[00:00:22] Speaker A: You are listening to WriteonRadio on KFAI 90.3 FM and streaming live on the
[email protected]. dot Eric I'm Eric Zimmerman. On tonight's program, Josh will be talking with Michelle S. Phelps about her book, the Minneapolis Race, Violence and the Politics of Policing in America. Phelps account of the city's struggles over what constitutes real accountability, justice and safety offers a vivid picture of the possibilities and limits of challenging police power today, all of this and more. So stay tuned to write on radio.
[00:01:18] Speaker B: Hello, everyone. This is Josh Weber with write on radio, joined in studio for the first part of the Hour with Michelle S. Phelps, the author of the Minneapolis Race, Violence and the Politics of Policing in America. Michelle is professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She's also the co author of Breaking the Pendulum, the long struggle over criminal justice. Her research has been featured in the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Time magazine, NPR 538 and other media outlets, and has informed criminal justice reform efforts by the Human Rights Watch and Pew Charitable Trust public Safety Performance Project. Michelle, it's great to have you with us.
[00:01:57] Speaker C: Thank you for having me.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: You know, in the preface of your book, how the crowd around George Floyd at the time of his death was unlike lynchings of earlier decades, it was witnessed by a multiracial and majority black crowd of residents. How did the diverse composition of the crowd witnessing Floyd's death influence the public's reaction and the subsequent protests?
[00:02:22] Speaker C: Yeah, so if we back up a bit, you know, there's this whole debate about how to best describe what was initially described in the media as officer involved shootings, right? Are they deaths? Are they killings? Are they murders? And when George Floyd was killed, subsequently deemed a murder, of course, by the court system at the time, as the video was circulating, people took to calling it a lynching, evoking the long history of state and vigilante violence, often by white people, against black Americans. And so it was evoking this earlier image. But if we go back to the period where lynchings were at their height in the United States, in part as a reaction to the end of slavery and the beginning of the civic rights of black Americans, what we saw was that those lynchings were often these jubilant affairs where there were actually cheering crowds of white people. This was actually a way that white people in the south would come together in community through this manipulation and mutilation of black bodies. And so what was different about Floyd's killing than those lynchings that it was tied to was that it wasn't witnessed by a predominantly white crowd who was cheering. It was witnessed by this multiracial crowd who were yelling out in horror, who were trying to stop the officers. And so, you know, part, I think, of why that murder was so resonant in the public space and in a way that a lot of other police killings have not been was because of that crowd of witnesses. That crowd of witnesses that saw immediately that what was going on here was not normal, was not acceptable, and that police were killing a man. And so I think we can track a lot of the aftermath and the way that that killing, indeed, murder, galvanizes the public as being, in part, a reaction to that crowd. And it's the crowd that's filming it. It is the crowd that is calling out to police officers to stop. It is the crowd that will ultimately wind up testifying in court against the officers.
[00:04:33] Speaker B: What historical factors have contributed to the strained relationship between the Minneapolis to police department and the black community?
[00:04:41] Speaker C: So I start the book, the Minneapolis Reckoning, with a chapter on the history of the city. And I went back and forth about where to start that chapter in time. And I wind up going all the way back to colonization and how we come to have this territory, first around Fort Snelling and then in Minneapolis. And I go all the way back to the beginning of the city to say, when we look at police violence, that is the end result of a long causal process, but also a long historical process of racism and injustice. And so we can't understand what happened that day in Minneapolis to George Floyd, without understanding the decades that preceded it and the decades that preceded it produced a really unequal Minneapolis, right, a Minneapolis that is rated as one of the top places to live, and the benefits of that largely accrue to its white residents. And so I wanted to understand not just policing, but the context in which this brutal and racialized policing exists in our society. And you couldn't understand that without going back decades. And one of the through lines that we see in this history. So Minneapolis got its first share of black migrants relatively late in the great migration, which brought black families up from the south. Because we're so far north, we were relatively a late stop on that process of migration. But from the beginning, you start to see these community outrage at unjust police treatment, at police brutality. We can go back to the 1940s. We can go back to 1950s. We can go back to the 1960s. And so it was important to say that nothing of what we saw in 2020 or in the earlier BLM years in the city, none of that was new, right? All of that had resonance. Both the police violence had resonance with the past, but also community outrage and calls to do something to transform this institution had these very clear echoes with the past.
[00:06:40] Speaker B: Can you discuss the significance of the public's role in documenting and disseminating footage of George Floyd's death? How did this impact the narrative and actions taken afterward?
[00:06:51] Speaker C: So there's a lot you could say about why the Black lives Matter movement, or BLM, as it's often referred to, why it exploded in the moment that it does. You know, certainly we can draw continuities with the past, probably most proximally the videotaping of the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles. There had been these moments of outrage about police violence that had been caught on tape, but certainly the development of smartphones and everybody having this camera recording device in their pockets, and not just these recording devices, but access to social media, where anybody could disseminate that footage as well.
Really, I think, brought into the public conversation something that black America had long known, but that white America only had to grapple with during these periodic kind of flare ups of public concern about police violence. And so, you know, I think in Minneapolis and the case of the murder of George Floyd, what was so, I think, profound there is that if you look at the immediate press release that the MPD put out, it bears almost no resemblance to what we saw on video. Right? This juncture that led this teenage girl, Darnella Frazier, to release that footage, right? And it goes viral precisely because it so contradicted the official account. So if all we had had was the official MPD account, if we hadn't had that community witnessing, and the way that community witnessing was not just a localized phenomenon, but was caught on camera and then went across the world, we would not have seen the scale of protests that we saw.
Maybe some of that footage would have eventually come out with body camera footage if the right folks had been pushing the case to get that released. But it certainly would not have become this overnight horror had it not been for that crowd of witnesses and their ability to immediately document and immediately counter the MPDs version of events and to immediately spread the word, not just in Minneapolis, not just in Minnesota, not just in the United States, but across the globe.
[00:09:01] Speaker B: What were the main strategies and tactics used by Minneapolis activists to bring attention to Black Lives Matter and police reform? How did local national political climates affect the activism and outcomes in Minneapolis?
[00:09:13] Speaker C: Right. So the second chapter of the book traces those early BLM protests in Minneapolis and how they evolve into what I call the movement field by the time we get to 2020 and the murder of George Floyd and what we know from Minneapolis and a lot of other cities is that I. The BLM movement took place both online and offline, right? So, online, people were documenting and sharing examples of police injustice, often caught on camera, but there were also offline, real world protests, right? And so we saw, in Minneapolis, the first BLM protest erupted in 2014 as solidarity protests with Ferguson. And then we saw in 2015, after the police killing of Jamar Clark in north Minneapolis protests, BLM protests again erupt in the city. And so it was this melding of both online, these newer forms of digital activism, with these more traditional direct actions, including an 18 day occupation outside of the fourth precinct building, which would become kind of the prototype for what becomes the siege of the third precinct in 2020. And why I think Minneapolis was unique. You know, it's an interesting city, because a lot of the cities that we initially associated with BLM activism were majority black cities and places.
And think of Ferguson, we can think of Baltimore, places with really sizable black communities. And in Minneapolis, black Americans represent less than 20% of the population and is still a majority white city. And so in some ways, it was an odd place for this new wave of black freedom dreams to take root. But in other ways, you know, the progressivism, the sort of liberal reputation of the city, meant that we've always had a deep bench of activist groups pushing for justice, including around issues of policing and police brutality. And so those folks had kind of seeded the ground so that when we saw this national movement, Minneapolis was one of the places it would take root.
[00:11:25] Speaker B: What role did community organizing and grassroots movements play and shape in the public discourse on policing in Minneapolis?
[00:11:34] Speaker C: So, I think, you know, activists are largely to credit for drawing the public spotlight on Minneapolis right? In the wake of Jamar Clark's killing, in the wake of Philando Castile's killing, it's important to note that it wasn't the MPD that killed Philando Castile. It was in a nearby suburb, but people associated it with the kind of Twin Cities region. And so it was really those activists that were putting a spotlight that would grow much, much, much stronger, of course, in summer 2020 on what was happening with policing here and the racism of the north. Right, the way in which the Minnesota thinks of itself as this, you know, always free state and this, like, sort of bastion of racial equality. And yet is this place where we see these profound racial disparities. That is what activists were pointing out. And what I trace in that chapter about how the movement field evolved is that by the time you get to 2018, even 2017, you're seeing a shift away from efforts towards police reform and the beginnings of this movement towards a police free future, which will cede the ground for calls to defund the police and calls to abolish the police and the national movement that we saw with the defund hashtag and slogan and real campaign demands and promises.
All of that, I think, takes root across the country, in part because activists in Minneapolis were ready to cede that demand, and they were ready to take center stage as all of the media outlets decamped on the city after the murder of George Floyd and the protests that we saw here. And so it was really, there was a moment there where Minneapolis was really leading the country in terms of reimagining what we might do to solve the problem of racialized police violence.
[00:13:22] Speaker B: There's a part of your book where you talk about there are residents that feel left out of the discussions and reforms regarding policing. I was wondering, talk about who those people are and why they feel this way. What are the. Yeah.
[00:13:35] Speaker C: So when I started this project, which began long before George Floyd was murdered, I actually had intended to stop this project in 2019. I have versions of the papers of this project where I try to explain why people should care about Minneapolis, which are haunting to read after the murder of George Floyd. But in those early days of the project, back in 2017, I was mostly interviewing the activists and organizers and people involved at the MPD and its leadership. And I had a student who was on a summer research fellowship with me, and I said, well, what do you want to do? And he said, well, I really want to know how residents of the most impacted communities, the places that are most exposed to both crime in the community, but also police violence, how are they making sense of this public conversation? Right. Everybody's now claiming to listen to black voices. Everybody's claiming that going to center the margins. But what we're centering is activists. And what are those everyday residents? What do they make of all of this political discourse about the realities of their communities and what they're facing? And so we did. And in the end, this was a real team based project. I had several graduate students that joined the project as well. And we wound up interviewing over 100 residents in north Minneapolis from 2017 to 2019. And what those residents told us, by and large, was that they felt trapped between community violence and police violence. And the many of them, not all, but many of them, most of them, the majority, were supportive of what BLM activists were doing. But there was also this persistent critique of, we have to address community violence at the same time. And that was really a lesson to me about how we think about what movements can do and the way that movements spotlight particular segments of problems under a particular framing, and how people living in places that have, you know, high unemployment rates, that have environmental degradation, that have schools, where most of the kids aren't graduating, where there's no job market for those kids to speak of, where people are getting shot on the street frequently, all of those crises and all those problems are intertwined, and policing and police violence is just one piece of that, right. And they're experiencing all of this state violence all at once and all tangled up together.
That impulse, that impulse to say, we have to fix racism. Like, it isn't just about the police. It isn't just about police violence. It is about how do we solve racism in America? That becomes the through line for the book. And ultimately, as I argue in the back half of the book, which traces what happens after the murder, I think that's one of the lessons of why the charter amendment to end the MPD and replace it with a new department of public safety fails is it was not because people were supportive of the MPD, by and large, was because people were worried about what would happen if we took it down in this particular way in the face of officer resistance and chief resistance and resistance from the mayor.
And it was that wanting of a sort of holistic solution that people were really calling out for. And so, you know, I think. And that critique of the activists, that critique came at us as university researchers. People were like, why are you studying this? Like, who asked you to study this? What are you gonna do about it? Why are you talking to us instead of actually making change? And it extended to the city leaders, too, who they saw as largely ineffectual in solving this big tangle of problems. And so the book tries to kind of grapple with, what would it mean to really have these kinds of holistic solutions that those communities that feel left out are really ultimately calling for?
[00:17:20] Speaker B: How has George Floyds death continued to affect the Minneapolis community and the movement for racial justice?
[00:17:27] Speaker C: You know, this is such a complicated one. I think, on the one hand, you know, we can trace so much mobilization and so much energy in that moment of summer 2020 that felt so radical and so full of potential.
We can also very easily trace the backlash that has followed. Right. We can think about the backlash against critical race theory that took up the Republican Party for a while. We can think about the upcoming elections and the very real possibilities that Donald Trump becomes our next president. Again, we can read a lot of that through the lens of this backlash to summer 2020. So, you know, on the one hand, we saw all of these statements come out in summer 2020. Suddenly Republicans were on board with BLM. Suddenly corporations were demanding that black lives matter. Suddenly, every, you know, every business, every organization, every community was going to have ways of thinking about more holistic models of safety and inclusion, diversity. And many of those efforts have failed to come to fruition. So, you know, if we think just most narrowly about legislative reforms to policing, the reforms at the city level, which we can get more into later, but those have largely not panned out yet. They're still ongoing at the state level. They largely fizzled out with any meaningful, without any meaningful legislative reform at the federal level, we couldn't even get the reformist justice for George Floyd passed. And so on the one hand, I think we, especially in Minneapolis, are still living in this moment of post trauma in a lot of ways. But I also think the national conversation has, in some ways moved on and moved on, even past the immediate backlash, let alone the sort of initial movement. So I think it's a really, it's a complicated moment. There are people still certainly fighting for justice and fighting for change. There are certainly people still pushing back. And there are a whole new set of questions that have preoccupied public attention.
[00:19:40] Speaker B: What mechanisms of accountability have been put in place or proposed to address police misconduct in Minneapolis and how effective? Well, you, I guess, just said that there has been very little efficacy right now. But. So, yeah, what mechanism of accountability have been put in place to address police misconduct?
[00:19:58] Speaker C: Right. So, you know, there are several waves of reform efforts. We see, you know, immediately after the killing of George Floyd, we saw the Minnesota Department of Human Rights jump in and open an investigation that immediately led to a negotiated agreement with a series of reforms, including banning chokeholds and a duty for officers to intervene. We saw another wave of reforms that was touted by the mayor in the run up to the November 2021 elections. We saw another wave of reforms that came out after the police killing of Amir Locke in downtown Minneapolis under a no knock raid.
We have seen more come out once the MDHR negotiated their agreement with the Minneapolis Police Department, the MPD is now under a consent decree with the courts, and they are negotiating another one with the Department of Justice, which opened its own investigation and released its own report. But evidence that any of these things have made a big dent is really hard to find. So, for instance, a lot of the things that were promised in that initial MDHR agreement when the investigation started, evidence that was found by investigators at both the state and the federal level in their report suggested that officers weren't abiding by those initial conditions even when investigators were present. Right. And they were evading data collection in other ways. So, for instance, with the scrutiny on racial disparities and stops, officers stopped reporting the race of the person they were stopping. Right. The mayor promised that he had ended no knock raids. And then we saw the killing of Amir Locke. And so there had been sort of a wave of promises. A civilian review is another one where we saw a wave of promises around civilian review that have largely not borne out. If anything, civilian review right now is more of a mess than it was before the murderous. But these processes are really ongoing right now. The city is in the process of still negotiating that second consent decree. There will be a court monitor tasked with evaluating the department's compliance with both of those consent decrees. And I am, I will say very cautiously, a little bit optimistic that that court led reform will lead to small, incremental improvements moving forward. But it's still very much an open question. I think the only thing where we can say we've got definitive numbers on this, where we can show an impact, is actually not a policy at all. But it is that the number of MPD officers is now a third smaller, more than a third smaller than it was when George Floyd was murdered. But that wasn't because the department was defunded. It wasn't because it was dismantled. It is cause they cannot hold on to officers. And that has caused all kinds of problems for the department. But it has also meant that the kind of routine harassment that communities of color experience, the routine stops from police, those have really gone down. So that was not a deliberate reform initiative. But it is one place we can see in the data where this daily friction between police and communities has gone down, but so has responsiveness to crime in the community and communities calls for help.
[00:23:13] Speaker B: What alternative models of public safety have been proposed or implemented in Minneapolis? I was wondering how successful this has been.
[00:23:21] Speaker C: Yeah. So I know we're running tight on time. I could talk for so long on this. This is the last chapter of the book, and I think the most important and exciting thing. But I will say very briefly, I profile three different models in that chapter. One is violence prevention and interruption work, where you send out folks from the community into the community to intervene with, typically the men in their late teens and twenties, who are most likely to be both the perpetrators and the victims of violence. Violence. And you work to intervene in that violence. We've also seen the development of the BCR, the behavioral crisis response team. So right now in Minneapolis, if you call 911 and you're having a behavioral health crisis that does not involve any threat of violence, the city, if the vans are available, will send out trained mental health and behavioral health professionals to come and respond to your calls. And we also have community led safety strategies that are trying to divert people away from the 911 system altogether and to show how neighbors can show up for one another. And so I think all three of these models, in really different ways show that we don't have to have this death grip of the police on our ideas about public safety. We can respond to crises. We can prevent crises in lots of different ways. And I think the more people with the more different professional identities and expertise coming to the table when we have these moments of, you know, there's a rise in any kind of victimization or public safety concern, I think we need to have more people than just the police at the table. And I think these new models give us at least the beginning of pathways to think about what that more holistic model might look like.
[00:25:02] Speaker B: Then my last question, because I'm way too curious not to ask you this, how do you envision the path forward for communities like Minneapolis and the pursuit of justice and equity?
[00:25:11] Speaker C: You know, my most important takeaway is that we have to keep paying attention. You know, I go to the memorials in George Floyd Square every year, and every year you can feel people trauma, and not just the trauma from the murder, but the trauma of nothing meaningful happening in the wake of the murder. Despite all the community outrage that can really demobilize people and lead people to think this is just too hopeless. Why even bother, right? And what I'm trying to say with the book is that, you know, these are entrenched structural problems. I don't want to gaslight anybody that these are simple problems to fix. But all of us can do a part. And one of the things that we can do by playing a part, in addition to thinking, thinking about racial justice and building community in our everyday lives, in our work lives, in our professional lives, but also our home lives and where we live and our children. But the other thing we can do is just keep our eye on this, right? The system thrives when people tune out and stop paying attention. And it's just so vital that that energy that we had in summer 2020, that that kind of pressure stay on steady leaderships and that people participate in the process to really make democratic policing that does right by our country.
[00:26:29] Speaker B: This has been our time. Talk with Michelle S. Phelps about her recently published work from Princeton University Press, the Minneapolis Reckoning, Race, violence and the Politics of Policing America, available now where books are sold. Michelle, thanks for being with us.
[00:26:42] Speaker C: Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.
[00:26:45] Speaker B: And now this.
[00:27:00] Speaker A: You have been listening to write on radio on KFAI, 90.3 FM in Minneapolis, and streaming live
[email protected]. dot I'm Eric, and we would like to thank Michelle S. Phelps and all of our listeners. Without your support, KFAI would not be possible.
