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The trial of Derek Chauvin, the officer who killed Floyd, has begun - and Minneapolis looks like a police state
The George Floyd uprising that began in Minneapolis introduced the demand of defunding the police to the general public, empowered Black-led anti-police violence movements across the planet, generated policy changes in cities across the US, and most importantly built new organizations which have the capacity to fight for systemic change for the long haul. The uprising brought a lot of reforms and positive developments to its birth city, too, including a move to actually defund the Minneapolis police department and redistribute funds to services with a larger potential for eradicating both crime and poverty. Now, however, the Minneapolis and Minnesota governments are in the process of undoing that progress and moving in the opposite direction. The trial of Derek Chauvin, the officer who publicly killed 46-year-old George Floyd – and inadvertently triggered what may have been the largest protest movement in US history – began this week. Instead of becoming more transparent and committed to undoing the anti-Black image it has cultivated, the city of Minneapolis has quickly transformed itself into a 21st-century police state, pushing even beyond the hyper-militarization and violence that already plague police departments across the US.
For a while it seemed that Minneapolis was headed on a better path. A veto-proof majority of city council members previously promised to dismantle the police department and build something better to replace it. Their attempts were dashed by a state oversight commission that shut down a ballot initiative that would have given voters the chance to abolish the police department in favor of a proposed department of community safety and violence prevention. By this winter, the summer’s ambitions had been replaced by a renewed commitment to the status quo. The police budget was cut by a mere $8m – out of a total budget of $179m – and a proposal to modestly reduce the size of the police force was shot down by city council members and Mayor Jacob Frey, who would be more useful to the world as a Justin Trudeau impersonator than an elected official. While the cut is a step towards disinvesting in police, it pales in comparison to the city council’s more genuinely radical rhetoric. Continue reading...