The US system to police bad apples is rotten to the core
On Sept 9 2010 David Smith, 28, an unarmed black man, died face down on a YMCA basketball court in Minneapolis as a white officer knelt on him for four minutes.
Police had been called because Mr Smith was “throwing a basketball aggressively”. No criminal charges were brought, and the officer was not disciplined. No one on the court had a smartphone and there was little coverage of the incident, even locally. America has not heard the name of David Smith. A decade later, two miles away, and in remarkably similar circumstances – they both suffocated – George Floyd, an unarmed black man, died on a street corner beneath the knee of Derek Chauvin, a white officer. This time bystanders filmed it, and America erupted in protest.
Mr Floyd was just the latest victim of systematic failings, entrenched interests, militaristic police training methods, as well as toothless oversight mechanisms that have plagued Minneapolis, and many other US police departments, for decades. While violent, racist officers are undoubtedly a few bad apples, the system that is supposed to police them is itself, according to critics, rotten to the core.
“The source of the problem is there is just no accountability,” David Bicking of the Minneapolis-based Communities United Against Police Brutality [CUAP] campaign group, told The Daily Telegraph. “People here say they’re going to file a complaint and a bad officer can just laugh at them. We have so little discipline it’s a joke. That leads directly to Derek Chauvin. It’s why he thought he could keep his knee on someone’s neck, in front of a crowd, knowing he’s being videoed. It comes from a culture of impunity, that ‘I can do anything I want to do and there are no consequences’.”
Mr Bicking used to sit on Minneapolis’s civilian review board for police complaints. It would recommend punishments for officers but was often ignored by police chiefs.
In 2012, Minneapolis, unusually in America, switched to a hybrid oversight system, further diluting civilian input. The new Office of Police Conduct Review consisted of civilians and police. Disciplinary figures since then are startling. According to the CUAP there have been more than 4,600 complaints from members of the public against Minneapolis’s 800 police officers. The total number resulting in discipline was just 12 – or about 0.5 per cent. In seven of those cases officers were suspended. The longest suspension was just 40 hours. Police officials dispute the figures.
The outcome of police departments’ own investigations into officers depends largely on the aggressiveness of their Internal Affairs units.
In Minneapolis, Internal Affairs looked into 17 complaints against Chauvin over two decades. He had been involved in three shootings, one fatal. He once shot an unarmed suspect twice in the stomach. But 16 of the complaints were dismissed, and he was only reprimanded for the other.
When Internal Affairs units do act decisively against their own, there is an appeal process. In Minnesota, over the past five years, 46 per cent of police and prison officers who were sacked were reinstated on appeal.
That is partly because the appeal panel bases its decisions on precedent, meaning that an act of force, or racist language, that was deemed acceptable decades ago must also go unpunished in 2020. Over the past several years some of the most high profile police killings in America have taken place in, or near, Minneapolis.
‘People here say they’re going to file a complaint and a bad officer can just laugh at them. We have so little discipline it’s a joke’
In 2015, Jamar Clark, a 24-year-old unarmed black man, was shot dead by two white officers outside a party. The following year Philando Castile, 32, who was black, was shot five times while in his car. His girlfriend livestreamed the aftermath on the internet. The officer in that case was acquitted of manslaughter, highlighting how difficult it remains for prosecutors to obtain convictions.
In cases of deadly force, juries have to consider whether a police officer was in “reasonable fear” for their life. The majority of jurors have not been in such a situation, and are reluctant to “armchair quarterback” an officer.
Much of what has happened in Minneapolis, and elsewhere in the US, has been attributed by justice campaigners to military-style training of police officers. Conducted by private security contractors, it teaches them to treat everyone they encounter as a potential mortal threat.
There are also wider issues with training. Police academies, on average, spend more than 100 hours instructing officers on how to shoot guns and self-defence, and a total of only 16 hours on community policing, mediation, and conflict management.