The Horrible History Of The Minneapolis Police Department

     The muder of George Floyd shook the world to its core. Seeing a man plead for his life and four police officers watch as they drain it from him is absolutely revolting, but, unfortunately, it is the furthest thing from a rare occurrence. The Minneapolis Police Department alone has a long, ugly history of brutality against citizens.

     In 1989, an elderly couple was killed by a stun grenade after the police raided a house relying on false information from an informant, and, in 2011, they paid $1 million in a settlement for injuring an innocent person with a grenade in another botched drug raid.

     An officer named Jeffrey Jindra was investigated for sodomizing a black prisoner with a toilet plunger, and the police chief celebrated when the FBI refused to file charges. He had previously been sued for over $100,000 for breaking a suspects jaw in several places, but never faced disciplinary actions and retired with a pension. A reporter who covered that case among dozens of others was threatened with prosecution and the loss of his job. Throughout these high-profile cases of police brutality, Amy Klobuchar refused to prosecute any of the officers involved and instead sent the cases to sympathetic grand juries to be systematically dismissed. 

     Derek Chauvin shot a man while responding to a domestic violence call and later shot another man who was running from him without a weapon. In the second case, he was placed on administrative leave, but no action was taken against him in the other 16 brutality complaints that were filed against him. Tuo Thao had seven previous brutality complaints against him, one of which was open and another of which resulted in a $25,000 settlement after he stopped a car for no reason and broke the occupant's teeth while he was in handcuffs. 

     In fact, it has been revealed that the police use force against black citizens 7 times as often as they do white people. Over the last 5 years, the police have admitted to using force against people almost 12,000 times in Minneapolis, and nearly 7,000 of those cases were black people, despite the fact that only 20% of the population is black.