Purposeful Understatement

If you're not from around here, you may not even hear that the Minnesota Department of Human Rights finally issued a scathing report about the Minneapolis Police Department. Even if you are around here, if you only looked at the headlines of our two major newspapers, you might think it was run-of the-mill cop racism, to be lost among all the usual stuff these days:

The other reports that have previously come out, much too late to have any effect on the 2021 Minneapolis mayoral and ballot initiative elections (of course!) have had generally similar findings, but this report contains the most detail, because it pulls its punches the least.

This story from Deena Winter in the Minnesota Reformer is a better example than the mainstream newspapers' stories. Just reading the table of contents of the report is enough to curl your hair, as my mother used to say.

From the Minnesota Reformer story, a few of the outrages the report documents:

• "MPD officers used covert, or fake, social media accounts to surveil and engage Black individuals, Black organizations, and elected officials without a public safety objective. As of December 2020, MPD did not use its covert social media accounts to track white supremacist or white nationalist groups." So this is COINTELPRO made local, while real white supremacists were running around burning buildings.
  
• "Hennepin County prosecutors said MPD officers are much less professional and respectful than officers from other police departments in Hennepin County. City and county prosecutors noted that it can be difficult to rely on MPD officers’ body-worn camera video in court because of how disrespectful and offensive MPD officers are to criminal suspects, witnesses and bystanders." Examples of the kinds of language recorded are given in the story. I know it's pathetic that I am pointing this out because it should not make a difference, but note that this behavior was also used with witnesses and bystanders, as well as suspects. It was so bad that the prosecutors couldn't use the recordings as evidence because they feared the cops' behavior would exonerate the defendants.
  
• "Based on a review of 300 MPD use-of-force files from 2010 to 2020, supervisors failed to complete a thorough review of an officer’s use of force in 48% of cases. The review demonstrated that in 24% of use-of-force files, evidence contradicts or disputes the information that an officer recorded in their use-of-force report." Remember that Derek Chauvin had multiple use-of-force cases brought against him.
  

According to Mapping Police Violence, from 2013–2021 (cited by Samuel Sinyangwe):

Police kill[ed] Black people at higher rates than white people per population in 48 of the 50 largest US cities. Minneapolis police kill[ed] Black people at 22x higher rate than whites — one of the worst disparities in the nation [the third worst, in the chart shown].

So yeah, Pioneer Press and Star Tribune, there's some racial bias (remember, always substitute the word "racist" for "racial" and things make a lot more sense) and there's a pattern of racism at MPD. This kind of purposeful understatement is a disservice to everyone, and it's not journalism.