“(The police) are a very real menace to every black cat alive in this country. And no matter how many people say, ‘You’re being paranoid when you talk about police brutality’—I know what I’m talking about. I survived those streets and those precinct basements and I know. And I’ll tell you this—I know what it was like when I was really helpless, how many beatings I got. And I know what happens now because I’m not really helpless. But I know, too, that if he (police) don’t know that this is Jimmy Baldwin and not just some other nigger[] he’s gonna blow my head off just like he blows off everybody else’s head. It could happen to my mother in the morning, to my sister, to my brother[.] For me this has always been a violent country—it has never been a democracy.” – James Baldwin
“Fuck Tha Police,” rapped the revered American hip-hop group N.W.A from Compton, California in their seminal debut studio album, “Straight Outta Compton.” In six short minutes, Emcees Ice Cube, Ren, and Eazy-E, serve as effective prosecutors—with Dr. Dre presiding as a judge in the case of N.W.A v. The Police Department—against the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) for possessing the “authority to kill a minority.” The LAPD, like police departments in other American cities, had a notorious reputation for corruption, using excessive force, racial profiling, and harassing minority communities in the Greater Los Angeles area. While some citizens and the police gave it their all to curb the popularity of the track, the song, the album, and the hip-hop group themselves would go on to achieve blockbuster status. In the summer of 2020, after the brutal killing of George Floyd—an unarmed Black man—by a police officer with the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD), the popularity of the thirty-two-year old anti-police-brutality anthem skyrocketed. The very existence of an audio track called “Fuck Tha Police” and its enduring and unwavering appeal among large swaths of Americans over multiple decades perfectly encapsulates the story of modern American policing, especially its relationship to racial and ethnic minority groups in the United States.
In four sections, this Article (1) looks at the history of policing in the United States and the city of Minneapolis; (2) surveys the ineffective internal reforms the MPD and the City have undertaken over the past few decades; (3) proposes urgent and effective responses to prevent the deaths of Black Americans, like Floyd, and other racial and ethnic minorities at the hands of the MPD; and (4) concludes why refunding the community, by defunding the MPD, is a pragmatic and timely response to the MPD killing Black and Brown Minnesotans.