The Department of Justice excoriated the Minneapolis Police Department in an 89-page report released Friday, accusing the department of systemic racial and behavioral discrimination—years before the death of George Floyd in 2020.
The two-year investigation was prompted by the April 2021 conviction of Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer who murdered Floyd the previous May by pinning his knee onto Floyd’s neck for nearly 10 minutes as three other officers looked on. The report found that before Chauvin murdered Floyd, the officer had used excessive force in other incidents in which “multiple other M.P.D. officers stood by.”
Floyd’s death, along with the killings of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, ignited a summer of nationwide protests over policing and racial injustice.
The DOJ report alleges a pattern of “excessive force, including unjustified deadly force” concentrated on the city’s Black and Native American residents. Between 2016 and mid-2022, the report uncovered nearly 200 instances of Minneapolis officers using neck restraints like the one Chauvin used on Floyd; some officers continued the practice even after the city banned them in June 2020.
Police, the report said, “used dangerous techniques and weapons against people who committed at most a petty offense and sometimes no offense at all” and “used force to punish people who made officers angry or criticized the police.”
At a Friday news conference at a Minneapolis courthouse, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said, “The patterns and practices we observed made what happened to George Floyd possible.” Garland added that the report found numerous examples of officers responding to residents’ complaints that they could not breathe with “some version of, ‘You can breathe, you’re talking right now’”—similar to comments made by the officers involved in Floyd’s arrest.
“As I told George Floyd’s family this morning, his death has had an irrevocable impact on the Minneapolis community, on our country and on the world,” Garland said. “His loss is still felt deeply by those who loved and knew him and by many who did not. George Floyd should be alive today.”
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called the DOJ report “objective” and “thorough.” “We understand that change is non-negotiable,” he said.
The city will likely soon start negotiations with the federal government on the terms of a court-enforced consent decree, which would put the Minneapolis police under federal supervision. “Consent decrees have been a useful tool for making progress on police reform in other cities,” Frey said Saturday morning. In recent years, several other cities have put their police departments under consent decrees, but critics argue that the oversights are a waste of taxpayer money and don’t provide meaningful reform.
On Friday, President Joe Biden called the report’s findings “disturbing” and said they “underscore the urgent need for common sense reforms that increase public trust and thereby strengthen public safety.” He called on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Negotiations on the bill, which passed in the House and would have cracked down on certain police tactics and made it easier to prosecute officers accused of misconduct, stalled in the Senate in 2021.
