Transformative Change’ Proves Elusive

‘Transformative Change’ Proves Elusive Police reform efforts falter in Minneapolis, yet hope persists.

BY SARAH LAHM

FARRINGTON LLEWELLYN

Robin Wonsley Worlobah at a Justice for Jamar Clark rally in 2016 to demand the indictment and conviction of the Minneapolis Police Department officers responsible for Clark’s murder.

ROBIN WONSLEY WORLOBAH has an incredibly busy schedule these days. The Chicago native, who has lived in Minneapolis since 2014, is not only a full-time community engagement coordinator for the statewide teachers union, Education Minnesota, but she is also working on a Ph.D. in gender, women, and sexuality studies at the University of Minnesota.

Sarah Lahm is a writer based in Minneapolis. Her work has appeared in various local and national publications, including In These Times and The Progressive, where she writes the Midwest Dispatch column.

Still, her eyes light up often with laughter and warmth.

Wonsley Worlobah is running for a seat on the Minneapolis city council next year, as the city’s first Black, female Democratic Socialist candidate. Her candidacy is fueled in part by the years she has spent as a grassroots activist in Minneapolis, working on campaigns for racial and economic justice.

All of these facets of Wonsley Worlobah’s life— scholar, union employee, activist—coalesced on May 25, 2020, when George Floyd was murdered.

Floyd, a Black man, was arrested over his alleged use of a counterfeit $20 bill. When officers tried to fold his six-foot, four-inch frame into the back of a squad car, Floyd resisted, saying he was claustrophobic.

He ended up face down on the street, his wrists shackled together. A white Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes while two other officers helped pin him down. A video taken by a young woman at the scene went viral, sparking a summer of unrest in Minneapolis and around the world.

But it wasn’t Floyd’s death, exactly, that prompted Wonsley Worlobah to run for office. It’s what happened afterward, when efforts to reform the city’s police department seemed more possible than ever— before they quickly collapsed.

Any “transformative changes” in Minneapolis, she says, whether they involved recent pushes for fair wages, paid sick time, or tenants’ rights, came from the community up—and not from “any proactive work from city leaders.”

She aims to change that.

Immediately after Floyd’s murder, the streets of Minneapolis erupted in protest. The police department’s Third Precinct building, home to Chauvin and the other involved officers who were there when Floyd was killed, was burned to a shell on May 28.

For many outside observers, it seemed like a watershed moment. Vicky Osterweil, writing for The Nation in June, expressed awe at the way events in Minneapolis had quickly led to calls to abolish or, at a minimum, defund the police.

There had been riots and protests after other high-profile police killings of Black and brown people, Osterweil notes, including the 2014 unrest that took place in Ferguson, Missouri, after Michael Brown was shot by police while walking home from a convenience store.

We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. And when we’re done, we’re not simply gonna glue it back together. We are going to dramatically rethink how we approach public safety and emergency response.

But none resulted in widespread support for police reform, Osterweil declared, until protesters breached Minneapolis’s Third Precinct building and destroyed it. “I cannot recall another time when protesters took over and burnt down a police station,” she wrote.

In October, a wrinkle in this story developed, however, when federal charges were brought against Ivan Harrison Hunter of Boerne, Texas. Hunter has been accused of inciting violence at the Third Precinct in May, as a member of the rightwing extremist group the Boogaloo Bois.

The Boogaloo Bois are a loosely-knit outfit that manyexperts see as driven by a white nationalist and anti-government ideology. Members of the group have appeared at protests across the country in recent months, including those in Portland, Oregon, and Kenosha, Wisconsin.

United States Attorney Erica MacDonald has accused Hunter of firing multiple rounds from an AK-47-style assault rifle into the Third Precinct building on May 28, before it was evacuated by police, in hopes of inspiring a riot. (A heavily armed Hunter also turned up at a George Floyd protest in Austin, Texas, in early June. He was questioned during a traffic stop but not arrested.)

The developing Boogaloo Bois connection aside, it’s fair to say that the destruction of the Third Precinct inspired immediate action in Minneapolis. Shortly after the building fell, a rally held at a city park featured pro-police reform statements from several City council members, including its president, Lisa Bender.

“Our commitment is to end our toxic relationship with MPD,” Bender told the crowd gathered before her, “and to end policing as we know it to recreate systems of public safety that actually keep us safe.”

Bender’s revolutionary-sounding language was echoed by another city council member, Steve Fletcher, who represents a ward in downtown Minneapolis. In an opinion piece published by Time magazine, Fletcher called for “dramatic structural change” to the city’s police force. He counted himself among others on the council “who are publicly supporting the call to disband our police department and start fresh with a community-oriented, non-violent public safety and outreach capacity.”

Other council members, including Jeremiah Ellison, who, as the son of former Minnesota Congressman and current state Attorney General Keith Ellison, has bona fide progressive credentials, readily chimed in to support the movement.

“We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department,” council member Ellison tweeted. “And when we’re done, we’re not simply gonna glue it back together. We are going to dramatically rethink how we approach public safety and emergency response. It’s really past due.”

By late summer, however, it was clear that Fletcher, Bender, and their fellow council members were not going to deliver on this call for dramatic change.

Wonsley Worlobah believes she knows why.

First, there was a procedural hiccup.

On June 26, a month after Floyd’s killing, the city council voted unanimously to put an amendment to the city’s charter to the voters in November. The amendment called for replacing the city’s mandated police force with a new “Department of Community Safety and Violence Prevention.”

But a somewhat obscure city charter commission stood in the way. This unelected body (whose members are appointed by a Hennepin County District Court judge) must approve any proposed changes to the city’s charter before the public has a chance to vote on it.

When charter members reviewed the city council’s proposal, they decided it wasn’t ready to be put before voters in 2020, meaning no structural changes would be coming to the Minneapolis Police Department any time soon.

To Wonsley Worlobah, this was disappointing, but not unexpected. The authority of the charter commission provided cover for city council members, she says, by preventing them from having to actually follow through on their stated support for radical police reform.

“The charter process is there to give cover to [city officials] when they do not want to move forward with transformative practices,” she argues, recalling a campaign to raise Minneapolis’s minimum wage to $15 that she was a part of in 2016. When an amendment to the city’s charter was proposed in that case, the charter commission blocked it. This gave city council members a reason to also reject the amendment. The city leadership, Wonsley Worlobah learned, is “not there to authorize progressive changes.”

The difference then, she says, was that the movement around the Fight for $15 had anticipated the charter process being used as a blockade against progress. And so activists took the city council to court and won the right to have the amendment for a wage increase placed on the ballot.

In 2017, the Minneapolis city council passed a $15 minimum hourly wage. But the push for police reform has largely stalled. Wonsley Worlobah thinks it is because activists were not as prepared this time around.

“Some of the groups leading the charge, I think, felt that, because we had nine city council members declare nationally that they were looking to do an

alternative model, that they could partner together to create those solutions,” she recalls, before pointedly adding that this hoped-for collaboration “did not happen.”

Although organizations such as MPD 150 and Black Visions Collective had been working on campaigns to abolish the police in Minneapolis for some time, Wonsley Worlobah believes the sense of urgency after Floyd’s death overtook their organizing capabilities.

When city council members declared their willingness to radically alter the Minneapolis Police Department in June, many saw it as the opportunity they had been waiting for, to finally dismantle—or at least defund—the police.

In July, however, Wonsley Worlobah and Ty Moore, a 2013 Socialist Alternative candidate for the Minneapolis city council, raised a note of alarm. The two wrote a cautionary article for CounterPunch magazine, warning that the Minneapolis city council should not be allowed to take the lead on police reform.

Citing a growing disconnect between the city council’s bold talk and a subsequent lack of concrete action steps, Wonsley Worlobah and Moore urged the public to “push back against every attempt to narrowly define the problem—and therefore the solutions—as limited police reform.”

They feared—and rightfully so, it seems—that the conversation would get lost in procedural red tape and promises to tweak (but not radically alter) police operations. What was missing was a clear policy platform, crafted by people on the ground who had been seeking reform long before Floyd’s brutal death was broadcast to the world.

That policy platform must include more than surface-level reforms, the two wrote. As police officers already wear body cameras in Minneapolis, Wonsley Worlobah and Moore called for a plan that addresses the “deep structural racism and class inequalities embedded into American capitalism.” These structural injustices, they argued, lead to police brutality and a profoundly flawed criminal justice system.

“If we would have had a clear proposal, we could have won people over and expanded our options,” Wonsley Worlobah insists. This, in turn, could have allowed those pushing for real change in Minneapolis to avoid the bureaucratic quagmire of the charter process.

But hope is not lost. In September, Wonsley Worlobah and other local activists, including Michele Braley, a leader in restorative justice practices, helped block the city council’s efforts to rebuild the Third Precinct.

REINING IN THE COPS

While comprehensive police reform efforts have stalled in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, other U.S. cities have made significant gains: Houston, Texas: George Floyd grew up here. At his Houston funeral, the city’s mayor, Sylvester Turner, said the local police would no longer be allowed to use chokeholds in the line of duty. Portland, Oregon: In June, Mayor Ted Wheeler pledged that upwards of $12 million would be reallocated from police and city services budgets and put into programs identified by communities of color. He also expressed interest in other reforms, such as banning chokeholds and limiting police gun use. San Francisco, California: Mayor London Breed announced in July that around $120 million would be cut from the city’s police and sheriff budgets over the next two years, with the savings moved toward addressing racial disparities in areas such as housing and workforce programs. Washington, D.C.: The city council passed a host of police reform measures in early June. These include a ban on hiring officers with records of misconduct in other departments and more transparency around the release of names and body-camera footage when an officer-involved incident takes place. —Sarah Lahm

Just months after council members so boldly declared their interest in dismantling the police, a committee within the same council voted to allocate $4.8 million toward a new, temporary Third Precinct building, a few blocks from the one destroyed in May. This was done, Braley says, without any community input—nor any attempt from the police to make amends with neighborhood residents.

She describes a community meeting convened by current council member Cam Gordon, whom Wonsley Worlobah is set to run against in 2021. Representatives from the police and city works departments had been invited, and Braley recalls them going over matter-of-fact details regarding the proposed new precinct building.

This approach caused her “blood to boil,” she insists, because it felt like even the very public murder of Floyd was not enough to disrupt business as usual.

And so Braley, Wonsley Worlobah, and others organized to stop the Third Precinct from being rebuilt, forcing—at least for now—the police department and the city council to rethink their next steps.

When it comes to the future of public safety in Minneapolis, Wonsley Worlobah has a vision for what that should look like: “We want something life-affirming, that does honor people’s basic humanity.” ◆

Rebel Cops

A look at the conscientious objectors of law enforcement.

BY GABBRIEL SCHIVONE At six feet four inches and 290 pounds, Thomas Owen

Baker looks the part of a hulking riot cop. On November 30, 2011, he was assigned to provide crowd control at the Westin Kierland Resort and Spa in Scottsdale, Arizona, for a protest at a conference of the American Legislative Exchange

Council (ALEC), an influential group of private sector representatives and rightwing politicians who draft state legislation to promote their interests.

That day, Baker’s black uniform was soaking up the desert heat of the Arizona winter. At the protest line, his baton firmly in hand, dozens of protesters are looking him in the eyes as they shout: “WE! ARE! THE 99 PERCENT!” Watching the protesters stoically through the plexiglass visor of his helmet, Baker found himself agreeing with them.

“Baker!” a voice calls behind him. He turns to see his supervisor, leaning in to be heard above the raucous chants. “If you want to eat, they have chow for us,” he tells him. Baker walks past a gaggle of mostly white executives gathering to smoke outside the front of the fancy hotel. He is directed to a side door and down a shaded ramp into the hotel basement, where food is being made for the officers on the scene. He sees chefs in freshly soiled white aprons. Custodians in gray jumpsuits. Bussers and maids. All the Black and brown workers who keep the hotel running. Now Baker is among them in his police uniform.

Resentment starts to well up deep inside him.

“I was representing the interests of these rich people upstairs who are making decisions,” Baker recalls, “and I was risking my life to clean up their mess on the street and

providing them security—but I wasn’t fit to eat in the same place as them. I was the help.”

In 2014, the year protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, following the police killing of Michael Brown, Baker quit the force and entered graduate school, where he’s currently completing his Ph.D. in criminology, focusing on police violence, at the University of Missouri–St. Louis.

“If [we are] thinking about the world we want to see,” Baker says in an interview, “we think about a world without the police.” But in the meantime, he says, present-day police should have limited contact with the public, be subject to rigorous accountability methods, and be given intensive competence training.

Most of all, Baker believes addressing the basic causes of socioeconomic inequality to be a comprehensive solution. The institutions that could make police obsolete are those we do not invest in enough: education, medical and mental health care, economic security, housing, community centers, and youth athletics, dance, and art programs. “What we need to do is take a more holistic approach to understanding community safety, and recognize that these other institutions create the public safety that’s required to no longer force public order with the threat or actual use of violence,” Baker says.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest the U.S. policing system is incorrigible, virtually since its inception. Numerous commissions by U.S. Presidents and by police departments themselves—the Chicago Crime Commission in the 1920s, President Hoover’s Wickersham Commission in the 1930s, President Johnson’s Kerner Commission in the 1960s, the Knapp Commission in the 1970s, all the way up to President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing following the Ferguson uprisings—have detailed widespread, fundamental flaws and suggested desperately needed reforms.

All have failed.

It’s not hard to see why. Violence, racism, corruption, and abuse of authority are all baked into the batter of the system. Even one of Obama’s handpicked task force members, Yale Law School professor Tracey Meares, asserted two years after she and her colleagues released their 2015 report: “Policing as we know it must be abolished before it can be transformed.”

POLICE ARE CHARGED with preserving the existing social order, observes historian Sam Mitrani, author of The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850-1894. “I suspect that police who openly side with rebels or revolutionaries—or with abolition today,” he writes via email, “cannot remain police for very long.”

This was the case for Atlanta patrol cop Tom Gissler, who quit the force in July 2020. Gissler had groused about his orders to shake down the Black tenants of the Bedford Pine apartment complex, which provides Section 8 housing, and write up any legal offenses he could find, such as parking tickets and outstanding warrants. Anything to make it easier for the Bedford Pine developers to evict the current tenants and replace the complex with more expensive housing. In turn, the developers promised office space to the police department. His supervisors admitted to the arrangement and derided Gissler’s moral compunctions.

“There was something about that that made me think now, when I clock into work, I’m not doing any good,” Gissler told Mother Jones. “I’m actually doing harm.” The experience jaded Gissler. “It dawned on me that the entire system, the entire thing, was just a shitty mafia system.”

Rebel cops have long been part of the police mix, long before the story of Frank Serpico, whose whistle-blowing on New York Police Department corruption led to the Knapp Commission, was made into a film. In 1885, a year before the momentous Haymarket rally, the McCormick Reaper Works company had employed a group of Pinkerton private security agents who fired on strikers. After the strikers managed to drive off the Pinkertons, police arrested eight of the Pinkertons, for firing on the strikers.

In 1937, a number of Chicago Police Department officers quit in protest following the “Memorial Day Massacre” when fellow officers gunned down ten strikers, wounding dozens, during the opening days of a massive strike against steel companies across the Midwest. In the 1919 Boston police strike, almost the entire city police force deserted their posts to protest a ban on organizing a union, as well as unfair pay and squalid working conditions.

Today, some activists balk at the thought of cops supporting rebel causes. A statement published on Medium this past July by an account called “Copfreenyc” asserted that “there is no room for law enforcement of any kind in our movements.” Days earlier, Nabil Hassein, an organizer with the Brooklyn-based antiprison group No New Jails NYC, wrote, “I could perhaps have been persuaded that in the progressive movement from here to abolition, there is some space for cops to turn against their own role.”

But there are more structural issues at the root of the problem. As Shannon Jones, co-founder of the New York City police abolitionist group Why Accountability, also known as Bronxites for NYPD Accountability, noted in an interview with Gothamist in June: “[Y]ou have a lot of Black people who are cops,

work for social services, work for [the New York City Housing Authority]. But if you look at any city agency, the top levels of city agencies are white people.”

Woods Ervin, an organizer at Critical Resistance, a California-based prison abolition group, agrees. “Policing is harmful to communities, so it doesn’t surprise me that people with firsthand experience in policing would come to that conclusion as well,” Ervin says. “As abolitionists, we’re not centering on individual cops. It’s about the movement of community members seeking to dismantle a system and build up structures that actually keep communities safe, simultaneously.”

Meanwhile, a debate is seething in the modern labor movement about what to do about police within their ranks. Several groups have expelled police unions since the summer 2020 protests, while others remain. Some labor leaders like Bill Fletcher Jr. have argued that organized labor in the United States must address police unions head-on, member to member.

“Any moves to eliminate police unions will certainly be followed by calls to eliminate other public sector unions, including firefighters, postal workers, and teachers,” he wrote.

FOR JAN BARRY, a longtime activist who co-founded Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1967, police dissenters may be just a few steps behind active-duty military and veterans who have spoken out against an unjust system. But one difference between soldiers at home and police at home is that soldiers have managed to organize themselves and carve out a place in social justice movements in past decades, while police dissenters remain isolated and atomized.

Barry left the Army in 1965 and entered the anti-war movement at a time when the nation’s first S.W.A.T. team was created, soon spreading to nearly every police municipality. Later, the 1033 Program administered by the military’s Defense Logistics Agency delivered hand-me-downs to police in the form of surveillance aircraft, vehicles, and weapons.

Seeing police use armored personnel carriers like those he used to see in Vietnam made Barry realize that “they’re treating us like we’re in some other country that has been occupied.” It also made him more determined to speak out and learn to organize at home.

The anti-war movement allowed Barry—who received political education through attending teachins, developing organizing skills, and networking—to find other like-minded soldiers and activists.

But not everyone was welcoming at first. Barry remembers that some activists called him and fellow soldier-organizers hurtful names like “baby killer.”

“Some people in the peace movement would say things like that and didn’t really want to learn anything about other people,” Barry says. “So you really just have to keep reaching out and find people who are willing to understand: If you’re going to have a wider movement, you’re going to have to be inclusive of people who otherwise are thinking in a different perspective—and change their minds.”

Francisco Cantú’s time as a U.S. Border Patrol agent gave him grisly night terrors, leading him to quit the agency rather than continue to participate in violating migrants’ rights. But it wasn’t the stereotypical post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms of jumping at loud noises or experiencing flashbacks. Cantú refers to the “moral injury” of his Border Patrol tenure, an affliction familiar to some military veterans who turned into anti-war activists. “Moral injury is very quiet,” Cantú says in an interview. “It’s something you sit with that changes you from within.” Cantú came out publicly for abolition in a recent article for The New York Review of Books. “The idea of abolishing immigration detention and other cornerstones of border enforcement may sound radical, but it is the only legitimate starting place for negotiation,” he wrote.

The movement seems to be opening up. Former Border Patrol agent Jenn Budd, a fierce advocate of abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Border Patrol, was invited by Maria Puga, the widow of Anastasio Hernández Rojas whom Border Patrol agents beat to death at the San Diego-Tijuana border crossing in 2010, to speak alongside her in front of the border wall in late October 2020. It was the first time Budd had been asked to speak at an activist event like that.

“For me, that was a lot. That makes coming forward about the truth of the Border Patrol worth it,” she says.

“Moral injury is as much an individual responsibility problem as it is a social problem,” says Garett Reppenhagen, a former U.S. Army sniper and executive director of Veterans for Peace. Reppenhagen was the first active-duty soldier to speak out, through then-anonymous blogging, about his experiences in Iraq in 2004, during the U.S. occupation.

Through organizing in Iraq Veterans Against the War and now Veterans for Peace, as well as organizing mutual aid in his neighborhood outside Colorado Springs, Colorado, Reppenhagen has changed course from being exploited as a stalk-and-kill predator for the state, to opposing state violence and convincing others like him to rebel and help build a new society together.

“Hopefully,” he says, “these cops and border agents will also find that through activism service, real service, they can get some of their soul back.” ◆