Weekly thread for news/updates/discussion of George Floyd protests, racial injustice, and policing policy - week of August 10

Can Minneapolis Dismantle Its Police Department?

But when the members of the city council in Minneapolis described their decisions to support the defund movement, I found that they talked much less about a sense that reform had run its course than about a recent collapse of their trust in the Minneapolis police. In many cases, this turn happened during the week after Floyd’s death, when riots spread through the city, forcing the governor to call in the National Guard. At about 1:30 a.m. on Friday, May 29th, Steve Fletcher, a council member who represents the Third Ward, downtown, left his home on his bike to see what was happening at a small protest. “It was mostly kids—kids of color from our city—and it was small, compared to what was happening in other places,” Fletcher said. Then he rode by the First Precinct building, a few blocks away. “They had like two shifts of officers just guarding the precinct building,” Fletcher said.

Not long after, Fletcher started getting calls to his cell phone from businesses in his district. “They’d all been robbed,” Fletcher said. One business owner who called said that he had been robbed at midnight, and then robbed again around 1:30 a.m. “because they saw that no one was coming,” and then robbed again an hour later, while the owner was on the phone with Fletcher. “I was realizing, Oh, my God, people are calling me because they can’t get through to 911, and nobody is responding even if they do get through to the police. No one is coming,” Fletcher said. “At a certain point, you say, they were only defending the precinct, and they left the rest of the community to fend for ourselves.”

On the east side of the city, near the University of Minnesota, a council member named Cam Gordon had marched with one of the protests and then watched the late-night violence from afar. “Many of the biggest buildings that burned were in the district that I represent,” in the Second Ward, Gordon said. The reports that came to him about the police behavior there were “all about escalation, there was no effort to de-escalate. And it was all about defending their fortress, their building. And they’d even push people away to other building areas, and let them get away with anything.”

In poorer neighborhoods, the lack of support from the police was starker still. The Fourth Ward, which Cunningham represents, is mostly residential but has a few streets with small shops, many of them owned by immigrants. When it became clear that the police were not responding at all, he and some of his neighbors began assembling citizen patrols. “Small groups of people all carrying fire extinguishers, and whistles, and that was how we were going to make sure that our community was protected,” Cunningham told me. Nearby, in Jeremiah Ellison’s mostly black Fifth Ward, the local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. organized armed citizen patrols from a restaurant called Sammy’s Avenue Eatery. A Washington Post reporter was with Ellison when he joined a group of civilians trying to put out a fire in a barbershop. They were unsuccessful, and the building was destroyed.

Oregon police to leave downtown Portland after DA declines to prosecute most protest-related crimes

Oregon State Police announced they will pull out of downtown Portland where nightly protests have continued for weeks, sometimes devolving into late-night clashes with law enforcement. The decision came after the county district attorney said Tuesday that he will not prosecute most cases against protesters who are arrested on suspicion of disorderly conduct, interfering with a peace officer or other low-level offenses.

Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt’s office said it has received about 550 cases related to protests that have occurred since May 29. About 410 cases are misdemeanors or violations, and many of those will probably be rejected under the new policy.

Full body cam leading to Floyd's death has been released by Police Activity (30mins): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkEGGLu_fNU

Video description as follows:

The Hennepin County judge Peter Cahill overseeing the George Floyd case has made the body worn cameras from ex-officers Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng available. The video, taken from the body worn cameras shows Kueng and Lane responding to a convenience store on May 25 on a report that Floyd had allegedly used a fake $20 bill. Their former colleagues, Tou Thao and Derek Chauvin, later showed up to assist. The footage follows Lane and Kueng as they apprehend Floyd and two acquaintances. Lane holds Floyd at gunpoint and handcuffs him, and the officers briefly question the visibly panicked man before attempting to get him into their patrol SUV.

After struggling to get him into the police squad, Floyd is eventually held down by officers on the ground. Floyd is heard calling to his mother, repeatedly saying he can’t breathe and that everything hurts. After a few minutes, Senior officers Derek Chauvin and Tou Thao arrive and help wrestle him to the ground. Chauvin then places his knee on Floyd’s neck, where it stays for over nine minutes. Lane and Kueng hold down Floyd’s back and knees as Thao keeps increasingly agitated bystanders at bay. Chauvin gets up after paramedics arrive and load Floyd into an ambulance. Lane accompanies them and administers CPR as they take Floyd to an out-of-the-way street corner, while Kueng goes back into Cup Foods interviewing an employee about the alleged counterfeit $20 bill and collecting evidence.

The autopsy report (released on June 4th) indicates that Floyd was possibly under inflence at the time as well (though the pdf is no longer avaliable on the county's website):

The medical examiner's report also details blunt-force injuries to the skin of Floyd's head, face and upper lip, as well as the shoulders, hands and elbows and bruising of the wrists consistent with handcuffs.

Signed by Dr. Andrew M. Baker, it says Floyd had tested positive for the novel coronavirus on April 3. A post-mortem nasal swab confirmed that diagnosis. The report notes that because a positive result for coronavirus can persist for weeks after the disease has resolved, "the result most likely reflects asymptomatic but persistent ... positivity from previous infection."

In addition to fentanyl and methamphetamine, the toxicology report from the autopsy showed that Floyd also had cannabinoids in his system when he died.

Floyd also had heart disease, hypertension and sickle cell trait — a mostly asymptomatic form of the more serious sickle cell disease, an inherited blood disorder that primarily affects African Americans.