Thread: The continued and disproportionate deaths of black men at the hands of police officers in Minnesota is a collective failure of our state. In part this is because police training, direction and accountability is difficult under our current system.

We have over three hundred individual police departments in Minnesota, reporting to hundreds of city councils and mayors. We have standards for police officer licensing set by the Minnesota Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST Board)...

...but the standards for training is set by each of the hundreds of police departments and the POST Board is not directly accountable to anyone. Police officer misconduct is investigated by the police department itself, unless it is serious enough to be referred to the BCA.

In Minneapolis, the police chief reports to the Mayor, but the mayor has limited control over the budget and other decisions made in city hall.

Our policing system is dispersed and uncoordinated, controlled by hundreds and hundreds of separately elected or appointed officials spread across the state. But more foundational than all of that is that we have a society built in part on fear of black men.

Our biases are real, and they run deep. Before denying it, check yourself. Be honest about your own feelings. These biases affect our law enforcement agencies, and the dispersal of authority in our police system makes it difficult to confront that bias.

That is part of the reason we have failed so far in Minnesota at making racial justice a part of our criminal justice system. Creating accountability in that environment is extremely difficult, but we still need to do it.

Despite the challenge of addressing the bias in law enforcement in Minnesota, one thing that can happen now is that the officers responsible for the death of George Floyd should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

The video of Mr. Floyd’s death shows the killing of an unarmed man, who posed no threat to anyone, who was completely subdued, and who calmly told the officers he could not breathe.

This appears to be a straightforward case of murder. We can start creating accountability one case at a time with criminal charges for the crime that was committed. #GeorgeFloyd

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