US protests: The police force that brought America to its knees

The police officers charged over the George Floyd death: J. Alexander Kueng, Derek Chauvin, Tou Thao and Thomas Lane. Picture: Hennepin County Jail

Forty million Americans unemployed amid health and economic crises, 40 per cent of renters across the US have missed rental payments with the moratoria over evictions ending in many states later this month. Locked down, frustrated, anxious about their futures, and with the fault lines in American society, some ancient, some new, rudely exposed, all that was needed was a flashpoint.

Where that flashpoint came from was predictable, almost foreseeable; at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department, a force of 800 officers and 300 civilians with a terrible history and a grim reluctance to reform.

Australians became acquainted with its inexplicable failures after the murder of Sydney born Justine Damond in Fulton, in suburban Minneapolis on July 15, 2017.

Damond had made two 911 calls, believing a sexual assault may have occurred in a laneway near her home. She had heard a woman screaming. Two officers in a patrol car attended. It was regarded as a low-level complaint. The officers in their patrol car checked the area and radioed a Code Four – stand down, no action required.

Mohamed Noor gunned down Justine Damond in 2017.

When Damond approached the patrol car barefoot and in her pyjamas, she was shot once in the chest by the officer in the passenger seat of the patrol car, Mohammed Noor. She died twenty minutes later.

Noor was convicted of third-degree murder and manslaughter and sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison in June last year.

That is the potted history but there is far more to it. Noor was an inexperienced officer with just 21 months in uniform. At his trial much was made of his fast-tracked training, a system developed by the Minneapolis PD to bring college educated minorities into its ranks. Much was made of Noor’s place of birth, Somalia. He was held up as a token of the multicultural face of the department.

But Noor had already racked up a number of complaints, including one that was unresolved at the time of Damond’s murder, where it was alleged he had assaulted a woman. There was another incident where he held a gun to the head of a truck driver over a traffic violation.

The Minneapolis Police Department’s complaints procedures are opaque, but it appears nothing happened and Noor was allowed to go on his way to that terrible point in time where he shot an innocent woman dead in the street.

Looking at his brief history as a police officer, it is impossible to understand why Noor should have been out on patrol at all let alone with another even less experienced officer.

Noor’s partner, Matthew Harrity, gave evidence that he and Noor “just got spooked.” They thought they were under ambush. Harrity and Noor spoke of a loud bang on their police vehicle. There was talk of fireworks exploding or of Justine Damond banging her hand down hard on the roof of the patrol car. Fingerprint analysis showed Justine had made no contact with the vehicle. She had merely peered inside the passenger side window and was shot dead for it.

It would take more than a year for Noor to be charged. Under legal advice and with the support of the local police union, he refused to submit for interview and when finally he was obliged to face questioning, he no commented from start to finish.

Just months before Justine Damond was shot dead by Noor, Officer Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted of second-degree murder after shooting dead Philando Castile, a 32-year-old African American man pulled over in a routine traffic stop. The incident where Castile was shot seven times was live streamed by his girlfriend on Facebook and viewed by millions around the world.

I defy anyone to watch that video and conclude Yanez’s actions were in any way appropriate.

Castile had been pulled over 49 times for minor traffic violations in the space of 13 years, most of which were dismissed or not acted on.

A man protests the death of Philando Castile in 2016. Picture: AFP

The four officers involved in the death of George Floyd have all now been charged.

There is an awful history here, too. Multiple complaints about the officers’ conduct that seemed to go nowhere.

The officer who pressed his knee on the neck of Floyd for almost nine minutes, Derek Chauvin, has had his charge of third-degree murder and manslaughter upgraded to second-degree (intentional) murder.

Chauvin, a 19-year veteran of the department, had racked up a dozen complaints. He had been involved in at least three cases where police shot civilians over a six-year period. In 2008, Chauvin shot a 21-year-old suspect during an arrest of a man who was believed to have assaulted a woman. News reports indicate the man had reached for Chauvin’s gun.

Tou Thao has now been charged with being an accessory to the murder of George Floyd along with officers Thomas Lane and J.A. Kueng. Thao was the subject of six complaints, five of which resulted in no action with the other still under investigation. In 2017, the City of Minneapolis settled a civil suit where a young black man, Lamar Ferguson had claimed Thao had knocked his teeth out during an arrest.

A line of demonstrators in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Picture: AFP

Philando Castile had been pulled over by Yanez because he fitted the description of an offender sought by the Minneapolis PD. The description offered no more than skin colour and a vague age group. It was policing by racial profiling, a scattergun approach to law enforcement at best and when combined with a policing culture of violent arrests, the use of choke holds barred almost everywhere else in the United States and a willingness to draw weapons and fire without justification, it quickly becomes deadly.

Four years before the murder of Justine Damond, the newly appointed Police Chief, Janee Harteau took the unusual step of calling in the federal Justice Department to conduct a review of Minneapolis Police. It came in the wake of numerous deaths, often young black men in cases of mistaken identity, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In 2015 the Justice Department released its findings, that concluded no adequate system for the handling of police complaints was in place and made recommendations to revise the point where lethal force could be used.

Little was done to implement the recommendations. Actions taken were piecemeal and the new complaints procedures were largely ignored by the department.

The Justice Department also highlighted that certain choke holds, including those where a suspect is reduced to the point of unconsciousness, should not be used by officers making arrests but this too was ignored by the Minneapolis PD.

Two days after the death of George Floyd and with a curfew imposed, Minneapolis Police were seen out in force and number with an Armoured Personnel Vehicle as a defiant accessory, firing rubber bullets at citizens who were watching from within their own properties on their front porches.

This is a police force that had long ignored the fundamental principle of policing, public confidence and was effectively saying, we’ll act as we please, we will brook no oversight and if the people don’t like it, we will respond with force.

It needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. This time it must happen. But it is all too little too late. Another scandalous shooting, another outrage was always going to happen at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department. On this occasion it happened at the worst possible time and it has brought the United States of America to its knees.