The video of a Minneapolis police officer murdering George Floyd shocked and horrified Americans from coast to coast — and brought police violence into the spotlight like never before.
Sadly, Black Americans who live in Minneapolis weren’t surprised in the least. A year after Mr. Floyd’s death, the Minnesota Department of Human Rights released a report: “After completing a comprehensive investigation, we find there is probable cause that the City of Minneapolis and the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) engage in a pattern or practice of race discrimination in violation of the Minnesota Human Rights Act.”
Specifically, the Minneapolis Police Department “engages in a pattern or practice of discriminatory, race-based policing”:
Racial disparities in how MPD officers use force, stop, search, arrest, and cite people of color, particularly Black individuals, compared to White individuals in similar circumstances.
MPD officers’ use of covert social media to surveil Black individuals and Black organizations, unrelated to criminal activity.
MPD officers’ consistent use of racist, misogynistic, and disrespectful language.
In 2019, the population of Minneapolis was 429,606 and 19.4 percent of the population was Black. However, based on their own statistics, from 2015 to June 2020, 58 percent of the times the police in Minneapolis used any type of force, the subject was Black (force was used around 11,500 times...the subject was Black in 6,650 of those). On the other hand, within the same time period, force was used against White people 2,750 times, although they made up around 60 percent of the population. That means that the Minneapolis police used force against Black people seven times more than they did White people.
Very little official data exists on the number of people killed by the police across the nation, mainly because police departments resist releasing the information to the public — which is super shady and must not be tolerated any longer. However, a couple of studies have been able to extrapolate the numbers and model the information. Here is what they found (this language is taken directly from the studies):
Police homicide risk is higher than suggested by official data. Black and Latino men are at higher risk for death than are White men, and these disparities vary markedly across place. Police kill, on average, 2.8 men per day. Police were responsible for about 8 percent of all homicides with adult male victims between 2012 and 2018.
Police violence is a leading cause of death for young men in the United States. Over the life course, about 1 in every 1,000 Black men can expect to be killed by police. Black women and men and American Indian and Alaska Native women and men are significantly more likely than White women and men to be killed by police. Latino men are also more likely to be killed by police than are White men. Read the entire report here.
Violent encounters with the police have profound effects on health, neighborhoods, life chances, and politics. Policing plays a key role in maintaining structural inequalities between people of color and White people in the United States. Social scientists and public health scholars now widely acknowledge that police contact is a key vector of health inequality and is an important cause of early mortality for people of color.
Police in the United States kill far more people than do police in other advanced industrial democracies. While a substantial body of evidence shows that people of color, especially African Americans, are at greater risk for experiencing criminal justice contact and police-involved harm than are Whites, we lack basic estimates of the prevalence of police-involved deaths, largely due to the absence of definitive official data. Journalists have stepped into this void and initiated a series of systematic efforts to track police-involved killings. These data enable a richer understanding of the geographic and demographic patterning of police violence and an evaluation of the magnitude of exposure to police violence over the life course. Read the entire report here.
Read Our Plan of Action Here
Evidence:
United States. Census Bureau. "QuickFacts: Minneapolis, Minnesota." 23 June 2020
Open Minneapolis. "Police Use of Force." 23 June 2020
Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Lazaro Gamio. "Minneapolis Police Use Force Against Black People at 7 Times the Rate of Whites." New York Times. 3 June 2020
Frank Edwards, Michael H. Esposito, and Hedwig Lee. "Risk of Police-Involved Death by Race/Ethnicity and Place, United States, 2012–2018." American
Journal of Public Health. 2018
Frank Edwards, Hedwig Lee, and Michael Esposito. "Risk of Being Killed By Police Use of Force in the United States by Age, Race–Ethnicity, and Sex."
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. August 2019