Tag Archives: Bob Kroll

“Cops for Trump”

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As I sit here sharpening the points of my pitchfork and adding a couple quarts of fuel to my XL Tiki torch, in preparation for tonight’s Trump rally downtown, I’m reminded again of the angriest and funniest book written so far on The Trump Degeneracy.

“Everything Trump Touches Dies”, by longtime Republican campaign strategist/hit man Rick Wilson, is a pitiless, acid-tipped dagger assault on Trump and every know-nothing tribal toadie who ever signed on to the reality TV huckster’s bald-faced racism, corruption and incompetence. Sadly, that’s a sub-set of people that now includes at least a portion of the Minneapolis Police Department. (Wilson gets off a hilarious, coffee-out-the-nose line every other page.)

Whether some of Minneapolis’ finest are actually stupid enough to show up downtown tonight wearing their “Cops for Trump” t-shirts, (it is a bit chilly), it almost doesn’t matter. The fact that their union president, Bob Kroll, everyone’s caricature of a right-wing thug cop, has made a point of his and his
“brotherhood’s” full-throated support of Trump is all that matters.

I mean the t-shirts could just as easily read: “Cops for Career Criminals”, “Cops for Shameless Racists” or “Cops for Any Fool Who’ll Stick it to the Libtards.”

Over the past couple decades a few groups in particular have seriously degraded their credibility with the general public. Along with (white) evangelicals blind to the sexism, racism and sewer-level morals of Trump and his ilk, American cops have done a startlingly effective job of discrediting their profession and the pretense that they are politically neutral public servants.

A couple days ago I was listening to (yet another) Ezra Klein podcast, this time with New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell on the event of his latest book, “Talking to Strangers.” At one point Gladwell dives into the serious problem American cops have properly and reliably interpreting the demeanor of people they stop and confront. (Gladwell emphasizes that far too many of the stops are for reasobns that amount to “ticky tack bullshit”.) The case of Sandra Bland, a thoroughly innocent Texas woman stopped (mainly because she was black, let’s be honest) and who later hung herself in jail, is a key drama Gladwell explores.

He dives into the rippling effects of The Kansas City Experiment, an early ’70s protocol that did prove successful in driving down crime in tough neighborhoods. Key was a more intrusive, predictive brand of policing that had the person-to-person effect of treating every police-citizen interaction as a criminal erncounter.

Gladwell

‘s larger point is that the “Minority Report”-like concept of stopping crimes before they happen has seriously mutated over the years into the kind of militarized, nakedly-racist profiling now seen in dozens of “cop-involved” killings across the country. I refer you to Philando Castile here in Minnesota, an interaction that also involved the average not too well trained/inexperienced cop’s role as a revenue-producer for his municipality.

Gladwell points this out as well as a key part of the perversion of police work in recent years. (Over the last 14 years of his life Castile was stopped by cops 46 times, resulting in several thousand dollars of fines. You’re free to check it out and decide how “ticky tack” most of these stops were and ask if any white guy in a Mercedes would have been stopped even once.)

Bad as all that is, Kroll and company’s unabashed, in-your-face-pointy-headed-liberal-wusses “Cops for Trump” move reasserts to every Minneapolis citizen the high likelihood that the cop cruising down the street is carrying a heavy baggage of greivances, along with a badge and a loaded gun. Far from being apolitical and color blind, “Cops for Trump” strongly suggests a fellow traveler/sympathizer with not just appalling corruption and criminality, but what history will eventually conclude is the most open and unapologetically racist Presidency since, well, since Andrew Jackson.

By so shamefully linking themselves to Donald Trump, Bob Kroll’s Minneapolis cops have significantly accelerated the death of their own legitimacy.

Guilty or Not, Mohamed Noor is Not the Most Culpable Party

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As of noon Tuesday the fate of Mohamed Noor was, to borrow a lyrical phrase favored by polite journalists, still “in the hands” of a Minneapolis jury. If I had a service revolver pointed at my head, I’d predict Noor walks, on the by now familiar grounds that he is a cop who “feared for his life” when he saw something blonde and pink raise a hand outside his police cruiser two years ago.

Among beard-stroking legal theorists, the fundamental twist in this case is whether Noor’s conduct — a plainly terrified young cop, his gun out of its holster while responding to a fairly routine call to a reasonably well-lit alley in an upscale part of town with remarkably low levels of violent crime — constitutes a criminal action on his part.

The third-degree homicide charge seems to be a stretch, given the evidence and the average jury’s inclination to give cops every possible benefit of doubt.

The second-degree manslaughter seems a better bet, but to my mind hinges on the part that requires, ” … the person’s culpable negligence whereby the person creates an unreasonable risk and consciously takes chances of causing death or great bodily harm to another.”

This issue there is who created “unreasonable risk” and the mindset that “consciously takes chances of causing death … .” Was young, inexperienced Mohamed Noor wholly responsible for that kind of thinking?

Were I juror, I’d be annoying the hell out of the other 11 by arguing that the “consciousness” that killed Justine Damond was created at least as much by Minneapolis police training/or lack thereof as Noor himself. After all, his defense has heavily emphasized how carefully and completely he followed police training … to protect himself and his partner.

While the jury deliberates, the Mayor and the police union, led by the medieval consciousness of Lt. Bob Kroll, are squabbling over the department’s shall we say, “highly problematic” training practices, specifically the hyperbolic “warrior” training that instills an amped-up combat zone mentality on recruits.

Part of the training, as we’ve learned, involves stark reminders of the ambush killing of Minneapolis cop Jerry Haaf, 27 years ago in what was then a rough section of Lake St. It was a notorious case and a tragedy. But what exactly makes it so relevant to daily police work in 2019 that it is seared into young cops as the sort of thing they must be prepared to deal with every moment they’re on duty, answering routine calls in quiet, upscale neighborhoods on warm summer nights?

Insurance companies, with all their data-driven underwriting may be a bane of modern American life, but the weird thing is that the numbers — the probabilities and risks — usually don’t lie. Which is why I have to wonder what the real world statistics are on the likelihood of another Jeffry Haaf cop ambush in Minneapolis?

Think of it this way: since Haaf’s murder in 1995 how many Minneapolis cops have answered how many calls, eaten at how many greasy spoons, rolled through how many dark (and not really so dark) alleys without being ambushed? Add all that up and what are the odds — really — that a Haaf-like ambush will happen again? Are we into winning-the-lottery odds yet? Lightning strikes twice odds? Peace breaking out in the Middle East odds? Donald Trump saying anything truthful odds?

Your average Bob Kroll will of course fly into a red-faced rage about how, “It only has to happen once! You goddam elitist pussy!” which is an echo of Dick Cheney’s famous “One Percent Solution”. That’s the one where you go to war with an adversary if there’s even a 1% chance he’ll do something nasty.

Where this leads is the obvious answer to who is most responsible for the death of Justine Damond? A young, inexperienced cop with an overactive paranoia? Or the city that selected and trained him, firing his imagination him with a war zone mentality?

Even a conviction of Noor will do little to nothing to prevent the next cop, “fearing for his life”, from gunning down some unarmed  citizen. What will have some impact though is an enormous civil verdict — $10, $15, $20 million or more — against the city for its responsibility in consenting to police recruitment and training that instills more terror than competence in the people it badges and arms to “protect and serve.”

 

It’s Time for an All-Female Police Force

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It’s no surprise that “What to do about the police” has become a the hottest topic in the current Minneapolis mayoral race. What is surprising, and as dismaying as it has always been, is the still pervasive thinking that police brutality or to speak more broadly, “the police culture” will be revolutionized by changes that are in no way revolutionary.

There’s an old joke in Europe about the difference between Heaven and Hell. It goes like this:

HEAVEN is a place where the British are the police, the Germans are the mechanics, the French are the cooks, the Italians are the lovers, and it’s all run by the Swiss.

HELL is a place where the British are the cooks, the Germans are the police, the French are the mechanics, the Swiss are the lovers, and it’s all run by the Italians!

The line about the Germans is worth injecting into the conversation about the Twin Cities/America’s police culture, where conventional wisdom continues to turn on the belief that conventional nostrums, properly tweaked, will eventually, some day, some how, produce the result we all want. Never mind that “all” of us hold wildly opposing ideas of what is wrong and what needs fixing.

Following the call-and-response on various Facebook pages or in newspaper comments section is never a good way to start or end your day. In the aftermath of the killing of Justine Damond … by a panicked rookie cop in one of the metro area’s safest neighborhoods … there is a clear Trump base-like percentage of people adamant that the only reasonable response to a terrified rookie cop gunning down a woman in her pajamas is  … you guessed it, a freer license for cops. A less-fettered license to “do their jobs” to stop the overwhelming criminal horror being produced by “non traditional” interlopers, mainly Muslims.

While the majority of us express far (far) more educated, informed and enlightened thinking about “what to do about the police”, the gamut of most-discussed solutions runs from “greater outreach to communities of color” to different “prevention strategies” and so on … and on … pretty much re-repeating every idea ever tried before and hoping this time for a different, better result.

To get all realpolitik about it, it is time for the very fundamental question of whether men, especially young, aggressive males should be policing American neighborhoods to be put on the table for non-facetious discussion. Studies have repeatedly shown that men, young and inexperienced men in particular, enforce the law in a substantially more aggressive, physical and violent manner than their female colleagues.

Put another way, the propensity to physical assertions of authority and dominance is genetic, biological and a fact of human existence.

I’ve been saying for a while now that one of the key red flags for any police applicant should be how badly they want to be a cop. Applying the Hell-is-a-German-police force idea, (non-facetiously), it is a question of the depth of the applicant’s authoritarian psychology that should worry applicant screeners.

The disqualifying issue is connected to how police work has been represented in the press and popular culture for centuries now. Namely as a largely militaristic profession, with unambiguous military-style male authority figures dictating orders and an unambiguous authority lent to every (predominantly male) who can pass a community college-type course and put on a badge. With the badge and gun comes an alpha status unavailable or at least far more ambiguous in most other jobs. This is heroic imaging for many boys.

As in Germany and everywhere else in recorded human society, there are people who can handle this authority-given-by-authority with self-discipline. But in the United States, where cops are under stress from an out-of-control gun culture, there is a much too high a percentage who can not, and the consequences for the regular screw ups of that faction are not tolerable.

Flushing every male out of the entire Minneapolis police force and replacing them with women is a radical idea worth considering. The women may be as young and as experienced as the men they replace, but genetically and culturally women are far, far more likely to use (profanity free) verbal persuasion than a fist to the head or a bullet to the stomach to de-escalate situations.  (What’s the cost of sucking up the men’s pensions compared to the regular pay-outs for excessive force and the cratering community confidence … before the Damond killing?)

Troglodytes like union chief Bob Kroll and the Chicken Little Trump-base percentage living in terror of incipient Sharia Law, convinced the only solution to a rampant minority-driven crime wave is to double down on a military police force (the “Full German” response)  should be treated like the fools they are. Serious changes have to be made and the only thing the Kroll-Trump crowd is serious about is their paranoia.

Violent crime rates have been falling in the majority of American cities for well over a generation, (and here’s another), (and another), and as far as daily police work goes, revenue-creation via citation writing is nearly as important to cities as breaking up domestic disputes and reporting stolen cars. Point being, we don’t need the extra height, weight and muscle of an adrenalized 28 year-old male wearing his first badge and clutching his service revolver in his lap as he patrols … friggin’ southwest Minneapolis … to achieve enforcement results equal to what we’ve got now.

It’s impossible to imagine how the women (the British in the old joke about Europe) could do any worse.

The boys could then have more time to concentrate on getting their Italian act together.