The Minneapolis Police Department habitually violated residents’ constitutional rights, particularly minorities, according to the results of a two-year investigation by the US Justice Department published on Friday. The investigation began in 2020, sparked by the now-infamous death in police custody of black suspect George Floyd under the knee of white officer Derek Chauvin.
Suggesting Floyd’s death was far from an anomaly, the Justice Department’s 92-page report alleges a pattern of civil rights violations from habitual use of excessive and often deadly force to systematic discrimination against racial minorities.
Even Floyd’s last words were apparently the rule rather than the exception, the investigation found, with numerous documented incidents in which officers allegedly ignored claims by suspects in custody that they could not breathe.
“The patterns and practices we observed made what happened to George Floyd possible,” Attorney General Merrick Garland told reporters on Friday.
The force routinely violated residents’ First and Fourth Amendment rights, including by retaliating against journalists attempting to document the aforementioned civil rights violations, the report claims. Residents are especially likely to suffer under department policies “based on race and disability,” with black and Native American individuals and those with mental health issues singled out for particularly brutal treatment.
Reinforcing the antagonistic relationship between law enforcement and residents, the force refused to discipline its own officers when they were found to be in violation of even its allegedly lax behavioral standards, the report found. Due to the organizational structure of the force, officers inclined to abuses of power of the sort amply documented in the report were able to escape accountability by self-selecting into enabling supervisory relationships.
According to the probe, the department’s pattern of abuses was established years before Floyd’s death – which was immortalized on cell-phone footage and seen by millions around the world, kicking off a summer of rioting and racial recriminations. Officers deployed “dangerous techniques and weapons against people who committed at most a petty offense and sometimes no offense at all,” the report states, with merely criticizing the police department sufficing to bring down excessive and sometimes deadly force.
Since Floyd’s death, Minneapolis has banned neck restraints, no-knock warrants, and other controversial tactics. The Justice Department’s report urges a total retraining regarding the use of force, both in terms of when and where it is seen as appropriate and how it is documented. Including racial data in all documentation of police activity is seen as critical to reducing the deleterious effects of systematic discrimination, as is adopting specific policies to deal with “people with behavioral health issues.”