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Ferguson started as a local event that escalated and ended as a media event. St. Louis watched on TV, mostly. At the time it was always identified in the media as a Ferguson event. I lived in Ferguson for a few years and growing up my back yard fence was the city limit. It is one of about 100 small municipalities that grew up and surround St. Louis -- little kingdoms with different problems and responses. Some adjust to change and some fight change. Ferguson has a mixed history but probably isn't much different than other suburbs outside of any large city. Things happen most often as a clash between individuals -- a few seconds of conflict turns into a power struggle and then (sometimes) a totally inappropriate response that often spirals out of control. The Minneapolis situation involved a horrific police response that was totally inappropriate and likely illegal. I suspect that there are a few similar events that happen all over the country every day that do not spiral out of control. Abusive police behavior is undeniably a real thing. The DOJ investigated and is monitoring police where I live due to a history of abuse and 20+ deaths over the years.
In that case San Jo, Oakland, Richmond, etc. do not affect San Fran.
Ummmm...do they? And how? And since when are SJ and Oakland (maybe Richmond too but unsure) suburbs of SF? Ferguson is a suburb, not a principal city of the metro area with its own well-established identity. And one can easily make the case that a singular event in the central/primary city reflects on the metropolitan area as a whole, whether fairly or unfairly, but that hardly means that the reverse is true, at least in as straightforward a way. In the wake of the Ferguson uprising, there were several think pieces produced that tied the current events at the time with similar events that had occurred throughout the region historically, most notably the East St. Louis riot of 1917, but those writers had to go back a century and across the river into IL to connect those dots. But to be fair, it is rare that the racial power dynamics in a suburb within a large metropolitan area are going to be altogether different from what is found within the larger region as opposed to being in some way truly representative of the regional dynamics of race and power on some level.
It should be noted that although Minneapolis is in the center of it this is a nationwide event. This impacts everyone (minus rural areas and even some larger towns are getting involved) because what happened in Minneapolis was the breaking point of a larger issue.
This may be more like the late 60s versus a localized situation like Ferguson and Baltimore was.
No, that seems very unlikely. What that officer did was very explicitly egregious, and it seems like MSP just has a lower tolerance for such given the fairly immediate reactions. MSP also had a far more robust economy and better socioeconomic indicators than either Ferguson or Baltimore prior to this.
From what I've heard, the problem was cumulative — as it has been across the country. We've had highly publicized incidents where cops executed unarmed black men now in several dozen large US cities, and this has sparked protests in cities far from Minneapolis. The unifying factor in all of the previous cases: The cop suffered no consequences for the killing. In most of the cases, they should have.
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Originally Posted by citidata18
Now that the officer(s) are getting arrested, I think things will settle down in Minneapolis.
Although St. Louis and Baltimore were mentioned, to put things in perspective, this (and even the incidents in St. Louis and Baltimore) is a cake walk compared to the 1967 race riots in Detroit that continued for 5 days and destroys miles upon miles of the city.
I heard a black Minneapolis resident on the news this morning saying that they'd continue protesting until all four officers involved in the incident are in jail.
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Originally Posted by atadytic19
I hope not.
I do think that more attention needs to be focused on police brutality towards black people in particular, but I also feel for small business owners who are being affected also.
It is sad that this is happening but it is also sad at the lack of empathy towards our fellow humans. At this point ignorance of the plight of being black in America is racist.
There is just no justification for it. I see the cop was charged for 3rd degree murder and manslaughter. The others should be charged for being complicit also. You handcuff someone then their life is now in your care and watching him get murdered makes you just add guilty as if it was your knee on his neck
See above.
There is a serious problem with racism among white police officers that we don't talk about nearly enough. In whiter and more affluent neighborhoods, the cops are still seen as protectors of order and stability, but in black neighborhoods, especially lower-income ones, the opposite is the case.
The head of Philly's police union, John McNesby, has a penchant for insulting and demeaning high-profile blacks who criticize the department and its officers. I recall seeing a Tweet he made in which he implied that one such critic, a fairly prominent individual, was a drug dealer (not true). One of those he fired back at, "nonresident, washed-up" (his words) Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins, made public safety his cause as a player and went on ride-alongs with cops so he could get an up-close-and-personal understanding of what they and the communities they serve faced. Here's what he told The Philadelphia Inquirer about the experience:
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“When we did that ride-along, we had to respond to a shooting.… I could see firsthand how everybody in the neighborhood is in their homes or on their porches, all of the police are sitting in the middle of the street, nobody is talking to each other, that trust is not there," he said.
“When we talk about trying to solve violent crimes and [trying to] get rid of these shootings and things like that, there needs to be cooperation. That cooperation comes with trust. You can’t have trust with a community with the reputation our police department has, without transparency, without anything changing.”
By the way, that was the year after that "non-resident, washed-up" Eagles player with a residence in the city's Northern Liberties neighborhood helped the team win its first Super Bowl ever, which should also tell you something about John McNesby's powers of perception.
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Originally Posted by As Above So Below...
Minneapolis has had two police murders of an unarmed black man in recent years.
I dont think the correct response is to say "Minneapolis is racist" because I dont think it is any moreso than your average American city. I do think there are some issues at the police department that need to be addressed for this to happen twice in a relatively short span. The department should be investigated.
See above. Same goes for just about every American police department. As Jenkins noted, trust in the police has all but disappeared in our poorer black neighborhoods.
Edited to add: I'd even go so far as to recommend a very radical solution, but one based in a famed 19th-century observation.
New York newspaper columnist Finley Peter Dunne, writing in his persona as Irish barkeep "Mr. Dooley," wrote in the 1870s that "cops and criminals come from the same class." And there was more than a little truth to that statement, for in New York, both the police officers and the criminals they arrested came from the same working-class-and-lower Irish immigrant neighborhoods.
While the number of African-American cops has risen in every one of our large cities, their voices (expressed here in Philly in the form of statements from the Guardian Civic League, the black police officers' association; they often take issue with the FOP president) remain muted relative to those of the white officers in whose ranks the problems originate. Perhaps we should take a page from "Mr. Dooley's" observation and mandate that the chief of police and their top lieutenants be black in any large city where blacks account for 20 percent or more of the population.
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Originally Posted by Mutiny77
It's hard to keep up these days, but I think you're referring to the Twin Cities as a whole. This incident occurred in the St. Paul area in 2018 which is what I think you may be referring to as the second incident.
And let's not forget about this incident which was a role reversal of sorts but the same racial dynamics played out.
Worth noting there: the black organizations in particular were either conflicted or critical of the verdict — critical because no white officer involved in a similar incident had ever been convicted.
For those of you drawing parallels between Minneapolis and St. Louis: Ferguson, besides being a suburb, occurred after St. Louis' north side had all but emptied out. Whatever caused St. Louis' decline bore little connection to rioting, whereas the similar emptying out of Kansas City's midsection (a hollowing-out masked by population gains in areas annexed after World War II for a while) was triggered in large part by four days of rioting on the city's black East Side after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. And I know people don't think about Kansas City in the way they do St. Louis, and that annexation is the chief reason why they don't. Minneapolis won't hollow out after this, is my prediction.
There is a difference between protesters who want justice and those planted to be destructive.
Now White Supremacist groups are going to Minneapolis to turn this into a race riot. This is not only bad for Minneapolis it's bad for all of Americans.
I mean the Boston Tea Party, Revolutionary War, and Civil War weren't so friendly. Sometimes people have enough and revolution's aren't always so peaceful. Destruction unfortunately gets attention when all fails.
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