I wish it was different.
I wish that, five years after former Minneapolis Police officer Derick Chauvin murdered George Floyd on Memorial Day in 2020, the city could point to many, many things that have changed as a result of the outcry.
I wish, five years after a global uprising and protest that started here, that Minneapolis was a different city, with better policing, better public safety, and in a better place on the city’s long-standing racial inequality.
I wish we could say that Minneapolis was sorry about George Floyd’s murder and that we worked quickly—and then consistently continued to work—to address the systemic problems of policing and race, of neighborhood gaps in development and opportunities, of media narratives that whitewash many of those problems. I wish we could say the city rose to the moment, changed things, and became a leading example of how to address police violence for the rest of the country.
But Minneapolis hasn’t changed, and Minneapolis isn’t sorry.
Is the city different five years later? Absolutely. But not when it comes to the liberal underpinnings that defined, and in many ways still do define, Minnesota as “The Jim Crow of the North.” And certainly not enough to prove that anything has changed.
In different ways, residents of Minneapolis put in work after the civil unrest. There was a very brief time, immediately after the protests and violent police response, when vibrant murals decorated the boards covering destroyed buildings, neighbors connected for new attempts at mutual aid networks, and flowers and tributes filled the now historic site at Chicago & 38th. Even the most cynical people in Minneapolis tried to look at the potential future for the city where George Floyd was murdered, and everyone from state and national politics, to news media, to hometown corporations jumped to make new pledges to do better for Black and other marginalized residents.
But like many rebellions in fiction and reality, the empire swiftly struck back at attempts for change, and much of the city fell in line. People working towards change quickly saw that white fragility’s fury and retribution are as systemic as they are individualistic.
Minneapolis leadership and their backers immediately did their own work to support the police department, while many officers coordinated en masse to retire with claims of PTSD—or “medical” as they sometimes code to it.An astounding 144 MPD officers were given settlements totaling over $22.2 million, even officers with previous records of misconduct. These same leaders used different parts of city bureaucracy, like the Minneapolis Charter Commission, to entangle the process of police reform, and they also used large sums of money to fund a local Political Action Committee that spread disinformation about the reform. “Defund the Police,” they argued, somehow meant the metro would descend into lawlessness overnight. It’s no wonder that national conservative groups have continued to amplify and expand the fear-mongering message, and it’s no wonder that, years after the civil unrest, many still claim that Minneapolis defunded the police, despite the MPD budget for 2025 being double that of 2014.
By the time the next city election took place in 2021, the political push not only meant that the police department didn’t change, but the mayor in office didn’t change, and Minneapolis voted to pass a city amendment that the city council who called for reforms would have less authority, too. Four years later, the same PAC still remains a big driver of local politics and elections.
Even more, the revelations of the MPD’s years of egregious behavior, inarguably revealed in a federal Department of Justice report and a state Department of Human Rights report which lead to two separate consent decrees to try and force sweeping changes (that is until President Trump rescinded the federal decree this week, leaving the state decree), have proven to hold enough importance to be anything but occasional talking points for local politics through the past few years. Case in point: City Council candidate Soren Stevenson was shot in the face by a non-lethal round when police escalated violence during the protests; Stevenson lost an eye as a result, and the officer who shot him was never disciplined and is still on the force.
Many of the corporations that made swift commitments for new hires and funding for BIPOC causes used the opportunity to simply reallocate some existing funding for arts and culture organizations and events. These same businesses are now using their DEI rollbacks to eliminate most of their corporate giving entirely. Many people have pointed out the fact that Target commissioned murals featuring power fists on their Lake Street location, which was looted during the riots, that starkly contrast with the company’s public rollback of its DEI initiatives.
We need your help to stay independent
The regional news media, themselves targets of some uprising protests, made some long-overdue diversity hires and briefly wondered aloud if they should take everything that the police force says as unquestionable facts—reporters did, after all, originally take the MPD’s report that Floyd’s death was simply a “medical incident” and moved on from the story until the video began to spread across social media—have since been a staunch ally in the routing of meaningful reform, with skewed both-sides coverage and commentary. Their ramp-up of stories and angles for the anniversary of Floyd’s murder highlights the sensational nature of their current coverage and the lack of change in day-to-day reporting.
The former police chief just last week made the rounds of local news to push his new book, unironically entitled “Securing Justice for the Murder of George Floyd,” with little pushback. The current police chief now routinely receives similar coverage without pushback, even going so far as to say, without rebuke in a recent press event, that police are the ones who are “starting to heal, it’s been a long five years.”
My kids were really little when the ash from the burned-down Minneapolis Police Third Precinct floated into our yard down the street. They’ve now doubled in age, but while they’ve changed over and over, year after year, the city around them hasn’t.
I wish we could point to a reformed police force, but the only significant changes in Minneapolis policing are that the number of employed officers is at a record low, that more and more people (not just BIPOC residents) are sharing stories of officers with chips on their shoulders, and that the city is still returning to earlier lower levels of crime.
I wish we could point to a new robust corner of Minnehaha and Lake Street where the condemned Third Precinct still blights the corner, but we can’t. Barricades still remain, even though a new wrap was just put up on the chain link fence.
I wish we could point to George Floyd Square as both a place of commemoration of what happened and the history, but also as a place to show the city’s change in direction. But we can’t. Community members are the only ones who have been stewarding the historic site of George Floyd Square, a grassroots site that regularly receives visitors from all over the country who make the pilgrimage to see another ground zero in the push for—and against—modern civil rights.
It’s one thing to say sorry. It’s another thing to be sorry and move forward with changes. And Minneapolis has done neither.
