Last Tuesday, an independent audit of the Minneapolis riots was released. The 86-page document was created by the Hillard Heintze firm after auditing nearly 100 interviews, more than 30 hours of police body camera footage, thousands of documents, and discussions with, and among, focus and listening groups.
The overall impression was “that did not go well”.
Despite the city having a “well-written, comprehensive, and consistent” emergency plan, the audit found that none of the leadership (Mayor and Governor) or responders (Police and Fire) worked the plan.
“The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry”
– Robert Burns, adapted from To a Mouse.
The Minneapolis riots flared up with little warning at the end of May in 2020. Fueled by the medias – social and news, the riots took over parts of Minneapolis and St. Paul for 10 frightening days. Activity surrounding the riots spread to Duluth, then coast to coast, even flaring up protests in other countries, all amid a pandemic.
How did it go so wrong? The reality is, plans are no good unless they are preached and practiced, frequently. Usually, these emergency response plans are created with tabletop dramatizations with response leaders over-confidently predicting what will happen and what their response will be. Not unlike a group of young boys playing G.I.Joe. The plans were likely typed up, distributed, and filed away. The report highlights that the Minneapolis Police Department had no civil disturbance team and had not offered crowd control training to their officers for nearly 4 years (noting that training should have taken place in January of 2020 but was cancelled due to COVID). Officers responded without riot gear, and without using the standard Incident Command System that all emergency responders use, statewide.
The audit puts the blame on Mayor Jacob Frey for not “ensuring the appropriate implementation” of the plan. The Office of Emergency Management also dropped the ball “minimally engaging in its coordination role.” The report also stated that the Minneapolis Police Department, after the crisis started developing, still did not create any formal plans or hold a planning meeting to discuss what to do with the unraveling riots.
The findings of the audit used one word repeatedly: communication. Robert Boehmer, the project manager for the audit said, “They weren’t getting information, they weren’t learning what was going on across the city, weren’t learning what was going on perhaps on the other side of the precinct, and they weren’t getting a lot of information from leadership on what they should or shouldn’t be doing.”
Neither the police nor Mayor Frey knew how to request support from the Minnesota National Guard, and Governor Walz, a National Guard member, offered no assistance until the crisis had grown too far out of hand.
The audit shares that communication on the ground with officers was ineffective and inconsistent, they were given no rules of engagement, supervisors didn’t know which officers had what weapons, and while the riot was taking place other typical emergency calls weren’t being responded to, at least not in an expedient way. And the public was left in the dark, with neither the city nor the police offering any briefings – leaving many business owners and some property owners feeling they had to fend for themselves to protect their property.
The MPD response may have been uncoordinated but the officers on the ground were valiant, it’s the police leadership that shoulders the brunt of the blame. The report shares some of what the officers endured during the siege and it is truly frightening.
During one incident the SWAT team was trying to get to an injured woman outside the ransacked Target store. The officers formed a human barrier around the injured woman as they loaded her on a flatbed cart found in the area, and transported her to the SWAT van. During this, the crowd was throwing plastic water bottles, rocks, concrete chucks, bricks, fireworks, glass bottles, and other objects at the officers. In the bodycam footage, it was noticed that those throwing the items stayed toward the back of the crowd using the non-violet protestors in the front of the group for coverage. It was also noted that many of the plastic water bottles that were thrown were frozen – whether they were brought there frozen with the intention of keeping them cold during the day or to be a more dangerous weapon is unclear.
The audit offers some clear recommendations to prevent another crisis like this, some of those items are the importance of community conversations, pushing leadership development, using the Incident Command System, developing guidance for crowd control, use of force, mass arrest, among other things, and creating a city-wide crisis communication plan. The report listed several more recommendations as well.
The audit doesn’t mention one important recommendation. Electing leaders that can actually lead. Leaders who are willing to anticipate, communicate, and follow the plans that were created for their benefit. And while no one person can know everything, good leaders surround themselves with those that know things that they don’t.
“The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry” because most think when the plan is done, so are they – but the plan is just Step One.
In Duluth, we were lucky to only see a fraction of what happened in Minneapolis, and that’s not because our Mayor and Duluth Police Department had a foolproof plan to stop riots. It’s because the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Department took the lead and used non-lethal means to disperse the areas where things were starting to turn violent when the Mayor would not allow our own police officers to do the same. Another leader unprepared and afraid to lead. Has the City of Duluth released an audit on its response to the riots of 2020? Not that we’ve seen.
Activist groups are waiting and planning for an opportunity to create more unrest, will Minneapolis and Duluth be ready this time?