There's a lot of intra-group dynamics at play where protesters don't trust the motivations of each other or trust that the destruction to property was done by faithful representatives of the protest. Others feel, rightly or wrongly who the hell knows, that some of the more well-known fires were started by undercover white police officers.
Some folks I follow report that a small cluster of people have, say, a couple of black women who are leading a peaceful protest in one area, but a white man is trying to rile up that same peaceful crowd to become more violent.
Others are going to say that the destruction is the city reaping what it sowed for having its institutions so blatantly disregard the sanctity of minority lives.
Yeah, it's a mess. I'm not on the side of property destruction, but I also take to hear the observations of Martin Luther King Jr. and I don't think we should weigh the property destruction against the blatant murder of a citizen by police.
At the end of the day, the MPD needs to be reformed from top to bottom and the government has to earn the respect of its community again.
Policing in Minneapolis was a lot different back in the Seventies.
The Twin Cities had endured a reputation as a major gangster hideout just thirty or forty years prior.
I even had a temp gig playing the piano at The Castle Royal (aka Wabasha Street Caves) nightclub for a little while, my very own Billy Joel fantasy.
If you mouthed off or fought with the cops back then, you were going to catch a beating, maybe even a helluva beating, but if you weren't armed, you knew you would survive. They just wanted to send you a little message that they weren't about to put up with your crap, that's all.
Both me and a good friend had both caught a couple of those Third Precinct cop beatings back then, he's black and I am white, although in the heart of Scandanavian blue eyed blondes I was quite the swarthy looking "import" compared to my peers up there.
But yeah, both of us got knocked around but since neither of us were in the habit of pulling a weapon on a cop, we knew we might get a black eye, or a busted nose, or a knot on the head, but we knew we would heal up and see another day. We both knew that once cuffed, most of the Hell was over and you just had to take your lumps, go to the pokey, see the judge, deal with what you got charged with, and then you moved on.
But we knew we would not be killed.
Looks like policing is a lot more deadly these days up there, and elsewhere.
I can understand the fact that armed criminals deserve whatever they get, but once the 5-0 puts the cuffs on you, isn't that the sign that the suspect is IN CUSTODY and is now rendered subdued?
We saw guys get cuffed and even HOG tied back in the old days, and even shoved into the back of the car hard enough they had a headache the next day. But that's the point...back then it was safe to assume there would BE a next day if you were put in the cuffs.
An unarmed suspect in cuffs can only do so much and a competently trained cop is supposed to know how to handle an unarmed guy in cuffs.
Yes, there ARE exceptions to the rule, I realize that.
But the common expectation back then was if you made a scene while you were in cuffs it just meant you were going to be sitting there in cuffs making a scene until you wore yourself out or until backup was called to take you in. If you DIDN'T make a scene, and the cops felt sorry for you, it was going to be three hots and a cot till you saw the judge.
