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The Minnesota Department of Human Rights (MDHR) investigated and found that the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) engaged in a pattern or practice of racial discrimination against Black people over the 10-year period beginning in 2010. Among its troubling findings, MDHR reported that MPD officers and/or officials created and used fake social media accounts to surveil Black leaders and organizations, including the Urban League Twin Cities and Minneapolis NAACP.
As a nearly 100-year-old legacy institution in this community, the Urban League Twin Cities is outraged and deeply offended by the actions of the MPD, as laid out in the MDHR investigative report. We are particularly aggrieved by the surveillance actions listed on page 35 of the report, which describes how police members created false social media accounts to monitor, influence and discredit the Urban League and at least one other Black organization.
This was unwarranted and fruitless. The Urban League has nothing to hide and has always acted lawfully to advance equity, justice and power for Black people in the Twin Cities. But the MPD's surreptitious social media sham also was wasteful of public resources, misdirected, and tone deaf to the real threat, which is policing itself.
MPD did not target any white supremacist organizations during the same 10-year period and to date has not initiated social media surveillance of any known hate groups or their leaders.
This institutional pattern and practice of MPD can only be described as an unchecked culture of racism enabled by department and elected leaders who have been unwilling or unable to control or hold them accountable.
We are grateful to Commissioner Rebecca Lucero and her colleagues at MDHR for their careful and courageous investigation and analysis. But the report presents only a small part of a larger and longer story of arbitrary, violent and too often deadly racial injustice perpetrated against Black people by the MPD. The report documents a 10-year period, but Black people have known and reported for decades that we are subjected to pretextual traffic stops, are more likely to have force used against us during those stops, and that the stops result in more frequent arrests, fines and fatalities than white people suffer in similar circumstances.
