solved. For example, only about 60 percent of murders in the United States are solved. If the victims are BIPOC, then the clearance rate is even worse. 

Clearance rate is what percentage of crimes result in an arrest.

Just over half of aggravated assaults—defined by the FBI as “an unlawful attack by one person upon another for the purpose of inflicting severe or aggravated bodily injury”—that are reported result in an arrest. That is just the aggravated assaults that are reported. 

So even by the measure of getting violent criminals behind bars, the system is failing badly. 

For property crimes like theft and burglary, the clearance rates are in the low teens. Even worse.

Sexual Assault and the Legal System

To say that the legal system treats sexual violence as a joke is an understatement. When survivors say that the police were useless at best with their cases, it is yet more evidence that the criminal justice system needs a major overhaul. 

Combined with 70 percent of sexual assaults not being reported because of how little confidence most women and girls (understandably) have and a clearance rate of only one-third, barely 1 percent of rapists face any actual jail time. 

Personally, I don’t see the difference between sexual assault and rape. I understand what the differences are legally, but the damage is the same, nonetheless. 

The criminal justice system must treat this reprehensible crime with the gravity it deserves. More rapists have to be put behind bars at a more consistent rate. Harsher prison sentences as well. No more being concerned about how prison will affect the well-being of rapists or other sexual predators.

White-Collar Crime and the Legal System

Along with sexual violence, the criminal justice system does a terrible job of dealing with white-collar crime. 

I will again use the FBI definition for help. White-collar crime is “generally non-violent in nature and includes public corruption, health care fraud, mortgage fraud, securities fraud, and money laundering, to name a few.”

Besides the fact that if you steal from people you should be held accountable (regardless of how the theft is done), white-collar crime is a threat to the United States economy. In order for capitalism as a system to work, it requires everyone to play by the rules and a trust that everyone is playing by the rules, which is why white-collar crime is a more serious threat than many people realize. 

The criminal justice system must devote more resources to these types of crimes.

Questions for Everyone to Answer in the Comments and for Us as a Country

Can your average violent criminal be fixed?

Can your average rapist be fixed? 

Can your average white-collar criminal be fixed? 

These are vital questions that must be answered. The answers will have significant policy implications going forward about how to deal with these crimes. 

Here in the Twin Cities, and in Minneapolis especially, we have some hard decisions that have to be made about how to get out of the destructive cycle we find ourselves in. Minnesota’s largest city, Minneapolis, is still a timber box waiting to be set off. Again. 

We also need to figure out how to hold people who hurt others accountable and how to stop them from hurting other people. 

These questions may have no good answers, but we have to fix the law enforcement system in this country with a new sense of urgency. 

Otherwise, the system will break completely, and we will have no criminal justice system.