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U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland today accused the Minneapolis Police Department of a pattern of bias and excessive force, the product of a wide-ranging federal investigation into the department following the 2020 killing of George Floyd.
Floyd, who was Black, was killed May 25 by a white Minneapolis police officer while others stood by, touching off months of protests. Today, Garland said the federal investigation revealed long-standing problems existed in the department before that moment.
«The patterns and practices we observed made what happened to George Floyd possible,» Garland said.
The DOJ investigation has determined that the MPD has a pattern of four distinct types of violations of civil rights:
With regard to racial bias, Garland says the Department found MPD officers «stopped Black and Native American people nearly six times more often than white people in situations that did not result in arrest or citation, given their shares of the population.»
Garland says investigators also found several examples of officers who were not held accountable for racist conduct «until there was a public outcry.»
The DOJ found MPD officers had a pattern of being too quick to fire their weapons, as well as an over-reliance on Tasers, even on people who were not being violent.
They also focused on examples of officers pepper-spraying or otherwise «punishing» protestors and journalists, especially during the unrest of 2020 and 2021.
These findings now give the Justice Department leverage to enter into a «consent decree» with Minneapolis — essentially, a reform plan that’s controlled by a federal court. Similar arrangements have been in place for years in cities such as Baltimore and Seattle.
