Minneapolis' Native Americans, feeling validated by findings of police bias, want a place at the table

As Jolene Jones listened last week to a U.S. Justice Department delegation describe how Minneapolis police have used more force against Native Americans than against any other group per capita, she found herself nodding along — unsurprised and unmoved.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," said Jones, who works as a voting coordinator at the Native American Community Development Institute.

She said the Native community in south Minneapolis has long had a tense relationship with government — whether federal or local — and a distrust of police. Jones said she has seen officers overreact with Native people over small infringements, talk down to Native girls and rough up Native boys. But Native people rarely file complaints, she said, because when it's an officer's word against theirs, they expect their protests to be promptly dismissed and retaliation to follow.

But as the Justice Department report circulated in the social media groups of Little Earth — the Native community housing complex in the East Phillips neighborhood — Jones found herself fixating on a particularly stark graphic — one that showed how Native people were more often held at gunpoint by police and subjected to significantly more neck restraints, tasers, canines and bodily force than white people. She couldn't help feeling angry.

"We are just an itty-bitty minority in the state and in the city of Minneapolis, and our numbers are that high? I'd like to know why we're being targeted," Jones said.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland flew to Minneapolis last week to announce the results of a two-year federal investigation of the city's police. While 71.7% of traffic stops typically won't result in citation or arrest of any kind, Native and Black Americans were stopped at significantly higher rates than whites — 5.9 and 5.7 times more often, respectively.

Finding racial discrimination in addition to unconstitutional violations committed against protesters, journalists and people with disabilities, the Justice Department will now negotiate a consent decree with the city. As part of that agreement, the Minneapolis Police Department will be expected to take action to erase the racial disparities in its practices. An independent monitor will measure the department's progress, and the consent decree won't be lifted until the city can prove it's in compliance. Change could take years.

When it comes to the findings regarding Native Americans — whose youth see guns pointed at them at rates nearly 20 times higher than at white adults — fixing those disparities will be a tall order. Especially with missing data.

The Justice Department found that after May 2020 when George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police, there was a precipitous drop in the required collection of race data by officers.

Compliance fell from 71% at the time of Floyd's murder to 35% and stayed low over the following two years, according to the report.

The situation could have grown worse after the killing and no one would have known for sure, said Vinny Dionne, street outreach worker with the American Indian Community Development Corp.

Dionne said he believes that police and the Little Earth community had made inroads in the years leading up to Floyd's death. Then, he said, all of that trust was shattered in a matter of a days.

Dionne said it's crucial that the Native community is invited to the negotiating table to help develop the consent decree.

"If we have officers deciding what needs to be done, or the mayor, it's not going to get us anywhere. We need the community holding them accountable," he said.

Dionne said he wants to see more Native officers on the police force, or at the very least more officers not hardened by overwork and trauma. What city officials must understand is that the Native community moves together, with collective will trumping individual opinion, he said.

Native leaders said they haven't heard any invitations from city officials to engage their community on the Justice Department's findings and the next steps.

"To me, it was a waste of money to do all this stuff, to make a report of what we already knew," said Mike Forcia, a building manager at the Homeward Bound shelter for Native Americans. "I suppose you could say we just found out we have cancer. We've been saying all these years that we have cancer, nobody believed, so we went to the doctor and got a big old bill.

"Doctor says, 'Yes, you have cancer. And so now we're at the point of, what do we do about it?'"