After two years of investigation spurred on by the brutal police murder of George Floyd in 2020, the Minnesota Department of Human Rights (MDHR) has released a report exposing how the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) engages in “the illegal practice of race discrimination in violation of the Minnesota Human Rights Act.”
The MDHR report outlines how oppressive colonial conditions in Minneapolis are maintained for the benefit of the white population through a pattern and practice of police force, stops, searches, arrests, covert social media surveillance and other violent tactics used to oppress, murder and control African (or Black), Indigenous and colonized peoples.
This unceasing, genocidal violence is innate to “the colonial mode of production” as laid out by Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party, Omali Yeshitela.
Violent colonial police tactics used against Africans today are part of the the long trajectory of colonialism dating back to white-led slave patrols, lynchings and the centuries-long European practice of theft of people and resources from Africa.
The foundation of our current world economy is built on the enslavement and exploitation of African people and the genocide of Indigenous people. The MDHR report is one example of the continued exploitation of African people required to support the colonial-capitalist system.
During a two year period of January 2020 through February 2022, African, Indigenous and other colonized populations comprised approximately 42 percent of the Minneapolis population, but accounted for 93 percent of MPD related killings.
Africans make up 19 percent of the Minneapolis population, but account for 63 percent of “use of force” by the MPD, exemplified by the fact that Minneapolis police used higher rates of chokeholds and “chemical irritants” on African people when compared with white people.
MPD officers search, cite, arrest and use force on African people at a rate which the report admits “is significantly disproportionate to the size of the Black population in Minneapolis.” Minneapolis police officers searched African people or their vehicles almost twice as often as they did white people.
The report discloses that Minneapolis police utilize “covert social media accounts” in an effort to “surveille and engage Black individuals, Black organizations, and elected officials unrelated to criminal activity (sic), without a public safety objective.” This hideous colonial practice is a continuation of COINTELPRO and counterinsurgency designed to keep African people from organizing and fighting for self-determination.
While Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey feigns horror and disgust at the findings, the African People’s Socialist Party has long maintained that this is how the colonial-capitalist system was designed to work; these findings are not an aberration or a mistake. Rather, this report sheds light on the true nature of the colonial oppression on which colonialism and white colonial-settler governments such as the United States were built.
The Uhuru Solidarity Movement is the organization of white people under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party, working for reparations to African people as a stand of solidarity with the struggle against colonialism.
We in the Uhuru Solidarity Movement stand in complete unity with the continued struggle for all African and colonized people to live their lives without fear of colonial violence and murder enacted by domestic military forces known as the police.
The African People’s Socialist Party is fighting for power in the hands of the African working class. We support the call for black community control of the police, the democratic right of the African community to hire, fire, train and discipline any and all security forces that operate within their communities.
We unite with the demand for reparations to African people for centuries of oppression, exploitation and colonial violence that continues to this day. Join Uhuru Solidarity Movement! Unity through Reparations!