2020 Civil Unrest, Protests, Demonstrations, et al.

It was the evening of May 30th, 2020, five days after Officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. An 8 p.m. curfew was in effect, but a group of Minneapolis cops weren’t keeping the peace — they were sowing chaos. Armed with 40 mm “less-lethal” crowd control guns, which fire oversized, foam-tipped rounds, officers roamed the city, looking for an excuse to fire: “The first fuckers we see,” one cop brags, “we’re just handling them with 40s.”

The officers’ own body cams record them taking pot shots at largely peaceful protesters, and celebrating their hits with laughter and fist bumps. Cruising in an unmarked cargo van, one officer imitates Elmer Fudd, Bugs Bunny’s cartoon nemesis, saying: “Be vewy vewy quiet. We’re hunting activists.” A police commander used the same language in a recording captured after midnight: “Tonight it was… ‘We’re goin’ out hunting.’ Just a nice change of tempo,” he said, adding: “Fuck these people!’”

The extraordinary footage was released last week by the lawyer of a man who was caught up in an exchange of fire with police that night. (That man, Army veteran Jaleel Stallings, was exonerated by a jury in September for acting in self defense.) The footage, which was part of the evidence used in Stallings’ trial, also shows Minneapolis cops making racist comments, cursing protesters and journalists, slashing the tires of parked cars — in short, acting more lawless than the crowds they were supposed to be controlling that night. 

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey denounced the “behavior and language” in the videos as “antithetical to the department we are striving to build.” But critics of the department insist the body cams capture “a culture of violence and excessive force among the rank and file” of the Minneapolis PD. Teresa Nelson is legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota. She blasts the “shocking level of impunity” on display in the footage, underscoring the cruel irony that the police that night were brutalizing “people protesting police brutality.” The cops appeared to be caught up, she says, in a warrior mindset of “us versus them.” 

The body cam footage, first reported by the Minnesota Reformer, was provided to Rolling Stone by St. Paul defense lawyer Eric Rice, who says the videos capture the cops’ “malice” toward protesters as well as their reliance on disproportionate violence: “If someone is violating curfew,” Rice says, “they’re not supposed to just be shooting them without warning.” 

The officers’ use of foam-tipped rounds was extremely dangerous, Rice insists. The impact munitions can bruise, concuss, and even kill. “They’re supposed to be less lethal than the live ammunition,” he says. “But they still do carry a risk of severe bodily harm or death.”

The officers would later claim that they were working to “stop looting” and “deter riotous behavior,” but the body cam footage does not support that. Rice says he’s not surprised by the discrepancy. After all, he says, if officers had said what’s apparent from the footage — “’We went out that evening and concealed our presence so people wouldn’t flee and we’d be able to get close enough to shoot them… and we were actually having fun shooting them’ —  I mean, that is an admission to some very, very bad things.” 

The Minneapolis PD did not respond to a request for comment, but an internal affairs investigation of the incidents captured on film is reportedly ongoing.

In one stark moment caught on a police body cam, a line of cops in the street confronts a small group of protesters on the sidewalk, raising their less-lethal arms, which resemble small shotguns. A female protester yells to the police, “We’re unarmed. What the fuck are we going to do to you? We’re out here peacefully protesting. This is fucking America!”