The assessment that all the trouble started after George Floyd had his life squeezed out, cuffed and pleading, is inaccurate. In the Midwest region, the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) flew relatively below the radar of police brutality, especially compared with the notorious corruption of the Chicago Police Department, or the daily racial profiling put forth by the Milwaukee Police Department in Wisconsin.
In 2016, in neighbouring St. Paul, the murder of another unarmed black man, Philando Castile, who was shot five times by a policeman as he was reaching for his driving licence (even after announcing his intention to do so) pulled back the façade. The death of Castile was not forgotten, but it went unpunished and was left festering.
One such figure who has stood as an obstacle to progress towards a more equitable and just police department is Bob Kroll, the President of the Minneapolis Police Union. Kroll is an avid Donald Trump surrogate (even appearing on stage with the president at rallies), and has been accused of open bias in favour of police action by any means, and of having close ties to white supremacist groups. Kroll is a microcosm of the split within Minneapolis.
What is unclear now is how much of a hand the “Bob Krolls” of the city played in the last several days However, nearly every resident of the area believes the police helped stir up the situation.
The timeline of events went roughly as follows:
On the Monday Memorial Day holiday, George Floyd was murdered.
Tuesday saw primarily peaceful protests around the 3rd Precinct on Lake Street and at the site of the murder; but also on Tuesday there seemed to be some sort of instigation, although the exact “who threw down first” question is impossible to say, but in one instance a suspected officer was filmed breaking glass with a hammer at an auto shop while carrying an umbrella.
On Wednesday, the protests escalated as the officer had not been arrested yet and police actions began to intensify.
Thursday split into two protests: a more peaceful one outside the murder scene at Cup Foods (where George Floyd was killed); and a rowdier one at the 3rd Police Precinct. The latter one spiraled, although there are multiple reports of overzealous and violent police actions, as well as outside instigation. By late night Thursday, Lake Street for several blocks on either side of the precinct had devolved into chaos and fires had been lit, most notably destroying the police station itself, forcing police into a hasty retreat.
The situation continued on Friday as police initially stayed out of the area entirely, letting it burn and allowing residents to fend for themselves. They then went in with no mercy in the evening hours. (All or nothing for the MPD.)
With the police department dead set on “enforcing order” instead of calming the situation, the riot police were widely reported to be enacting a policy of violent action first, consequences be damned. Authority in America truly does despise any pushback.
Thursday split into two protests: a more peaceful one outside the murder scene at Cup Foods (where George Floyd was killed); and a rowdier one at the 3rd Police Precinct. The latter one spiraled, although there are multiple reports of overzealous and violent police actions, as well as outside instigation.
Instigators began to come out at night, both from inside the community and many from outside of it. There were multiple reports of white supremacists taking action and clashing in the area, as well as ANTIFA instigators, undercover cops, random out of state people, white kids in from the suburbs to kick up some shit and loot, Minneapolis citizens venting rage and Lake Street residents fighting the would-be instigators. All this, not to mention undercover cops stirring the pot and marked police cracking down on the crowd.
One man, a resident of the area, said of the previous night: “I was at the precinct last night. It was not what you want; people were walking up behind protesters and putting big ass fireworks at the feet of protesters. I watched Wells Fargo burn down. Now you see people who live here out here and cleaning? You know at night it’s a different thing. I think it is hired people. I don’t know who or from where but it is a coordinated effort. I’m hoping there’s just not much less to destroy down here.”
The fire-setters were of particular concern, as random Molotov cocktails were seemingly accompanied by more organised elements. The fires had ripped through seemingly dozens of businesses; large and small alike were not spared. Cars, burned down to white-hot ashy metal dotted parking lots in the surrounding area, particularly in the parking lots of bigger stores like the Target at the corner of Lake and 26th. Graffiti was everywhere, tagged in red and black. Slogans of “Fuck 12” (meaning police), “Death to Pigs”, “No Justice”, “Say His Name” were becoming ubiquitous across exposed brick and hastily thrown up plywood covering shop windows.
The area is the hub of the Twin Cities Somali community, a group of immigrants that has thrived in Minnesota over the last quarter century. Families from all over East Africa and beyond have made these leafy avenues one of the major centres of the diaspora, and now their shops were facing down a situation far outside of their control.
Some of the plywood had desperate pleas to be spared: “Don’t Burn: We Live Upstairs” and “No Fire: This is A BLACK OWNED BUSINESS.” Even stores that seemed to have managed to protect themselves were not spared on closer inspection; in several stores, water poured out from the cracks underneath the sheets of spray paint covered boarding. The low buzz of alarms was everywhere, some gurgling last chirps through the damage of flames, baseball bats and fire system flooding.
As a retired gardener named Madeline who lived off Lake Street said of the situation: “There is a criminal element looking to set fires. We just took a fire bomb out of a cooler outside the Precision Tune store. There’s no sense to this. The criminal elements are coming in on the coat-tails of the protesters and taking up the opportunity. They are very organised. Get your block club organised, coz it is up to us now.”
Now on Saturday, all of this served as an absolutely bizarre tableau. Empty hulking shells of businesses stood wobbly on pillars, surrounding ash and smoldering ruin within.
In front of one building, fluorescent yellow caution tape circled the structure, and a sign read, “Do NOT pass! Building WILL Collapse!”
Streaming past were brooms. Lone people at first, then twos and threes, and looking down Lake Street, a constant stream running up for miles, thousands of people, carrying brooms, shovels, dustpans, snow shovels – all making their way in to clean and salvage.
So many were willing to help their city, and so thorough a job they did that many commented that Lake Street was in fact cleaner than it had ever been. The result gave the impression of a Hollywood movie set – smouldering ruins of structures scattered around spotless asphalt.
In front of one building, fluorescent yellow caution tape circled the structure, and a sign read, “Do NOT pass! Building WILL Collapse!”
Outside an Ethiopian restaurant burned to a husk, with only the sign seeming to survive wholly intact, hundreds of people swept and shoveled up bricks and glass, some even tossing pieces of rubble into wheelbarrows. Inside, not even the floor had survived; it was now a smouldering plank looking down into the cellar of twisted beams intermingling with cracked and leaking water pipes.
Down the road, two doors down from the Kismayo Bakery, they continued, picking up glass by hand, scrubbing at graffiti with sponges, serving as fire brigades and throwing buckets of water onto embers.
In those initial hours of the afternoon, there was an eerie absence of voices; only the scrap of shovels and the swish of brooms broke the silence. The closest historical resemblance was that of Londoners removing rubble after Nazi bombing runs during the Blitz. As most were wearing masks, the eyes spoke of shell shock in the blocks around the Third Police precinct.
An older Somali man stood at the corner, looking at the ruins of a four-storey building about to collapse. He never stopped shaking his head, “This is not good, it is useless. This? You hurt people like this? No…no…no.” He didn’t say this to anyone in particular. Tears were welling up in his eyes. He turned and walked, defeated, up a side street.
Outside a half burned dentists’ office block on Chicago Avenue, a fire truck finally made an appearance, pouring down water that subsequently spilled out onto the street, washing chunks of charred debris around the feet of volunteers who stood in line waiting for the Afro Cafe workers to hand them packed samosas and veggie pilau.
It seemed like every half a block, people — the real representatives of Longfellow – offered up food, bottled water, and sunscreen. Some just asked the passersby if they needed to talk, whether they were holding up alright. The US media, somehow, managed to not highlight any of these organised efforts, though they stood in multitude in solidarity together – masked up and wearing T-shirts painted with “JUSTICE FOR GEORGE”. They took up the mantle of helping their neighboruhood, even as the police abandoned them, the overriding sentiment being “Let them burn each other down”. Instead, the people of Lake Street collected food, redistributed it, and did their damnedest to save every business on the block, even risking their necks to clean the inside of a giant burned-out Target superstore that surely never raised the minimum wage.
As often rings true, those most at risk do the most work. Perhaps this is why it was first- generation immigrants, many from the African diaspora, who spearheaded efforts to galvanise the community towards rebuilding, even as the fires smouldered around them, and the smell of chemical spray paint and the sickly sweet remains of tear gas intermingled with smoke from torched cars. In the midst of the fumes, they painted the word “Love” on the outside of a boarded-up grocery store.
On the nightly news, anchors feigned shock that convenience stores got robbed by three white teenagers in balaclavas, but there was no mention of the thousands who faced down the pandemic together for change and then took up brooms instead of bricks.
Two local teachers barked out this order to a waiting contingent of volunteers: “Get the chalk! Draw lines around this block so it is not hit!”
One of the women stopped to pause a second, murmuring to a random lady on the sidewalk, “Those people aren’t from Minneapolis, the ones burning? They’re not. All of us are here with this COVID? This is a double trauma. This is a great city. I can’t believe this would happen here. People live in some of the buildings being burned. Why would we do that to ourselves?”
A major question rings through: If anger is rightfully centred on the MPD, where were other first responders? If the city truly supported the cause for change, then where were the crews of medical workers handing out PPE?
This was failure at every level: an already stretched thin city abandoned, an already marginalised community threatened; the looming spectre of COVID hanging over it all.
Indeed, if it is possible to be simultaneously aggressive and passive, the emergency systems of Minneapolis managed to achieve both, threading the needle of uselessness. The city government isn’t entirely blameless either; while it may be convenient to blame only the Bob Kroll cop-fetishist types, the city’s “openly progressive” mayor, Jacob Frey, rightfully deserves criticism for his decision to let the protests continue unabated even as they became volatile into the nights of Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. While instigators set up fire bombs, the police, dressed to kill, stayed on the sidelines, seeming only to break their holding pattern to beat, arrest and pepper spray the wrong (non-white) people, often pulling from the peaceful crowd to do so.
“Hands Up!” at the Fifth Precinct
Then there were the dressed-to-kill cops. They were huddled, half a dozen or so, behind trash cans and barricades on the roof of the 5th Precinct. Across the street, the Wells Fargo bank branch was in ruins; a car burned down to the rims lay next to a drive-through ATM machine.
Fences surrounded the station, and as the protesters moved closer, the officers silently put on bulky blue plastic riot helmets.
This initial reaction of gearing up to do battle seemed strange, particularly as how this same group of protesters, minutes before, was in the Uptown district of Lake Street, blocking off an entire intersection, taking a knee and chanting, “SAY HIS NAME! GEORGE FLOYD!” With signs they came in, perhaps six thousand of them, crowding in around the fences, chanting in unison.
Not a stone was thrown and the cops kept gearing up.
“What do we want? ALL FOUR!” the crowd chanted incessantly. It was led by a tiny teenage girl in a “HANDS UP! DON’T SHOOT!” shirt, yelling into a megaphone while steadying herself on top of a concrete barricade.
“All four” means arresting, trying and convicting all four cops that were present when George Floyd died. The sentiment is clear, there are no halfway measures to justice this time. All or nothing and f**k compromise. That road just leads back to this point.
The sentiment of the real South Minneapolis is that this killing truly was the last straw and now there is a need for systemic change or he died for nothing. They believe that George Floyd’s murder was premeditated because for nearly nine minutes, the pressure on his neck was unrelenting. He died cruelly, needlessly, helplessly, and three other cops let it happen; they were complicit in a daylight murder on Chicago Avenue. Not even a live cell phone camera recording and pleas of onlookers could change Floyd’s fate.
“These are the people that really live here,” one man said as he pushed an overloaded dumpster out of the road to help ease traffic. “This is actually us.”
Non-violence seemed the overall sentiment; anger definitely, but not a violent energy that wasn’t the centre of this movement. Even the non-violent were met with brutal police response, however, seemingly unprovoked in many instances.
Even some of the shop owners who had their shops burned still stood in solidarity, with the mantra of “possessions can be replaced but justice needs to be permanent”.
A man on a bicycle wearing a lime green Nigerian national squad football jersey elaborated on what he’d seen. He’d driven all the way from New York City and was quickly lumped in with the rowdier elements, as the police opened up on all of them: “I was there last night man, I was just there, not doing shit, not holding shit. I got shot in the leg with a rubber bullet, anything that could be burned was, from my eyes. My leg is swollen as shit man.”
The sentiment of the real South Minneapolis is that this killing truly was the last straw and now there is a need for systemic change or he died for nothing. They believe that George Floyd’s murder was premeditated because for nearly nine minutes, the pressure on his neck was unrelenting.
There has been a lot said about the outside elements, and the truth seems murky at best, but where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
At the corner of Wells Fargo, a fifty-something black woman, N-95 mask dangling around her neck, gathered a crowd around her, rebuking the destructive elements and calling on the crowd to do the same: “We gotta get some control in this, we really, really do. Don’t sit here and try to blame the cops, the only thing they’re to blame for is not standing their ground. They left us. Do the peaceful protests man But if you go out and tear up the stores? Don’t go into that! I told my sons that! They pulled guns on my sons and I told them not to be out here. Don’t tell me how to feel!”
Even more to the core than “outside elements” the common theme always circles back to how the police cracked down to such an extreme that people were forced into a corner, thinking that they were suddenly facing down a deadly circumstance with a riot gear-laden officer representing a department that just asphyxiated an unarmed, handcuffed black man in broad daylight and now were in their face swinging clubs and firing tear gas canisters with the intention of hurting people.
When forced into such circumstances, can it really be expected to never swing back?
Three men in their late twenties, Sam, Marvin and Anish (Marvin had moved to Minneapolis from Eldoret, Kenya, years ago), who all live north of the metro line in Minneapolis, attested to the conditions that primed the city’s protests.
“I don’t think they take the precautions they need to when it comes to black folks,” Marvin said, stone-faced.
Sam weighed in. “As black men we go out our way to say ‘hi’ to people, just to make them feel comfortable. Now Trump calling people thugs and shit, now saying ‘hi’ to you might not be valid anymore. F**k him man. That’s his first tweet, why not George Floyd? Why not the protests? We’ve been quiet for too long. This is exactly what happens when you don’t think about change. What do you want us to do, sit back and be quiet?”
There has been a lot said about the outside elements, and the truth seems murky at best, but where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
“Exactly!” Anish exclaimed, while holding a sign that read “Where’s Justice For George? No Justice For Us?” and shifting the sign onto the handles of his bike before continuing, “Everybody’s frustrated. Enough is enough It’s a cycle though. Same as Baltimore and St. Louis. Rodney King was when? We don’t have to do this, we don’t have to get to this point. This woulda been another closed case. People in Minnesota avoid these issues. Things get swept in this city man.”
A few blocks away, the echoes of “Say His NAME! GEORGE FLOYD” reverberated around store fronts. All up and down the block, countless hands worked furiously, scrubbing away, and screwing in more plywood barricades to stave off the inevitable.
In the adjacent alley, four tactical police units, shaved heads and wrap-around reflective sunglasses, buckled up their flak jackets.
A cocktail of volatility stirred
“When the looting starts, the shooting starts!” There, in small Twitter font, Trump quoted a white supremacist police chief from Miami back in the 60s, and the reaction on the ground was a sarcastic, “Tell us how you really feel”.
Much has been made of the fermenting of some uglier sentiments of American culture, old ghosts bubbling back up to prominence in the age of Trumpism. On Sunday, May 31st, the right-wing talking heads made little mention of the white supremacist who attempted to mirror the truck attack in the French city of Nice by plowing a petrol tanker into the peaceful protesters marching down interstate 35. He missed them, and in his panic that he hadn’t committed mass murder, slowed down, only to be swarmed by people jumping onto the hood and the sides, kicking out the windshield and dragging him out, ensuring he wasn’t beaten so badly that he couldn’t be handed over roughly to the police, who promptly tried to detain one of the would-be-terrorist’s captors.
When the “looting” starts, the shooting starts…clearly. For this administration, all black faces are looters and all those who demand justice for George Floyd are violent ANTIFA thugs. It matters not that they hold signs that read “I Can’t Breathe!”, and that they walk in solidarity with hands up and that there are young people, even children, in the crowds demanding change. This peaceful movement, for the Trump administration, is terrifying and they’re desperately grasping at straws to paint it only through negativity, and further drown out the growing voices who see the obvious realities of inequity.
The disconnect of political ideologies is clearer than ever within the age of COVID and Trumpism, but during the opening salvo of what seems to be a movement, it rings all the starker.
Now, across the US, the simmering has begun to boil over. Protests are breaking out in dozens of cities. Peaceful marchers are revealing that the callousness of the Minneapolis police is not a Minnesota problem, but an institutional system of brutality. It feels as though a moment has arrived, and that true change may, finally, at last, be possible.
The unfortunate part for Minneapolis is how heavily the movement got hijacked.
Sitting out in her lawn ten blocks from the 3rd Precinct, Amy Froiland Parada, a social worker focusing on health services for lower income families from a St. Paul high school, reflects on the last few days.
“People are stirring up all kinds of fear. On my block, (she points around at houses) those guys all fled. I didn’t feel scared until this morning, when I heard that the fire bombs could be organised. When I heard the helicopters, when I heard about the precinct burning down, I thought, you know what? We need a change here. And now…now we’re texting our neighbours and telling them to hide their propane tanks, keep hoses and buckets handy.”
Now, across the US, the simmering has begun to boil over. Protests are breaking out in dozens of cities. Peaceful marchers are revealing that the callousness of the Minneapolis police is not a Minnesota problem, but an institutional system of brutality. It feels as though a moment has arrived, and that true change may, finally, at last, be possible.
Parada has made inroads into the community here through her work and through neighbourhood meetings with members of local predominantly black churches. Now those very same neighbours are under threat. “Tonight, there are people taking shifts to guard the black church around the corner. There’s that fear, the fear it could be targeted. I just truly, truly don’t believe that it is people from this neighbourhood doing all of this.” Her primary concern is how organised the violence seems.
There is truly an element of the Lake Street protests that doesn’t make sense, namely, why Lake Street? Sure the 3rd Precinct is there, but that doesn’t answer the riddle of why the street has been the focal point of the conflict.
In a primed America, however, it might. As coronavirus has brought the world’s “most powerful nation” and “best economy” to its knees, ugly truths have been revealed. Cops are shooting journalists with rubber bullets at point blank range on live television. Young people of colour are so frustrated that they are willing to put up with brutalisation just to be heard – and brutalised they are.
All of this, during the greatest global pandemic in a century, and the desperate clinging to bullshit ideals of “normalcy” from the political class and the controlling interests of the economy. America was never for everyone; African Americans have known this all along. And now, as the financial stability of everyone has cratered through unreachable floor after unreachable floor, such sentiment is spreading. People are risking brutalisation on their heads from clubs while risking brutalisation of their lungs and lives from COVID-19.
There is truly a severe anger right now- the altruistic tendencies that marked the early weeks of the COVID pandemic have been replaced with people who have been left behind and told by their leader that “the White House has handled everything perfectly”.
The young people are sick and tired of being sick and tired. Black America is tired of seeing the movie on repeat, an endless loop.
As one man said of the issue in Minneapolis: “I ain’t burned shit yet, but I am. They put their knee on us too much, it isn’t like a typical way, it’s like a system way. A lot of people feeling the same way, it was bound to happen sooner or later.”
Now, with money running thin and the crises deepening, the marginalised are gaining a voice that’s becoming a deepening bellow. But for every action, there’s a reaction. Those who would quell those voices, the elements on the other side of the divide mobilised too.
All those elements hit Lake Street like a cyclone; the anger fermented in a desperate and politically divided America poured out into the fires set to Longfellow shops.
The melting pot of the upper Midwest became a cauldron in the days since George Floyd, and as things stand economically, who can say if it’ll ever return to prominence. All of those immigrant-owned businesses, generations of work, gone in a fire bomb.
As Parada describes the situation, “It is almost like someone is trying to come in and stir up a race war up here.”
It is that concern that encapsulates the darkest thoughts that creep in – that in a country where anything can be bought, hate can also be funded. Through this lens, is it truly an act of chance that all of these minority and immigrant-run shops and restaurants started being targeted early on?
In the winding streets of the wealthy lakeside homes south of Lake Street, no less than 20 police SUVs, lined up in a row: they were calming the situation down by guarding the rich miles away from the problem. It was then that the class segregation parallels between a city like Nairobi and Minneapolis become crystal clear: when the chips are down, keep the masses away from true wealth.
To that end, if South Minneapolis is truly ahead of its time, is it so hard to believe that there are elements within America that seek to drag it backwards?
Indeed, the George Floyd protests have been a litmus test for the progress of the neighbourhood. But if the last few days are any indication, residents of Lake Street will come out with brooms, and together they’ll sweep up America’s mess.
