Thread by @UR_Ninja

“They came and walked up on us and said they’ll ‘Trayvon Martin our little Black asses.’ His exact words.” A Downtown 100 youth retelling an encounter with @MinneapolisPD

NEW -- Part 4 in the Series: 21st Century Jim Crow in the North Star City unicornriot.ninja/2021/targeted-…

As explained in Part 3 of this series—Minneapolis’ Downtown Dark Alliance—a program called SafeZone began with cutting-edge surveillance technology when Target donated 30 cameras to the city, & grew into a citywide public-private surveillance state. unicornriot.ninja/2021/minneapol…

#Minneapolis: The Downtown 100 Initiative (DT100), an extension of SafeZone, is essentially a criminal registry compiled of downtown’s top ‘livability crime’ repeat offenders. #Thread 🧵

DT100’s targets are tracked by a team made up of police, prosecutors, probation officers, social workers, and business community representatives who meet weekly to share intelligence and updates on individuals caught up in the program. #Thread 🧵

A formerly homeless youth, Will Menday, was a participant of some of the DT100 meetings, he said to @peoplepowerpod1: "It’s almost like being an invisible man in a Ku Klux Klan meeting."

https://twitter.com/peoplepowerpod1/status/1444698104209543172

In 2015, youths on the DT100 list, with support from arts nonprofit Kulture Klub Collaborative (KKC), created a short film, Reflections on the Downtown 100, giving them a platform to tell their own stories for the first time.

Youths in 'Reflections' opened up about being profiled thanks to the vast surveillance dragnet created from the public-private partnership between downtown #Minneapolis businesses and cops. #Thread 🧵

Story: unicornriot.ninja/2021/targeted-…

Dr. Keith Mayes, Prof of African & African American Studies at the UofMN, puts contemporary harassment that can have fatal consequences into historical context, saying, “coming out of slavery, vagrancy laws … were critical for white police officers to attack young Black people”.

As mentioned in Part 1 of this series, former YouthLink case managers Anne Kent & Mickella Rolfes, who worked with youth on the DT100, said that the list is actually populated by those who’ve had the most police contacts rather than the most arrests. unicornriot.ninja/2021/policing-…

Kent said police brutality was something she saw often when she first started working at YouthLink. “A lot of the kids that I worked with weren’t necessarily on the Downtown 100, but still experienced police violence and harassment daily.” #Thread 🧵

Kent told the story of a former client who was beaten up badly by the Minneapolis police after walking his bike along Nicollet Mall in front of Target’s flagship downtown store. “A kid came in the next day after he left the drop-in [center], beat up physically…by the police.” ↕️

Kent said she got YouthLink’s executive director to talk to then-Minneapolis Police Chief Janee Harteau about the youth being beat up by MPD. Instead of talking, she said Harteau yelled at them & then left the meeting. “We never got to finish that conversation,” Kent laughed.

Recently, a young man we’ll call Abdi (real name is being protected), talked to Unicorn Riot about getting marched off the Metro Transit bus at gunpoint by MPD.

“They came on the bus, walked straight to me, and pulled his gun out, & put it dead on me.”

>unicornriot.ninja/2021/targeted-…<

Abdi, who is now 30, was homeless as a teenager and in his early 20s and ended up in the streets of downtown Minneapolis sleeping wherever he could, including under a bridge. He wasn’t on the DT100 list but found himself frequently targeted by downtown police. #Thread 🧵

Abdi believes MPD was trying to set him up to get him on the DT100. He talked about a white cop who was obsessed with locking him up & said one time the cop couldn’t believe Abdi didn’t have a criminal record.

“You’re 18 and you don’t have a criminal record,” the cop said.

Two years later that same cop who Abdi said was obsessed with locking him up would go on to arrest him for a small bag of weed, which resulted in a felony conviction. #Thread 🧵

According to Dr. Mayes, the DT100 program was never about public safety:
“One of the scariest things for white folks was Black folks’ ability to go about their business … They have a tendency to over-target young Black people ... because they want to control their labor.”

Dr. Keith Mayes said there’s a direct connection between the Black Code laws of the 1870s, crafted to essentially re-enslave Blacks after emancipation, and the post-9/11 SafeZone and DT100 programs. #Thread 🧵

Story: unicornriot.ninja/2021/targeted-…

After the murder of #GeorgeFloyd, & after the uprising claimed Minneapolis’ 3rd Precinct police station & the Target across the street, the hashtag #LootEveryTarget began trending on social media, putting the corporation on blast for their long history of funding racist policing.

Last summer, a group of activists called Concerned Shipt Shoppers created an online petition demanding Target CEO Brian Cornell cease all funding to law enforcement, stating Target's investments don't correlate with their statements that #BlackLivesMatter: coworker.org/petitions/targ…

Although Target said they stopped directly funding the Safe City programs in 2015, it told Bloomberg Businessweek it was sticking with police and wasn’t abandoning its investments in law enforcement, while claiming to push for reforms. #Thread

Full story: unicornriot.ninja/2021/targeted-…

See the rest of the ongoing #investigative series '21st Century Jim Crow in the North Star City' by contributor Marjaan Sirdar, @peoplepowerpod1, here: unicornriot.ninja/21st-century-j…