Race and Policing in the Twin Cities

The history of law enforcement in the Twin Cities, as in the rest of the United States, has been deeply influenced by race. Since the early twentieth century, many Minnesotans of color have responded to racial targeting and police brutality by forming community organizations and citizen patrols; others have served as officers themselves and grappled with racial inequality inside the police force.

The northern US, as well as the South, was a dangerous place to be Black at the turn of the twentieth century. In the Twin Cities, instances of police brutality and racial profiling were reported in the Western Appeal and the Appeal beginning in the 1880s and 1890s. New cases emerged in the 1910s and the 1920s in the Minneapolis Messenger and the Twin City Star. Victims, however, could not always afford to be candid in public, even with Black newspapers like these. John McHie, who told his family that he had been beaten by Minneapolis police in 1918, reported a version of the incident to the Twin City Star that concealed police involvement.

As far as can be documented, the first Black police officer in Minnesota was James H. Burrell, who worked at the Rondo sub-station in St. Paul beginning in 1892. Lewis Liverpool, James Loomis, Charles Grisim, Abraham Yeiser, William Lewis, and Joseph Black followed his example in the next decade. These officers faced ongoing discrimination in the early twentieth century during both recruitment and assignments, which required them to patrol areas with the fewest socio-economic and educational advantages.

As Twin Cities police departments became larger and more sophisticated in the 1920s, there were increasing reports of brutality against those arrested. As Minnesota’s Black population grew, racist hiring practices and more brutality cases led to increased calls for reform. City leaders, however, remained unresponsive.

After January 1921, there were no Black officers appointed to the St. Paul Police Department until 1937. In 1939, a civil service exam was posted for a patrolman position. When the St. Paul Urban League protested that only one Black officer had been appointed over the last eighteen years, the commissioner responded that since 1936, department policy had been that no one would be passed over or shown preference. Furthermore, he stated that he would not overlook anyone just to appoint a Black to the job. With this promise, the Urban League held classes at the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center to help Black candidates pass the exam. Community leaders organized a recruitment drive, over thirty Black candidates were included, and 1500 people took the test. It was the largest recruitment turnout in the history of the St. Paul Police Department to date.

An unwritten discriminatory rule used by police departments nationwide in the 1930s and 40s prevented Black officers from working motorcycle or squad car duty with white officers. Black and white officers worked together only on special assignment, in jails, or in the patrol wagons. In response, churches, the Black press, the Urban League, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took the lead during the 1940s and 50s to shape civil rights legislation and build alliances among African American communities, including those in the Twin Cities.

The 1960s and 1970s saw a sharp rise in social movements organized by people of color, including the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and the National Organization of Brown Berets. Racially motivated police violence spurred community members to establish citizen-led patrols to “serve and protect” people who felt mistreated, unheard, and underserved by law enforcement.

Dan Pothier helped established the Black Patrols to serve the North Minneapolis area. After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, the Black Patrols became incorporated into the Citizens’ Patrol Corps unit, also known as the Soul Force. The combined patrols served the North and South Minneapolis neighborhoods until 1968.

Also in 1968, the American Indian Movement (AIM) created its own citizen patrol to protect the East Franklin Avenue area and act as a barrier between the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) and the surrounding community. The patrol was under the direction of the AIM board, whose members included Clyde Bellecourt and Dennis Banks. Recognized by both neighborhood residents and the MPD for bringing change to the East Franklin area, the patrol continued through 1975 and reformed briefly in 1987.

The momentum of activism in the 1960s and 1970s continued through the 1980s and 1990s, when more steps were taken to improve relations between the police and communities of color—with more governmental action. In 1981, a multicultural task force was created to examine malpractice cases within the St. Paul and Minneapolis Police Departments. They were also tasked with fostering relations between communities of color and police officers and improving police practices. The task force’s chairman, Curman L. Gains, was a former deputy commissioner of human rights and the principal of Como High School in St. Paul. Administrative aid Irene Gomez-Bethke, a Latina community leader, extensively documented the group’s activity.

The Chicano/Latino Task Force was created in 1993 by Commissioner David Beaulieu as a new branch of the Minnesota Department of Human Rights. It was responsible for reporting racial discrimination and recommending solutions. Around the same time, the community-based organization Inter-Race, commissioned by the MPD, created trainings for their officers. Its “Police Training Workshops,” co-hosted by Vivian Jenkins Nelson, brought together Minneapolis citizens and police officers to discuss issues plaguing the community. Instead of adopting these ideas, however, MPD hired an outside consultant from Detroit, without ties to the community, to create the trainings.

The Twin Cities witnessed an influx of Somali immigrants in the mid-1990s as a result of the civil war in Somalia. Since arriving in Minnesota, Somali people have had both positive and negative interactions with Twin Cities police. The Somali community and police have a history of joining together to create healthy and productive relations. In the late 1990s, the police joined Somali leaders to focus on lowering crime in the Somali community. The Minneapolis and St. Paul police held monthly meetings with Somali elders, created crime prevention workshops, and even hired their first Somali police officer.

Policing in the Somali community, however, was not always positive. In 2013, two non-Muslim St. Paul police officers were photographed wearing a hijab. On February 3, a photo surfaced on Twitter of officer Robert Buth dressed as a Somali Target employee in a red hijab. On February 6, a photo appeared of Buth and an unidentified officer dressed in orange hijabs and blackface. These photos clearly mocked hijab-wearing Somali women. On February 5, an article surfaced in the Star Tribune denouncing the photo, and the situation appeared to be isolated from the beliefs of the St. Paul Police Department.

Two instances of police violence that occurred in the Twin Cities metro area in the 2010s led to national discussions of race and policing. On July 6th, 2016, St. Anthony police officer Jeronimo Yanez shot and killed Philando Castile after pulling over his car. Yanez shot Castile after Castile notified him that he had a gun but was not reaching for it. Yanez was acquitted, yet he was one of the first Minnesotan officers in modern history to have charges brought against him so quickly.

Just over a year later, on July 15, 2017, a Somali American Minneapolis police officer named Mohamed Noor shot and killed Justine Damond while responding to a 911 call (Damond had called to report a possible incident of rape near her home in South Minneapolis). A jury convicted him of third-degree murder on April 30, 2019—a decision that the Somali American Police Association claimed stemmed from racial bias.