Thread by @javimorillo

What are these multi-agency operations if not an opportunity for everyone to abdicate responsibility and point the finger at someone else. Who’s telling the truth? Who knows. || Brooklyn Center’s Request for Mutual Aid scribd.com/document/50305…

The mayor says Sheriff Hutchison is ignoring his pleas to not use tear gas. The Sheriff cites a letter from the mayor he says specifically exempts the multi-agency operation from the city’s ban on gas and flash bombs. Everyone is pointing fingers at everyone else.

We are being told the choice is stark—we either accept chaos and 1k buildings burning or we accept military occupations. The cops need to stop killing Black people and until such a time, we cannot criminalize protest, rage and grief. There has to be a better way

Can we start by not giving cutesy military operation names to operations surrounding reactions to the justifiable outrage that occurs when police kill black people?

When journalists were arrested during last year’s protests, the governor apologized publicly and repeatedly. Now we have le enforcement *announcing* in advance they will arrest members of the media. Now we’re normalizing that? This is bonkers.

Minnesotans, we need to wrap our brains around the fact that our reputation in the country and the world is as a state where it is not safe to be Black. That is our shame. Yes it feels risky to reimagine public safety and transform policing.

That’s a risk, but on the flip side is a certainty and far greater danger: do nothing and we continue to be the state where it is unsafe to be Black.

That extends not only to reimagining policing but reimagining reactions to protest when Black people are killed. We’re the state that not only kills Black people but can’t figure out a way to manage protest that isn’t a choice between chaos and Operation Tear Gas.

To be clear, I do not think there are simple or easy answers. We saw what happened lash year when incompetent leadership allowed chaos to reign—over 1k buildings burned, poor POC neighborhoods destroyed.

But just as we have growing agreement about the need for police to practice de-escalation, we also need protest response to be centered on that approach. Tear gas is not that. Riot gear is not that. Kettering is not that.