Three Quarters of a Sheet of Paper

The last full sheet of paper, front and back, of the front section of today's Star Tribune included the op-ed page and the back page of the section.

I tore the full sheet out because among those four half pages, there were three examples of world-upside-downness: one op-ed, one news story, and one ad. (The fourth half page contained an innocuous op-ed and unrelated political cartoon.)

The news story is about Trump's Waco rally, where he lionizes the January 6 insurrectionists and reviles anyone who would prosecute him for his obvious crimes against democracy. In Waco, on the 30th anniversary of the ATF raid on the Branch Davidian religious cult, which the extreme Right and militia groups see as evidence of government threat. A rally that, if you had told me its details in 2014, I would not have believed was real.

The ad is for Enbridge Energy. It's mostly a photo of solar panels, with a big fake orange sun peeking above them. The copy proclaims that Enbridge is "bridging to a cleaner future" and has been for two decades! They're early adopters of wind and solar! They're investing in renewables! This is the same company that just rebuilt the Line 3 pipeline across Minnesota and Wisconsin, to carry the worst oil — tar sands oil — out of Canada to refineries so it can be shipped all over the world. They paid county sheriffs to harass and arrest people, especially indigenous people on their own property, who were protesting (and even when they weren't protesting). During the pipeline's construction, their contractors broke fragile aquifers in several places in northern Minnesota, then hid it from the DNR.

The op-ed is called What really happened in the riots of 2020, and it's by a now-retired Minneapolis police commander who was in charge of the city's "special operations and intelligence" division. He's big mad about the recent consultants' report that assessed the short-comings of the city's response to the uprising after George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin on Memorial Day, May 25, 2020.

I don't have enough information to argue with his analysis about events after things really went off the rails that week, but his statements about the first day or so are wrong.

First, he uses typical cop passive language: "After the death of George Floyd in May 2020, protests, and subsequently, violence began within hours." George Floyd happened to die, I guess. There was no reason that anyone was upset. He wasn't murdered slowly in front of a bunch of witnesses.

Second, protests started the next day, Tuesday, May 26, but violence in the sense that word implies did not. Which seems like an important distinction in the context of this op-ed. There was some graffiti at the Third Precinct, with one window broken, and some thrown bottles; there were also other protesters trying to stop the damage. Is that "violence" as you would think of it? Or is that exaggeration?

Third, when actual violence started on the third night, Wednesday, May 27 (more than 48 hours later), it was first police violence, when cops fired "less lethal" rounds from the roof of the Third Precinct at a large crowd of protesters who were doing essentially nothing. Did someone throw a water bottle at the fencing surrounding the building at that point? I don't know, but does that require shooting into a crowd?

What's  more, before it had reached that point, no one who could have calmed the situation had come out to talk to the crowd — such as the mayor or the chief of police. I remember exclaiming about this out loud. The situation did not need to become what it did.

This had already been seen a few years earlier with the Jamar Clark situation in North Minneapolis. I think someone at the city had decided they didn't want to have an encampment protest (which is what happened after the Jamar Clark police killing), so they were told to break up the George Floyd protests fast.

We see what the result was.

I personally know people who were walking away from the area that night of May 27, doing nothing, and were shot with "less lethal" rounds. There have now been multiple damage awards to people who lost eyes or incurred other physical damage.

And that's without getting into whatever the instigators like Umbrella Man did that night to provoke what ended up happening. From the point of view of people outraged at Floyd's death, it seems like police were trying to make people angrier by firing on the crowd, rather than quell the anger. Add to that the outright provocateurs, and you end up with what happened.

So the op-ed writer's defensive crouch about how "no police department could have dealt with the scope of the riots, once they were in full swing," may be correct. But how they got that way is a different story. 

The social fabric is frayed, and police did a lot of the most noticeable fraying, before, during, and after George Floyd was murdered.