Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence, and the Politics of Policing in Americaby Michelle S. Phelps, Princeton University Press, 304 pages, $29.95
Being in the right place at the right time is a combination of opportunity and preparation.
Michelle Phelps, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota, began studying fatal police encounters and the politics of policing in Minneapolis in 2015. The following research results.When Minneapolis police killed George Floyd.
Phelps has now published Minneapolis’ reckoninglooking back at her years of research through the lens of Floyd’s death and subsequent unsuccessful researchsh Defund the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD). it thinks minneapolisA progressive, predominantly white city with a history of police brutality and racial segregation, Ollis is an “undercover bellwether city for understanding race and policing in America” and “the possibilities and limits of liberal police reform.” test case”. “
I admit, I sighed a little when I read these words. I reviewed last year Riders come out at nightThe Oakland Police Department has a similar history of corruption and decades of cleanup efforts. The author describes Oakland as “a borderline case in American policing.” By my count, there have been two books and a famous TV series about it dishonest police task force Baltimore is another city viewed by social critics as understanding issues of policing and race in America.
But Minneapolis certainly deserves special attention, both as the site where Floyd was killed and where a precinct building was set on fire during the ensuing riots. These will become two of the most important images of the year, with the former launching global protests and the latter polarizing and ossifying discussions about those protests.
Minneapolis is also one of the few places where actually did Seriously consider defunding the police. (Despite apocalyptic warnings from police unions and Republican politicians at the time, police budgets in the vast majority of major cities either increased or remained flat after the summer of 2020.) Minneapolis, June 7, 2020 Nine of the city’s 13 city councilors stood on the podium and announced that they would take immediate steps to end the People’s Democratic Party, saying that the party “cannot be reformed and will never be held accountable for their actions.”
But Minneapolis voters rejected a 2021 ballot initiative that would have amended the city’s charter to eliminate mandatory staffing levels for police officers (a measure the Minneapolis police union successfully lobbied to add in 1961 Clause), which most controversially shifted control of the police from the mayor’s office to the city, replaced the MPD with an umbrella public health agency, the Department of Public Safety. that new department Can Includes, but does not require, police.
Opponents see the charter amendment’s failure as evidence of the deep unpopularity of “defund the police” rhetoric and the widespread failure of anti-police efforts.
Phelps’s book provides important context for all of these events. As she shows, radical activism and calls to defund the police in Minneapolis did not appear out of thin air or be concocted by deep-pocketed mystical Marxists. They are the culmination of decades of political tug-of-war between local activists, city officials and the powerful Minneapolis police union.
Efforts to transform policing in Minneapolis are not monolithic, either. They are divided into three large groups.
Phelps defines the first group as “21st Century Police Reform,” the Obama-era technocratic movement led by liberal city officials, police chiefs and policy think tanks. In 2015, Minneapolis served as a virtual pilot for the National Initiative to Build Community Trust and Justice. The pilot program includes sending officers to undergo implicit bias training, changing the department’s use-of-force policy and requiring officers to intervene when they witness a colleague using excessive force. None of this stopped Officer Derek Chauvin from pinning George Floyd down with his knee for nine minutes.
The second group is what Phelps calls “radical reformers,” community groups and Black Lives Matter activists who are pressuring city officials to overhaul MPD. Their demands include prosecuting and decertifying officers involved in unjust killings, creating stronger civilian oversight, banning “warrior” training for police officers and renegotiating the collective bargaining agreement between the city and police unions.
The third category is abolitionists, many of whom became exhausted and further radicalized after seeing the lackluster reforms achieved by the Black Lives Matter protests of the past decade. abolitionism reject Gradually carry out institutional reforms and insist on large-scale dismantling of the “prison-industrial complex.”
But there’s a fourth group, perhaps the most important one Phelps documents: residents of Minneapolis’s North Side neighborhood — a high-crime, majority-black area that has dominated the city’s politics. All the different characters on stage claim to be fighting for the area.
Phelps’ interviews with North Side residents illustrate why the charter amendment gained momentum and why it failed. A black veteran describes being called a “nigger,” and a woman tells how she tried to report to police that she was drugged and raped, only to be treated “like a disease. Like a suspect.” “treat.
But northerners also suffer from high crime rates. As Phelps describes, they are simultaneously trapped in over-regulation and under-protection. They often have negative experiences with the police department, but they are forced to rely on it to deal with high rates of crime, which they also believe the city is willfully ignoring. This has created a sense of legal alienation among residents — the “police-community relations” gap that panels harp on endlessly — and a deep ambivalence about policing and the possibility of police reform.
“I have no confidence [police] Not at all,” one woman told Phelps. “But at the same time, if you need them, you have to call them. You know what I mean? And then when they come and you need them, they’re gonna shit on you. So it’s like, If you do, you’re damned if you don’t.
The police represent “both sides” promise national protection and threaten This, Phelps writes, is where abolitionist dreams collided with cold political reality. Distressed communities are less protected and they are demanding.
The tragedy of this story is that after the fires in Minneapolis stopped smoldering and hundreds of police department officers resigned — and the city actually experienced temperatures below what its charter allowed — crime rates on the North Side skyrocketed. rise. There is plenty of finger-pointing and finger-pointing among the various factions, but not much self-reflection.
Minneapolis’ reckoning Of limited interest to general readers outside of Minnesota. But it’s a valuable study that explores how the fight for police reform is won and lost, and what reform means for the people who need it most.
