The Minneapolis Police Department used illegal, abusive practices for years, the Department of Justice finds

The Justice Department on Friday accused Minneapolis police of discriminating against black and Native American people, illegally using deadly force and violating First Amendment rights of protesters and journalists — scathing allegations stemming from a multi-year investigation and could lead to a court-enforced reorganization of the police force.

The federal review was touched by the 2020 murder of George Floyd, a black man, by a Minneapolis officer, a crime that sparked protests and unrest across the country. But the Justice Department’s scathing 89-page report looked far beyond that murder, describing a police force devoid of accountability, whose officers beat, shot, and detained people without justification and patrolled without the trust of residents.

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said at a news conference in Minneapolis that Mr. Floyd’s death “has had an irreversible impact on the Minneapolis community, on our country and around the world,” and that “the patterns and practices that we observed what happened to George Floyd is possible.

The murder of Mr. Floyd, who was caught on video saying “I can’t breathe” as he was pinned to the ground by Officer Derek Chauvin, drew international attention to the Minneapolis Police Department. But to many people in the city, where protesters had complained for years about police excesses, Mr. Floyd’s death, gruesome as it was, wasn’t entirely surprising. The Justice Department researchers described “numerous incidents where officers responded to a person’s statement that they couldn’t breathe with some version of, ‘You can breathe; you are talking now.’”

The Justice Department report was almost uniformly critical, painting a disturbing portrait of a dysfunctional law enforcement agency where illegal behavior was common, racism was pervasive, and misconduct was tolerated.

In many cases, investigators found that officers fired guns without assessing the threat they faced; used neck restraints even in non-arrest interactions; and used their tasers, sometimes without warning, on pedestrians and motorists who committed minor offenses or no offense at all.

“This is no secret,” said Bridgette Stewart, a lifelong Minnesotan who is black and regularly spends time at the scene of Mr. Floyd’s murder. “This is something that has been going on in Minnesota for many, many, many, many years — longer than I’ve been alive.”

Minneapolis officials appeared next to the attorney general at press conference Friday and pledged to negotiate with the Justice Department to reach a review agreement, known as a consent decree, that would be reviewed by the federal court and would make specific changes to the police force. enforce . Similar consent decrees followed federal investigations into police misconduct in other U.S. cities, including Baltimore, Cleveland and New Orleans.

“This work is fundamental to the health of our city,” said Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. “We have the power here to create lasting change, to influence generational change, and we embrace that.”

Officials said negotiating a consent decree could take months, and Mr Frey suggested some potential bottlenecks were already emerging. Earlier this year, Minneapolis entered into a separate consent decree in state court with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, which reached some of the same damaging conclusions about the city’s police after its own investigation.

Mr. Frey said the city would like there to be a single monitor oversee both the state agreement and any federal agreement, and need assurances that the two agreements do not contradict each other. Justice Department officials stressed that their report contained separate violations of federal law that should be reviewed by a federal judge, not a state official.

Sergeant Sherral Schmidt, the president of the union representing Minneapolis officers, said her organization had not received a copy of the federal report before it was made public. She said union leaders were reviewing it and planned to comment on the findings later.

The report includes several cases that are painfully familiar to many people in Minneapolis: the fatal police shooting of Justine Ruszczyk, an unarmed white woman; a Christmas tree at a police station with racist awards; racist comments by an officer to young Somalis about “Black Hawk Down” – as well as others not widely known. It described an incident in which an officer threw a handcuffed man to the ground face-first; another when an officer pointed his gun at a teenager over the suspected theft of a $5 burrito; and another when an officer repeatedly beat a protester who had already been restrained.

Minneapolis police routinely discriminated against black people and Native Americans, investigators found, while patrolling “differently based on the racial makeup of the neighborhood, without any legitimate, related security rationale.” And the city violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by discriminating against people with behavioral disabilities, the report said, including sending police officers to mental health calls where they were not needed and where their “response is often harmful and ineffective.”

At protests, the report said, officers violated First Amendment rights of protesters and reporters. “MPD officers often use force indiscriminately and make no distinction between peaceful protesters and those committing crimes,” the report said.

All the while, the Justice Department found that complaints of officer misconduct were mishandled or ignored, while some officers accused of serious misconduct were assigned to train new Police Academy graduates. The report said that in the years before killing Mr Floyd, Mr Chauvin had used excessive force in other incidents where “several other MPD officers were watching” and failed to stop him.

“The cops who do something horrific almost always have a history and a pattern,” said L. Chris Stewart, who represented Mr. Floyd’s family in civil suits following his murder. “The oversight has failed. The cops don’t get corrected and they end up killing someone.”

Mr. Chauvin was convicted of murder and a federal civil rights violation in Mr. Floyd’s death, a relative rarity for an on-duty death involving police. Three other officers who were at the scene that night – Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane – were also convicted of federal and state charges.

Minneapolis, a Democratic-led city that has long been a center of progressive activism, was fundamentally reshaped by the assassination of Mr. Floyd and the turmoil that followed. For a time, the city was a center of the national defund-the-policy movement, with activists and several city councilors calling for the abolition of the police and a new approach to public safety.

But in the years since Mr. Floyd’s death, the politics of crime and policing have changed again. Minneapolis voters rejected a ballot measure in 2021 that would have replaced the police with a new public safety agency. Mr Frey, who was jeered by protesters in the days after Mr Floyd’s murder when he spoke out against cutting funding from the police, was elected to a second term.

The problems faced by the Minneapolis Police Department in the years before Mr. Floyd had faced protests for other murders have been compounded. Hundreds of officers have quit their jobs, some of whom received disability benefits for post-traumatic stress they linked to the unrest. Amid mounting concerns about crime and uncertainty about the department’s future, the city struggles to retain officers and meet recruiting goals.

When Minneapolis elected a new police chief last year, Brian O’Hara climbed to the top of the candidate list, largely because he helped oversee the implementation of a federal consent decree in Newark, NJ Chief O’Hara said the road ahead lay would be challenging for his new city.

“This is a necessary step,” the chief said in an interview. “This will be the way for the community to begin to heal, for the department to begin to heal, and for all of us to move forward together.”

Outside of Minneapolis, the Justice Department is investigating complaints about potential systemic problems with law enforcement Mount Vernon, NY; the city of New York; Oklahoma city; phoenix; And Worcester, Mass.as well as with the state police in Louisiana.

Both critics and proponents recognize that consent decisions can be tough. Embraced by the Justice Department during the Obama and Biden administrations, but not during the Donald J. Trump presidency, consent decrees can contain hundreds of requirements, cost millions of dollars, and take so long that citizens forget what success should look like.

Still, the consent decree can be a powerful tool for reviewing law enforcement agencies. The Justice Department says consent decrees work, especially when judicial oversight is in place.

Vanita Gupta, the associate attorney general, said a consent decree would include input from residents and police officers, and that an agreement would “provide a pathway to lasting change in Minneapolis.”

But she also had a word of caution for residents: “Police reform doesn’t happen overnight.”

Shaila Dewan reporting contributed.