10 years later, lessons of Jamar Clark police killing in Minneapolis live on

Jamar Clark’s eyes peer down on Plymouth Avenue.

His face, forever 24, is plastered to a tree on this North Side street, overlooking the spot where he was fatally shot by Minneapolis police during a brief confrontation in 2015.

Irma Burns returns to the space, now a manicured plot adorned with white crosses and a stone angel, when she wants to feel close to her son.

A decade later, the pain remains acute.

“Some days I can’t get up out of the bed,” said Burns, 63. “I don’t wish this on my worst enemy.”

Clark’s killing marked a watershed moment in the Twin Cities police accountability movement. Protesters maintained an unprecedented 18-day occupation outside the Fourth Precinct police station and hundreds marched in his name, shutting down Interstate 94 amid demands for authorities to release video evidence of the shooting.

Public outrage about the case hastened Hennepin County’s elimination of the secretive grand jury process for charging decisions in police use-of-force cases and heightened public consciousness about police brutality, years before George Floyd’s death by the same Police Department sparked a global racial reckoning.

Without Jamar Clark, she said, the status quo would have persisted and future high-profile police killings of Black civilians — like Philando Castile, Daunte Wright and Floyd — would have been less likely to result in calls for the officers’ firings or garner formal criminal charges.

“That was pretty much unheard of before all this,” Levy Armstrong said.

Shortly after midnight on Nov. 15, 2015, Minneapolis police officers Mark Ringgenberg and Dustin Schwarze were dispatched to the 1600 block of Plymouth Avenue on a report of an assault outside a birthday party.

When they arrived, paramedics were tending to a woman who said she injured her ankle during a domestic dispute with Clark — a statement that changed over time in accounts she has provided investigators. Clark, who was unarmed, approached first responders inside the ambulance before making contact with the two white officers.

They ordered Clark to show his hands. When he refused to remove them from his pockets, Ringgenberg attempted to handcuff him and wrestled Clark to the ground. Police said Clark grabbed the officer’s holstered firearm before Schwarze issued a warning and shot Clark in the head.

The entire interaction lasted just 61 seconds. Clark died the next day.

No body camera footage of the shooting existed because the department had yet to be fully outfitted with the new technology. Investigators never found a video clearly depicting the whole encounter.

Protests erupted overnight, igniting an emotional new chapter in the city’s already tenuous police-community relations. Residents were not inclined to believe the law enforcement narrative this time.

“For many people, that incident brought back memories of grievances and pain they had had with the MPD from years gone by,” said former Police Chief Medaria Arradondo, a veteran Black officer who served as deputy chief at the time.

“I knew very early on this was not going to resolve itself in quick order.”

The morning after Clark’s death, Levy Armstrong and fellow NAACP members door-knocked in north Minneapolis looking for witnesses to the shooting, mobilized concerned citizens on social media and called news conferences to demand accountability.

“It was no longer just a one- or two-day story, where the victim is being painted as a criminal,” Levy Armstrong recalled. “[We forced] much more extensive coverage, with multiple sides being told.”

Young people clogged the police precinct’s front vestibule, refusing to leave until police officials released the names of the two officers involved. What began as a single act of civil disobedience soon sprawled into a full-fledged occupation.

Volunteers dropped off hot meals, cases of water and winter gear. Demonstrators pitched tents and lit fires in the street, huddling together for warmth. Peaceful daytime community dialogues continued for weeks, even on Thanksgiving Day.

Black elders stood alongside a new generation of young activists to lead the call for change.

Allen “Lance” Scarsella III, a 32-year-old Lakeville man, was later sentenced to 15 years in prison for the crime.

After the protest stretched into its third week, Mayor Betsy Hodges ordered public works employees to clear the encampment, citing “increased safety risks.”

Many city officials walked away thinking the situation had finally resolved itself, Arradondo told the Minnesota Star Tribune.

That wasn’t the case.

“We as a Police Department did not do our due diligence to fully engage with those young adults,” Arradondo said, noting that underlying grievances went unaddressed.

Under intense community pressure, then-Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman announced he would no longer send such police use-of-force cases to a secret grand jury. He ultimately decided not to file charges against the officers in Clark’s killing — and was shouted down during a news conference when he tried to explain why.

“The officers needed Clark to show his hands, and it ended up with the officers taking him down,” he elaborated years later, criticizing the tactic. “There were other ways to de-escalate the situation. But my job was to decide if the cops acted criminally, not if I liked the way they handled the situation.”

In clearing them, Freeman pointed to forensic evidence that backed their account that Clark was not handcuffed and had his hand on Ringgenberg’s gun when he was shot. Schwarze, the prosecutor said, fired a round into Clark’s head after Clark continued struggling with the other officer despite repeated warnings to stop.

Andrew Luger, U.S. Attorney for Minnesota at the time, found insufficient evidence to file federal criminal civil rights charges against the officers. That reinforced Freeman’s belief that his office had made the right call, but later acknowledged it was “one of the toughest decisions I made.”

Clark’s family won a $200,000 settlement from the city in 2019, following record-breaking payouts in subsequent high-profile deaths like Justine Ruszczyk Damond, the Australian woman fatally shot by a Minneapolis officer responding to her 911 call.

But in the years to follow, relatives and activists would come to see his death as a fundamental building block in the greater struggle for racial equity and police accountability. Several testified before the state Legislature and even the United Nations about the toll of police violence. They hold out hope that the institution has the capacity for change.

“We became a political soccer ball,” said Eddie Sutton, Clark’s older brother. “We refuse to let it go.”

Ringgenberg remains on the police force today. He never faced any discipline in relation to the shooting. Schwarze has since left the department.

Each year, on the anniversary of Clark’s death, his relatives gather on Plymouth Avenue to honor his life and legacy.

As the youngest of 10 children, Clark was the baby of the family — a beloved prankster always itching to make his family laugh. Despite a troubled childhood, he maintained a positive disposition, Sutton said, often encouraging loved ones to dream big.

On Saturday, exactly 10 years after losing Clark, family members will unveil a permanent memorial bench at the site where passersby can reflect on the movement he helped galvanize.