A ‘vast, vast void’ in leadership: Audit rips Minneapolis police response to 2020 George Floyd protests

Police didn’t know how many riot weapons fired at protesters

It has been almost two years since Minneapolis police officers brutally killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck in May 2020, and the city is still grappling with the impact of the murder and the resulting protests and riots, which inspired a worldwide social justice movement.

City leadership failed dramatically during the 2020 uprising and officers were left at their discretion to abuse protesters with little accountability, a city-commissioned report released on Tuesday has found.

The leaders of the $230,000 study, conducted by veteran law enforcement officers working with the risk consultancy Hillard Heintze, put it simply.

Everyone, from community leaders to police officers to city employees thought “the response did not go well,” according to project manager Robert Boehmer.

Here are the main takeaways from this in-depth look at one of America’s most controversial police departments in a moment of crisis:

City leadership during the protest was ‘rudderless’

Perhaps the single most damning set of findings in the study concerns city leadership.

The report, based on nearly 90 interviews, community listening sessions, 2,400 documents, and the review of over 30 hours of police body camera footage, concluded that many in the city found that the mayor’s office and police department leadership were “rudderless.”

The city had an emergency plan for large-scale breakdowns in public order that was “well written, comprehensive and consistent,” but top officials didn’t appear to follow it as police officers fired riot control weapons at peaceful protesters, and rioters destroyed millions of dollars worth of property.

Errors ranged from the serious to the nearly slapstick, according to the city study, which noted that the police didn’t designate a specific incident commander or other leadership roles to respond to the protests, and officers on the street rarely got intelligence briefings on what was going on or what they should be doing.

In one bizarre incident, fire officials were delayed in their ability to call their crews off the street for safety reasons because leaders couldn’t access a password-protected phone system.

As a result of this vacuum of leadership, many residents banded together to protect neighbourhoods and businesses,  "acting on their own and doing what they thought was needed with very little guidance or even situational awareness,” the study writes.

Requests for National Guard assistance were needlessly delayed

This strange lack of preparedness translated to calls for help from outside as well. Neither the Minneapolis Police Department nor the office of mayor Jacob Frey at first knew the proper process and information requirements to request the Minnesota National Guard, leading to crucial delays.

“The information that’s required by the Guard that’s required to activate personnel, to put them into a civilian situation such as what was occurring in Minneapolis, the information simply wasn’t there on the first day the request was made,” the study found.

(The mayor has said the delay was in part because Minnesota governor Tim Walz failed to take the situation seriously at first.)

Riot control, without the control

These lapses in leadership were felt most glaringly when it came to rules around police use of force. The city study describes something of a free-for-all, where police leaders didn’t know which officers had what riot weapons, and officers weren’t bound by consistent orders on when to use them.

“There was a vast, vast void in consistent rules of engagement or control,” Chad McGinty, a former Ohio State Highway Patrol major and report co-author, told the Minneapolis City Council on Tuesday.

The review indicates supervisors didn’t tell officers when or how they should deploy chemical agents and highly dangerous riot weapons like beanbag rounds and rubber bullets.

Police body camera footage shows that in the absence of such rules, at least one group of officers drove through the city in an unmarked white van firing riot control weapons at people on the street without identifying themselves or issuing warnings.

Another video shows officers celebrating that they were out “hunting” protesters. Many who attended the demonstrations reported being fired upon indiscriminately with tear gas, flash bangs, and riot control rounds, including members of the press.

According to the New England Journal of Medicine, at least 45 people were injured by MPD riot control weapons during the protests, and the city study notes that at least four suffered permanent eye damage.

Officers faced little accountability

Despite these clashes, there was little apparent accountability when officers stepped out of line, according to the report.

The MPD has a policy requiring a use-of-force review every time an officer uses a riot control weapon, but the probe didn’t find any records showing such reviews actually took place. Police leaders didn’t know which officers were carrying non-lethal 40mm projectile launchers, nor who fired them.

What is clear, however, is that numerous civilians were harmed by police during the uprising. A journalist sued the department in 2020, after being blinded by a rubber bullet. This February, the city paid out a $2.4m settlement to Soren Stevenson, a 27-year-old whose eye was shot out by the MPD during a demonstration, as he stood arm-in-arm with protesters.

Despite promises of accountability and widespread reports of misconduct, just two Minneapolis police officers appear to have been strongly disciplined since the protests, one of whom was a female whistleblower who spoke with the press about the department’s “toxic” culture. That’s even though other cities like Austin have filed scores of criminal cases against officers who abused protesters during the 2020 riots.

“From my vantage point, not much has changed since the murder of George Floyd. Despite it being nearly two years later, we’re still trying to figure out as a city what were the lessons we agreed to learn as a community,” University of Minneapolis sociologist Michelle Phelps recently told The Independent, after the police killing of Amir Locke, a young Black man, during a no-knock search raid.

Few are happy with findings

Many in the Twin Cities condemned the report’s findings.

“This report made it crystal clear to me that at city hall, our failures were not structural failures, they were actually failures of leadership,” Council Member Robin Wonsley Worlobah told The Minnesota Reformer.

Even before the report came out, city leaders had been calling for a swift review of police misconduct during the uprising.

“If I had been mayor when George Floyd was killed and Minneapolis burned, I would have wanted to know as quickly as possible: Was there misconduct by police officers or state troopers? Excessive force? Violations of law? Violations of city or state policy by sworn officers? Did the actions of officers protect people or exacerbate conflict? When officers went ‘hunting’ down Lake Street and fired plastic rounds from an unmarked van, were they disobeying or following orders? From whom?” former mayor Betsy Hodges wrote in an opinion piece in 2021. “Most of all, as mayor I would know and would convey to the best of my ability: Has there been any accountability for any of these actions? And where could I have done better?”

The current mayor’s office, for its part, said it welcomed the findings of the report.

“Rebuilding trust between community and local government relies on us taking concrete actions informed by this review’s recommendations,” Mayor Frey said in a statement earlier this week. “As we dig into the findings, I remain grateful to city staff who worked around the clock, navigating a global pandemic, during one of the most challenging and traumatic times for Minneapolis as a city.”

The Independent contacted the MPD for comment.