The Lesson of George Floyd: It’s Time to Put the Minneapolis Police Department Under State Control

Minneapolis has a police problem.  It has a race problem.  We have known both of those facts for
years.  The question is the cause and what are the possible solutions?  There is no simple answer but one is that Minneapolis police department needs to have a major cultural change that can only be effected by either state takeover of it or by merging it with or having it taken over by the Hennepin County Sheriff or placed under receivership and operation with another jurisdiction.
Minneapolis has long had a problem with its police department.  Muckraker Lincoln Steffens in his 1904 classic the Shame of the Cities and in his 1903 McClure Magazine cover story highlighted the corruption and problems in the Minneapolis Police Department that included graft, corruption, and a host of other issues.  There is a problem in controlling the police that go back over a century.
There is also a well-known racial problem.  It is one of the most racially segregated cities in the nation with terrible education, health care, incarceration, income, and employment disparities.  Combine them together and they yield a racial problem with policing, especially including excessive use of force.
Twenty years ago I taught a class on police civil and criminal liability law.  Minneapolis was a living laboratory in what not to do.  The City made constant pay outs to victims and families and across two country prosecutors that included now Senator Amy Klobuchar and Mike Freeman little had been done to hold officers criminally liable.  There are lots of reasons for this.  Some are political and not wanting to take on the police or wanting to appear tough on crime.  Others are the fact that the law on police criminal (and civil) liability favor them over victims.  As a result, Minneapolis is perhaps the most notorious example of police racial violence against people of color.
What do we do now?  Addressing the underlying racial and economic disparities in income, education, and health care are needed but they will not change police behavior.  There is a persistent cultural problem with Minneapolis police practice that needs to be addressed.
Some had hoped that Monell v. Department of Social Services, 436 U.S. 658 (1978) would provide an answer.  The Monell decision allowed individuals to sue under 42 U.S. Code § 1983 for civil damages.  These §1983 suits, if won, would require cities to pay civil damages for abuses of constitutional rights.  If cities had to keep paying out then maybe they would have an incentive to force changes in police practices or training.  Great theory except it did not work, including in Minneapolis where despite millions of dollars paid out training and use of force practices have not changed.
Others blame the police unions. It is not so much the unions as it is the psychology of the “thin blue line” where in a view of us versus them, police are hesitant to take action against or buck other police officers.  This is just the most extreme version of no one like a snitch or fink.
Maybe the fault is with the public.   Generally suspects and defendants  do not garner much sympathy from the public.  Racism may be a factor when often it is white police interacting with people of color.  Of course the exception in Minneapolis was when a Black police officer shot a white woman and there was a rush to convict him.  Many felt good about themselves here indicating they could now support a victim over the police.
There is also a culture of complacency. By that, Minneapolis has a reputation of being one of the most liberal cities in America.  Mayors, city council members, and voters can say all the right things about race but at the end of the day the solutions fall from short of anything beyond rhetoric.
Finally, mayors in Minneapolis are weak.  They cannot do much.  The city is effectively a one-party town where the establishment is not going to challenge anyone in power for fear it will hurt their career.
Now firing four police officers and calling for them to be charged with murder will placate some but it still will not change the culture and administration of policing.  What should be done?
It is clear, if Steffens was correct, that the police have been a problem for Minneapolis for more than100 years.  The City has shown it is incapable of reforming or correcting the problem.  It is doubtful people of color have much confidence in the City of Minneapolis to fix the problem.  Someone needs to step in.
Solution one is a takeover of the Minneapolis police department by the State of Minnesota.  This probably would require legislation altering or preempting home rule authority of the City.  Across the country states such as New Jersey have employed similar solutions when it comes to education.  Maybe the State of Minnesota putting the police department under its control would be an option.
Solution two is disbanding the police department entirely and letting the Hennepin County Sheriff perform public safety functions in Minneapolis.  A variation of that is merging the Minneapolis police department into the sheriff’s office or putting the former under some type of receivership with another jurisdiction.  Perhaps this what should have been the remedial basis of a previous civil rights law suit.
Overall, continuing to believe that the City of Minneapolis can administer and reform its police in a racially neutral manner increasingly looks unlikely and a new entity needs to run or provide for the public safety needs there.

Final Exam: Political Science 101, Introduction to Real World Politics

It’s May.  I am a political science and law professor and it is final exam time.  Here are the questions  and suggested answers to the final exam in my class Introduction to Real World Politics.   The final consists of three essay questions.


1.  Independent and self-described democratic socialist Senator Bernie Sanders has officially declared he is running for president as a Democrat.  The media has declared that he cannot win.  Are they correct?

Much in the same way after Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul declared they were running for president and the mainstream press declared they could not win either the general election or even secure the party nomination, they are saying the same about Bernie Sanders.  The media says that Sanders cannot raise enough money to challenge Hilary Clinton and that she is such a frontrunner and he has positions so liberal that he cannot possibly win and that even the very idea of running seems Quixotic at best.  However, the media and the establishment has been wrong in the past.  Just seven years ago Clinton too was declared the front runner and had a lock on the Democratic nomination and then something happened–It was called Barack Obama.  Both he and John Edwards beat Clinton in Iowa and the former went on to win the Democratic nomination and the presidency...twice.
Clinton has high name recognition and a strong media presence, but she also has huge negatives.  She is well-known and will have a hard time redefining her image.  She does not have a lot of room to recreate herself.  Additionally she has yet to craft a narrative and rational for her campaign.  In effect, she is repeating so many of the mistakes she made seven years ago when the arrogance of her campaign assumed she was inevitable.
True Sanders does not have a ton of money but he has a powerful narrative about economic justice and fairness.  Sanders also appeals the disenchanted left of the Democratic party which does not like Clinton. He will not vulnerable to the criticism that he is a tool of Wall Street and instead will be able to make that argument against Clinton.  Sanders is also good one-on-one talking to people, something really valuable in Iowa and he could pull off an upset there just like Obama did in 2008.  Moreover, while Clinton then recovered and won New Hampshire, Sanders may enjoy terrific name recognition in the Granite state because he is from Vermont.  Combine an Iowa win and a great New Hampshire showing, along with a good narrative and who knows.  Yet again the media could be wrong.  Remember, the media was not only wrong with Obama in 2008, it missed it with Bill Clinton in 1992 and Jimmy Carter in 1976, among many other examples.


2.  The 2015 Minnesota Legislative session ends on May 18.  Do you think they will reach an agreement on a budget by then?
There is barely two weeks left in the legislative session and it is looking less and less likely that there will be a budget by then.  While in January few thought that either not passing the budget by May 18, or by July 1, to avert a government shutdown was likely, what has been most interesting to watch is how the Republicans have hardened their political and policy positions over the last few weeks.  Kurt Daudt and the Republicans have learned how to move their agenda in a coherent fashion (they have learned how to be a majority), while the Senate Democrats and Governor Dayton still seem both unable to articulate a compelling narrative to support their agenda and unable to find the political ability to work together to counteract the GOP.  The governor’s political interests are different from Senate DFLers in that he is not running for reelection while they are and potentially  are vulnerable in 2016.  Thus, their political interests are moving in different directions, thereby preventing them from uniting to oppose the House Republicans.
Many contend that the Republicans are operating in a fantasy world.  They want to make $2 billion in tax cuts (give back all of the surplus) and also spend more on rural and greater Minnesota.  That explains why their recent higher education budget hammered the UMN Twin Cities.  One cannot give away $2 billion and also spend more on greater Minnesota at the same time if one is talking about using the surplus.  That is why the GOP us also proposing other cuts to human services.
But remember that the Republicans are not the only ones living in a different dimension.  The governor and the Senate Democrats too believe that we have a surplus.  The reality again is that there is no real surplus and that between inflation and money that should be placed into contingency, that $2 is already spent.
Perhaps partisan ideology and contrasting constituencies account for many of the reasons regarding why Minnesota this year is perhaps hurling toward another budget impasse.  Yet given all the recent problems with government shutdowns, special sessions, and botched unallotments, the bigger problem is that the budget process is broken.  There are many changes that could be made to improve budgeting.  One example of a good reform would be to adopt an idea from Wisconsin.  In that state, if there is no budget adopted by the due date the current ones continues in effect.  This automatic continuing resolution if adopted in Minnesota would prevent government shutdowns and  would be a good first step in reforming the budget process.  Another good reform would be eliminating the dumb idea that inflation is not calculated for the purposes of determining state budget obligations, even though inflation is considered for the purposes of determining revenue.

3.  Will the screening out of bad racist police officers solve the shooting problems such as what we just saw in Baltimore?  What are these killings occurring?
Police shootings such as in Ferguson and now most recently in Baltimore are not just the product of a good cop/bad cop dichotomy.  By that, the assumption is that only bad cops shot unarmed civilians or racial minorities.  Find a way to screen them out and the problem is solved.  Alas, this is a simplistic solution.
Yes there is individual racism that might motivate some of these shootings, but the problem is far larger than that.  The racism found here is rooted in something larger–the social injustices of American society.  It is about the huge income and wealth gap between Black and White in America.  It is about the educational achievement gap, and it is also about the gap in the demographics of the American population and who is actually elected to office.  The core problem here really is a political economic one.  African-Americans and Latinos, for example, have largely been excluded from the  political structure in the United States and one can argue that the excessive use of political force against them is really the most direct symbol or sign of how the government and society use its power to oppress them.
But even beyond the institutional racism that may be at play here, one needs to consider other factors that may influence why so many people–and not just people of color–are shot.  Unlike in England where there are no police shootings of civilians, this country has a lot of guns in private and personal possession.  England does not.  America is one of the most heavily armed countries in the world.  We are the fantasy world of the NRA where they seem to think if everyone is armed like in the good old wild west of yesterdays then everyone will be able to protect oneself or others.  Guns deter them seem to believe.  They have forgotten though that the old days of the west were violent, and that is what happens when you have guns–people use them, or at least there is a fear that they will be used.  I can appreciate the fear of police who approach people whom they do not know whether they are armed or not.
But yet another issue here is the nature of policing.  Policing is not about roughing up people–it is about interpersonal skills, communications, and problem solving.  Policing now requires  skills more closely approximating negotiator and not a solder.  Yet too often police are badly or ill-trained.  Minnesota has some of the most stringent educational and training requirements for police in the country. Elsewhere across the USA a simple high school degree lets any Barney Fife put on a badge and carry a gun.  The skill of policing is in learning how not to use force, yet that has been forgotten by politicians whose message and arming of police over the last 50 years has been one emphasizing a war mentality.
What all this means is that the political economic exclusion of people of color from the political process, along with a society with too many guns and often bad police training may better explain than individual racism why so many shootings occur.

The Geography of Twin Cities Race

An earlier version of this essay appeared in the March 18, 2015 edition of Politics in Minnesota.

Why are the Twin Cities so segregated?  This is the perplexing question and title of report recently issued  by Myron Orfield and the Institute of Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota.  Why perplexing?  It is because he juxtaposes how the “Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area is known for its progressive politics and forward-thinking approach to regional planning” with the reality of the educational and residential segregation that exists.  Yet his perplexity should not be a surprise since so many of the conclusions he reached were those similarly found a generation ago, and of which could easily be confirmed by almost any person of color in the Twin Cities, if not Minnesota.
First let it be said the Orfield’s report is outstanding.  It documents a Twin Cities metropolitan region that is racially segregated.  This residential segregation is the product of a coalition of interest groups resisting Met Council plans and legislative mandates, if not also court orders, to disburse low income housing across the Twin Cities.  Instead, low income housing continues to be concentrated in select neighborhoods in Minneapolis and St Paul, along with select inner ring suburbs.  Additionally, educational reforms such as charter schools and choice which are supported by those who have vested interests in these ideas, have reinforced and enhanced the housing segregation.  Together, there is a housing-education interest group complex enabling the status quo, hostile to integration, pursuing policies that are producing residential-education segregation and the outcome disparities among students.
Orfield writes a report full of surprise about this, yet should he have been?  Back in 1996-97 the Institute on Race and Poverty, the predecessor to the Institute of Metropolitan Opportunity before its name was changed, was headed by john powell.  I worked there and was the principal writer and  project coordinator for a wonderful team that issued a report “Examining the Relationship Between Housing, Education, and Persistent Segregation.”  We found that the Twin Cities was among the  ten most segregated metropolitan regions in the country.  It was a region  where race and income were stratified by geography.  By that, we had already charted through the 1980s and 1990s that there was a heavy concentration of poor and racial minorities in selected urban and first ring suburbs.  We also found that the causes of this segregation were many, including exclusionary zoning, persistent private housing discrimination in terms of racial steering, residential  mortgage lending, and rental markets.  Our research on the Twin Cities paralleled that by national scholars who looked at other regions of the country.  In effect, the Twin Cities was not exceptional from trends found elsewhere across the country.
We additionally found that federal housing policy, school policies, siting of low income units, the way school district lines were drawn, political fragmentation, and frankly personal preferences–whites not wanting to live near people of color–drove the segregation. Yes government policy contributed to the discrimination, but there were powerful private preferences and market forces that also drove the segregation. For example, we found in a survey that we commissioned  that half of Whites described their ideal neighborhood as mostly White, whereas twenty percent of African-Americans preferred a neighborhood nearly or mostly non-White.  Questions about current neighborhood composition and current and ideal school patterns yielded similar answers demonstrating distinct preferences for Whites and African-Americans.  In short, Whites did not want to live or go to school with Non-Whites whereas African-Americans preferred more integrated options.
The causes of residential and school segregation were a consequence of both clear  governmental policies and choices, but also a product of individual and market preferences.  But where our study went further than the Orfield report was in at least four  ways.  First, we were willing to say something he was not–Twin Cities metropolitan segregation was a product a racism, individual, institutional, and societal.  Beneath the veneer of the ostensible progressivism of the area there was a clear racist animus.  Ask many people of color in the area and they will tell you that Minnesota Nice masks Minnesota racism.  Second, our study more so than Orfield’s looked at how segregation is a product of the intersection of race and class.  Third, our unit of analysis was the census track and not the metropolitan unit, giving us a better neighborhood by neighborhood study than the Orfield study.  Finally, our report offered several recommendations in terms of changes in state law and other policies to address the segregation.  Unfortunately, these recommendations were largely ignored.
Race and class worked together then and still do now to broker the segregation in Minnesota.  We noted how back in the early 90s Minnesota and Oregon had the highest percentage of their African-American populations attending predominantly minority schools.  We looked at rents that priced all poor people out of most suburbs and neighborhoods, with the special impact it had on people of color.  We documented the concentration of poverty, the disappearance of mixed income neighborhoods, and a series of failed public policies that did nothing to address discrimination.  We also pointed to then how the evidence showed that charter schools and vouchers did little to address school achievement and desegregate.  We found everything that Orfield discusses in his report, yet we did it a generation before he did.  We noted back then that the research was already clear in that  school vouchers, choice mechanisms, and perhaps even magnet schools were failing and would fail to address school performance or desegregate.  Yet as Orfield alludes to, powerful interest groups and political and perhaps academic careers and reputations are at stake in supporting these failed policies.
The power of the Orfield study is in linking the policies to interest group politics and in telling a story that brings our report up to the present.  It is a study that further confirms that little has been done to address what we called the “persistent segregation” in the Twin Cities in the nearly twenty years since the Institute on Race and Poverty issued its report.  One can only hope twenty hence another report will have documented a change in policy to reflect the increased racial diversity that the metropolitan region is experiencing.  Maybe it will also be a study that reports that the failed  housing and educational policies that we have thus far adopted since the 1990s were abandoned.

A long, powerful history: How we militarized the police

Please Note:  Today's blog originally  appeared in Minnpost on August 26, 2014.

Policing in America has been shaped from its early days by a military structure, a war mentality and a cloud of racism that continues to repeat itself over time.

The shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, raises many troubling questions, among them: How did we come to militarize the police? The answer reveals a powerful history that ties race, class, policing and the military together.

The shared history goes back to the Reconstruction era. After the Civil War, federal troops were used to enforce civil rights and the Reconstruction in the South. But as a result of the disputed presidential election of 1876 between Republican Rutherford Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden, Democrats conceded the electoral votes to Rutherford if federal troops were withdrawn from South.

Passage of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act ended Reconstruction and barred federal military personnel from enforcing the laws. The Act does not apply to the National Guard, and over time they have been deployed repeatedly to keep the peace. A couple of examples: The 1894 Pullman strike saw 12,000 federal troops deployed to break up a workers' strike. In 1957 Eisenhower nationalized the Arkansas National Guard to enforce integration in Little Rock.

Prior to the Civil War, only a few American cities had police. Post Civil War, policing grew along several fronts. There were the Pinkertons, who were created as private police to bust unions. In the South, police departments emerged to maintain order against the freed slaves. In the North, they grew to check immigrants and unions.

Early 20th-century reforms

Reformers such as August Vollmer in the beginning of the 20th century sought to professionalize the police by reforming its structure and organization along a military model of authority and hierarchy, creating uniforms and command structures that exist to this day.

Yet the modern militarization of police in America owes it origins to several events. First, reaction to the urban riots of the 1960s led to President Lyndon B. Johnson signing into law the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. The Act created the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which made available grants to local governments to develop and purchase military-type resources to suppress the riots. The money facilitated the development of SWAT and other heavily armored police forces which had developed in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other cities to counteract so-called black insurgency.

Second, President Richard M. Nixon’s declaration of the war on drugs and its reemphasis by President Ronald Reagan further enhanced the militarization of the police. It did so in its rhetoric — the war metaphor — sanctioning that a military-style response was needed to address drugs. But also underlying the war against drugs was a racial overtone — the urban riots of the 1960s and drug usage were often associated with blacks. This was seen later as punishment differentials between drugs such as crack and cocaine more heavily punished racial minorities than whites. American prisons and jails incarcerate far more people of color than whites for drugs.

Civil forfeitures

Third, the war on drugs encouraged the police use of civil forfeitures. This was the confiscating of property of convicted and sometimes suspected drug dealers. The theory was it would take the profit out of crime and prevent drug dealers from using their money to enrich their businesses. Civil forfeiture was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1996; it gave local police departments the money to be able to purchase even more military equipment from the Pentagon.

Finally, the events of 9-11 and reaction to it led to the collapse of the distinction between criminal policing, intelligence gathering and protection of national security. Laws such as the Patriot Act effectively turned the police into agents in the war against terror, again providing both a war metaphor to support aggressive policing and, with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, new resources and funds to fight that fight with military-style weapons.

Thus, policing in America has been shaped from its early days by a military structure, a war mentality and a cloud of racism that continues to repeat itself over time with racial profiling, the death penalty and shootings like that of Michael Brown in Ferguson. The only surprise is the degree of press and visibility it has received. Hundreds if not more Michael Browns have existed, and the question now is what America will learn from this latest tragedy.