More on Saint Paul's Skyway Injustice

More details from today's Pioneer Press on the Chris Lollie sitting-while-black-in-a-skyway-lounge case.

Photographer Ben Garvin, who took this picture, reported on Twitter that for the first time in his career taking hundreds of photos in Saint Paul's skyways, he was told not to and that it was a "private area."


Sure looks like a private area, doesn't it?

Some people who hear about the Lollie case say, "Well, yeah, but what happened before he turned on the video recording?" Today's story describes it this way:

When a guard told Lollie he was calling police, Lollie said he replied, "Go ahead," because he expected officers would tell the guard he was in a public area.

He said he waited about five minutes for police to arrive, then started walking away to see if his children had arrived.

The first [woman] officer then approached, Lollie said, and asked him to identify himself. Lollie refused, telling the officer that he knew his rights and that he had done nothing wrong. 

So Lollie was no longer doing the supposedly illegal action when police arrived. There had been no harm from it.

When officer Lori Hayne encountered Lollie, he was walking and she couldn't see the area where the security guard reported he had been, [city attorney] Grewing said. Two other officers, Michael Johnson and Bruce Schmidt, arrived. 

So the city confirms that Lollie had gotten so far from the seating area by the time police started talking to him that the seating area wasn't even visible.

In my opinion, what the first-arriving officer should have done was ascertained that there was anything illegal in the first place. Plus -- if Lollie had walked away from the area far enough that it was no longer visible, and Hayne never talked to the guard -- how did she even know Lollie was the guy she was looking for? He could have been any black guy with dreadlocks in the area.

The PiPress says that officer Bruce Schmidt is the one who tased Lollie. It's not clear if he's the first male cop who appears from the right of the frame and immediately escalates the situation, or if he's the second male cop who's seen briefly but never speaks (as far as I can tell).

The story continues:

Before the case was dismissed, Rezac [Lollie's defense attorney] went to examine the area where Lollie had been sitting. He saw no signs calling it private and neither did a Pioneer Press reporter who looked Wednesday. A sign at the building's lower-level entrance says, "No loitering." [Note: that entrance is on a different floor, not visible from the skyway.]

Rezac told security guards he was going to take pictures in the area. They told him it was a private area and that he could not. A building manager said he would need a court order to do so, he said.

A Pioneer Press photographer taking pictures in the area Wednesday said a security guard stopped him, told him the bank was a private building and said he couldn't photograph in the skyway. 

The police union insists that the officers behaved in a respectful manner and that Lollie is at fault for not falling down on the floor and kissing their feet, essentially. (Okay, they didn't say that last part, but they did say the cops acted "responsibly, respectfully and in accordance with the highest professional standards we expect from our members." And they continued, saying Lollie refused "numerous lawful orders for an extended period of time. The only person who brought race into this situation was Mr. Lollie.")

What part of the male cop's behavior can be called "respectful"? He swoops in, interrupting what was a fairly reasonable conversation between Hayne and Lollie, immediately tries to take Lollie's arm for no reason, and when Lollie pulls his arm back, responds by saying, "Well, you're going to go to jail, then."

Cops need to be shown this video so they know what NOT to do when interacting with citizens.

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Pioneer Press columnist Ruben Rosario wrote in the same day's paper about the Lollie case. He discusses implicit bias:

"Nationwide, statistically significant samples show that 70 (percent) to 87 percent of Caucasians in the United States demonstrate bias against African-Americans on the Race IAT," [researcher] Papillon writes.

More known "shoot/don't shoot" studies show that the overwhelming majority of players -- less so trained law enforcement personnel -- made more mistakes and fired at unarmed African-Americans than Caucasians.

"Though the subjects in this study were required to make a choice ostensibly to protect themselves, they displayed a more aggressive reaction and willingness to injure when faced with the African-American," Papillon notes. "Most importantly, these responses were based on implicit biases, unknown to the subjects. In fact, most of the subjects consciously held strong values for fairness and egalitarianism and abhorred the notion of racial bias and discrimination." 

When will police catch up and learn about implicit bias and do the important work of training and policy to counter its effects?

Bad Cops in Saint Paul

In case you haven't heard, a clear case of police brutality and general stupidity took place in Saint Paul back in January. It just became known because the victim, Chris Lollie, only got his phone back from police a month ago, and finally posted the video he took to YouTube a few days ago. Given the story in the Atlantic, linked above, it may be going national.

Lollie was sitting in one of these chairs at 9:45 a.m. on a weekday, waiting to pick his kids up from a child care center down the hall. This is one of our famous skyways -- second floor passageways that connect buildings in the downtown areas of Minneapolis and Saint Paul.


Photo by Twitter user Alex Cecchini

Skyways are quasi-public spaces -- I'm not sure who owns them, but they are patrolled by city police, so that tells us something.

Apparently, a security guard from the adjacent bank told Lollie -- a black guy in his late-20s with short dreadlocks -- that he was in an employee-only space and asked him to leave. Lollie ignored him. Or maybe he said hell no... that part is not on tape, and it doesn't matter, since there are no signs saying it's a restricted area and everything about its design and comfy chairs indicates it is meant for the public.

So the guard calls police and Lollie begins to record the encounter on video. It's a disturbing video, but not in a "someone gets killed" way -- just in a "it's hard to watch someone being treated in such a dehumanizing manner" kind of way.


It took Saint Paul police almost six months to drop the absurd charges they filed against Lollie, and they're still insisting they behaved in an acceptable manner. Quoting the Atlantic article,

"At one point, the officers believed he might either run or fight with them. It was then that officers took steps to take him into custody," a spokesperson said. "He pulled away and resisted officers' lawful orders. They then used the force necessary to safely take him into custody." Said the designated public employee union representative: "These three cops in the skyway, you couldn't get nicer individuals. This guy was acting like a jerk." 

Yeah, I'd want to run away from you, too, and I would have the right to do that since there was no indication a crime had been committed. "He pulled away" and "he resisted...lawful orders" -- that's utter crap.

Apologize now and pay the man some money. You are wrong. I am ashamed that you police my city.

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Update: Back in 2009, the First National Bank building (owner of the seating area in question) posted this Facebook status, which clearly welcomes the public to have a seat in those cushy chairs. The comments in response are all about the Chris Lollie incident. Most are supportive of Lollie, and one person tells a story from his own life where he was assumed to be a criminal as he returned to his own home. There are also a couple of overt racists in the thread, though they are smacked down by other commenters.

Change the Rules of Engagement

In addition to training to decrease implicit bias among police officers, cities across America should change the rules of engagement between police and citizens suspected of minor offenses. Ian Ayres and Daniel Markovitse of Yale Law School give these thoughts:

Consider what arrests are for. An arrest is not punishment: After all, there has been no conviction at that point. The purpose of an arrest is to prevent crime and to aid in prosecution by establishing identity, gathering evidence and preventing flight. The steps taken to secure arrests therefore must, at every point, be proportional to the suspected crimes that underlie the arrests.

The current police rules of engagement violate these basic principles at every turn. Convictions for jaywalking and selling single cigarettes — the predicate offenses in Ferguson and Staten Island, respectively — effectively never carry jail sentences, and nobody thinks that they should. Fines are the proper punishments for these minor crimes.

But under current law, when the police arrest someone based on nothing more than probable cause of a minor crime, they can treat the wrongdoer more severely than the punishment that would ordinarily be imposed by a court of law, even after a full trial. We believe that the New York City Police Department violated current law when Officer Daniel Pantaleo placed Eric Garner in a chokehold. But under current rules of engagement, Garner’s saying “don’t touch me” unquestionably authorized the police to initiate the use of force — nonlethal force, but still force — to subdue him.

That’s wrong. An arrest should not impose a burden greater than a conviction. When it does, the arrest amounts to police oppression.

They continue with this solution:

A police officer confronting someone suspected of only a minor crime should not be permitted to arrest the suspect by force. In most cases, the police should simply issue a ticket...

Such rules would not only protect the public’s rights but also promote law and order. Many critics rightly doubt that maximally aggressive “broken windows” public-order policing works. And other countries marry nonviolent rules of engagement with effective law enforcement; Germany, for example, imposes strict limits on the use of force to arrest petty offenders, and the entire German police, governing a population of 80 million, fired only 85 bullets in 2011. Moreover, nonviolent rules of engagement would also protect the police. Officers must of course retain the right to defend themselves when subject to attack. But by inviting police to initiate force, current practices require officers to control a naturally escalating dynamic that can quickly endanger all concerned.

The best thing about this idea is that we don't have to wait for federal or state legislation -- it could be enacted by individual cities. If Saint Paul had these rules of engagement, Chris Lollie wouldn't have been tasered in that skyway, or if he was, the cop who did it would have been held responsible for it. Eric Garner and Mike Brown and many other people probably wouldn't be dead, either. It would deescalate so many situations.

I'll be calling my city council member to urge him to introduce a bill changing the Saint Paul police department's rules of engagement.

Or Does It Explode?

Today is the day Missouri Governor Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency, even though the Darren Wilson grand jury hasn't finished its work. Saint Louise has stocked up on $200,000 worth of tear gas and plastic handcuffs. They've mobilized a thousand National Guard members.

It's four days after our local ABC affiliate, KSTP channel 5, insisted it was right to air a story saying the mayor of Minneapolis was flashing gang signs because she was pointing at a young black guy.

It's three days after the city of Saint Paul's police civilian review board decided there were no procedural errors, let alone crimes, by the cops who tased Chris Lollie for sitting in a public skyway.

Add just those three things up and it's hard to claim black people are full citizens in this country.

A state of emergency means Nixon can ban public gatherings, that police don't need probable cause, that journalists can be excluded from anywhere the government or police decide they shouldn't be.

Even without a state of emergency, Saint Paul's mayor and police stripped citizens of their rights during the 2008 Republican National Convention, carried out raids on people they thought might dare to block an intersection, limited our marches to places where convention attendees had no chance of seeing them, and kettled law-abiding protesters until they could be arrested. And all of that happened despite the fact that protest organizers met with local police for over six months to make sure things went in a way that preserved First Amendment rights, and where the protesters were mostly white and middle class.

What will a major protest -- made up largely of black people -- look like when police or soldiers empowered by a state of emergency try to control it? It'll either be complete repression, with a Boston-bomber-style house lock-in, or a military action that makes the armored personnel carriers and tear gas of Ferguson in August look like a gentle warning.

How hard would it be for the grand jury (and the prosecutor) to treat this case as if the life of the kid who died mattered? That's all anyone is asking.

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In case the title of this post is not familiar, here is the source.

Beyond Bad News at the Falcon Arms

Last night, a 32-year-old African American man named Philando Castile was shot to death by a Minnesota cop during a routine traffic stop. You may have already heard the details, which I won't recount. Suffice it to say his killing and the details of his life will rightly provoke outrage: he had worked at a school since he was 19, was beloved by the students, and had no criminal record (except lots of Driving While Black citations). Just driving along a street with his girlfriend and her daughter on a typical evening, but now he's dead.

By coincidence, the killing took place across the street from the Falcon Arms apartments, which I have written about before. Today, late in the afternoon, there were a few dozen people at the site of his killing and across the street:


Last night, a few hours after the shooting, it looked like this:


The white car is Castile's. The person standing beside it is from our state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which was immediately brought in to investigate.

All of this is in a tiny suburb called Falcon Heights, along a stretch of four-lane suburban street/road (or stroad) that's owned by Ramsey County and patrolled by both county sheriffs and cops from another nearby suburb called St. Anthony, which is the outsourced police department of Falcon Heights. It skirts the north edge of the Minnesota State Fair and the University of Minnesota's agricultural campus.

The reason for the traffic stop? Castile's tail light was supposedly not working, but when I was there at midnight, all four of the car's lights were lit.

Today there was an all-day gathering and rally outside the governor's mansion in St. Paul. Some photos from that:








Speakers I heard at the rally included Chris Lollie, who was tased for no reason in St. Paul's skyways two years ago, and Ericka Cullars-Golden, the mother of Marcus Golden, a young black St. Paul man who was killed by city police in 2015 in the midst of a mental health crisis.

Later I stopped by the crime scene again and found these signs among the flowers, candles, and other offerings:










There was one other sign at the crime scene that was taken down by the time I got there. It read, "Blue Lies Matter."

I hear our governor spoke a few hours ago and acknowledged the obvious, that if Castile had been white, he wouldn't be dead. At least we have a politician in office who can say that.