Revenge of the city that is outlawing police: TOM LEONARD visits flaming Minneapolis

Atlanta police attend a routine call at a fast-food restaurant where a man has fallen asleep in his car, blocking the drive-through lane. 

They establish that Rayshard Brooks has been drinking and handcuff him, but he struggles and breaks free, running away with one of their Taser electric stun guns and, reportedly, firing it at them as he goes. One of the officers shoots the black man twice in the back, fatally. 

A coroner declares it murder and, with protests still happening, the U.S. is plunged into yet another storm about racist police brutality. 

After the death of Mr Brooks on Friday night, crowds torched the diner outside which he was shot. Police fired tear gas and flash grenades at protesters and at least 42 people were arrested. 

Yet these scenes, though shocking, were almost humdrum compared with the devastation wreaked on Minneapolis, the Midwestern city where another black man, George Floyd, infamously died three weeks ago after a white police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, setting off fierce and sustained Black Lives Matter protests across the globe. 

After more than two weeks of chaos, at least 600 buildings in this normally affluent city have been badly damaged or destroyed. Standing beside the charred remains of his factory, Kris Wyrobek told me how rioters and arsonists had ruined a flourishing 33-year-old business in one night. 

That evening, a fully manned fire engine had been just 100 yards away but the fire crew reportedly told Mr Wyrobek’s staff they had been ordered ‘not to engage’. And police? The 3rd Precinct headquarters was only a block away but they didn’t come either.

Soon that building, too, would be burnt down — and another police station almost met the same fate as an outpouring of mob violence left some parts of this city of 425,000 people looking like a war zone in the Middle East, with whole blocks reduced to charred rubble.

The rioters left a five-mile trail of devastation across the south of Minneapolis attacking every building in their path, including many black and immigrant-owned businesses — giving the lie, said officials, to the notion that this was purely a protest against brutal and racist policing rather than an excuse for wanton violence. 

Much as they no doubt shared in the outrage and disgust over the death of Mr Floyd, many city residents and business owners watched in horror as overwhelmed police and fire crews left neighbourhoods at the mercy of rioters. 

Frightened citizens spent nights guarding their houses and businesses, armed with baseball bats and guns, while others banded together to protect their streets. Now the businesses that escaped destruction hide behind anti-looting boards as work begins to repair damage estimated at $500million (£397million). 

You might think the authorities would be rushing to reassure citizens that they can still rely on the rule of law and properly trained officials to maintain order. Instead, to the horror of many, Minneapolis’s ‘progressive’ leaders have taken a different stance. 

Last Friday, the city council voted to begin the process of abolishing the police department altogether and embracing a Utopian ‘police-free future’. Mr Wyrobek now plans to take what is left of his manufacturing firm out of Minneapolis. 

He told me he is disgusted by the failure of emergency services to save the city from the rioters, and dismayed by what its leaders say now. ‘I can’t imagine what they mean by “abolish” and “defund” the police,’ he said. 

‘Maybe they don’t understand what the police are doing, and need to do, for the community to be safe.’ Mr Wyrobek could be the first person in a mass exodus from a city often voted the ‘most pleasant place to live’ in America. 

This gun-packed country, the spiritual home of hard-bitten, quick-draw law and order from Wild West sheriffs to Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry and innumerable Hollywood cops, may now become the first with a major city that dispenses with police. 

There have been previous efforts in the U.S. — notably in Camden, New Jersey, once America’s most violent town — to dismantle troubled police departments. But those forces were amalgamated into neighbouring ones. Never before has there been a plan to dispense with officers entirely.

The leaders of Minneapolis, which prides itself on being a bastion of Left-wing values in a conservative region, sense that history is on their side. The killing of Mr Floyd has been described by some as a modern day lynching, carried out by police, some of whose treatment of black people has apparently changed little since the days when their forebears hunted runaway slaves. 

Although policing in the U.S. is being questioned as never before, some fear moves to ‘Defund the Police’, of which Minneapolis is the most extreme example, may frighten ordinary Americans so much that November’s presidential election is handed to Donald Trump. 

Signing an executive order on Tuesday urging police reform, Mr Trump said the police actually need more money. He said there are a ‘tiny’ percentage of ‘bad police officers’, so the idea of defunding the national police force is wrong and only produces more ‘stoking of fear’. 

He added: ‘Americans know the truth. Without police there is chaos, without law there is anarchy and without safety there is catastrophe.’ 

Desperate not to antagonise the same anti-racism lobby, city leaders across the U.S, including in New York and Los Angeles, are pledging to cut huge police budgets and invest in helping the poor. 

Proponents of such moves point out that the police are rolling in cash — more than $115 billion (£91.4 billion) is spent on U.S. police annually. Police chiefs, for their part, insist they will be forced to cut their numbers, pushing up crime. 

Widespread antipathy towards Trump’s administration and the febrile atmosphere created by the coronavirus pandemic — including unemployment and the stress of lockdown measures — are cited as factors fuelling the crisis here. 

The leaders of Minneapolis say the death of Mr Floyd, who was arrested for allegedly using a fake $20 note, was not a one-off tragedy involving a single ‘bad apple’ policeman but final confirmation the local police are beyond repair. 

Mr Floyd is the 11th person, black or white, to have died at the hands of Minneapolis police since 2010. While the city prides itself on its friendliness and sterling record of philanthropy, critics say this masks some of the most glaring racial inequality in the U.S. 

Minneapolis was originally settled by Swedish and German immigrants but has since become the main home to America’s Somali population. Today, black people make up 19 per cent of its residents. 

City council president Lisa Bender, a 42-year-old who is white and a Democrat, has no time for white people wondering who will protect them without the cops. Asked last week who she would call if her home was broken into in the middle of the night, she replied that wanting to call the police ‘comes from a place of privilege’. 

White people, she added, had to put themselves in the shoes of black people, for whom calling the police ‘may mean more harm instead’. So how does Minneapolis intend to get rid of its police force — which, incidentally, is led by an AfricanAmerican, Medaria Arradondo? 

The dream is ‘community-led public safety’, whereby people will be deterred from crime after money is diverted from the police into social services, housing, jobs programmes and anti-addiction drives. 

Emergency calls could be redirected so that addiction experts or nurses would be sent to deal with drug abuse, trained counsellors would respond to mental-health calls and social workers would address domestic violence cases, rather than armed cops. 

All well and good, sceptics say. But who will physically break up a fight? And who will answer the call at 3am when an armed prowler breaks into your home, in a city that last year reported 551 rapes? Abolitionists are vague on how violent crime will be tackled, conceding that there may need to be a small cadre of armed public servants (not called ‘police’, mind) to do the job. 

Another woolly suggestion is to rely on a glorified Neighbourhood Watch in which ‘neighbours look after neighbours’ — challenging strangers, patrolling their streets and even arming themselves to protect businesses. The notion of abolishing the police may strike many as naive and hugely dangerous. But even many serving officers admit U.S. policing needs significant reform.

Few would deny that police tactics are too confrontational. Most police departments — there are 18,000 across the country — have policies stating where and how officers can use force, but these vary wildly (some controversially still allow chokeholds), as does training. 

U.S. police have also become increasingly armed — as has much of America’s citizenry — with a fearsome arsenal of army-surplus hardware, and are drilled in militarystyle tactics. Critics are incensed that U.S. police have ‘qualified immunity’, a legal doctrine that tends to protect offending officers from ever being sued. 

‘Bad apple’ officers are further protected by powerful and aggressive police unions that make it very difficult to sack them. While few disagree that U.S. police use excessive force, some question whether they are systemically racist. 

Conservative academic Heather Mac Donald says police have to ‘go where the crime is’ — and that is often ethnic minority areas. The Minneapolis Star Tribune recently published an opinion piece co-authored by Peter Bell, a former leading local official and an African-American. 

‘When it comes to matters of criminal justice, an allegedly racist system is not the reason so many blacks are caught up in it,’ they wrote. 

‘The fact that African-Americans commit far too many crimes is the reason.’ On the streets of Minneapolis, I found precious few local people — black or white — who shared their local politicians’ dream of doing away with police.

Even Kimuel Hailey, an AfricanAmerican radio DJ and bus driver who was manning a stall selling Black Lives Matter hats and T-shirts at the spot where George Floyd died — now a sprawling shrine strewn with flowers — thought it was a ‘bad idea’. 

‘A lot of the criminals will come out in the open and do harm. And they’ll need a lot of social workers to answer all those calls,’ he said. Mr Hailey said he’d lived for years with petty police harassment. 

‘I know there are some good cops but a lot of them here don’t know how to deal with black people and they need to be made accountable for their actions.’ 

Near by, hotel worker Simone Simon, 39, wearing a George Floyd badge, said: ‘I walk around Minneapolis at night and I feel comfortable. I don’t believe I would if they substantially weakened the police.’ 

Although she would like to see changes in how the force handles complaints, she added: ‘They do such great things for the community, like volunteering in schools. They help keep things peaceful.’ 

Like many I spoke to, Ms Simon disagreed with the city council’s view that Minneapolis suffered from endemic racism. But she is white, as is Chris Pollard, a 50-year-old business consultant and supporter of the council. White people, he told me, don’t notice the racial injustice as they are ‘left alone’ by the cops. 

A supporter of the movement to defund the police, Mr Pollard sees many of the changes as bringing America’s cops closer to British police, such as the expansion of community support officers and directing well-trained armed officers to respond to gun crime. 

Nationally, a recent poll showed that only 16 per cent of Americans, and 33 per cent of black people, support cutting police budgets, let alone abolishing them. Electorally, the police ‘abolishers’ are playing right into Trump’s hands. As for Minneapolis, it may not be a contender for America’s most pleasant city for much longer.