A white Minnesota state senator and former sheriff downplayed racism and police violence in a news conference Tuesday on the topic of police reform — and promptly drew criticism from an African-American senator.
At one point during the news conference, Sen. Bill Ingebrigtsen, R-Alexandria, seemed to suggest an equivalence of black-on-white racism from black suspects toward white officers.
“As far as racism, I just, I think it’s just a sidebar here is what it is, and I’m sorry to say that,” said Ingebrigtsen, who sits on the Senate’s judiciary and public safety committee and served as Douglas County sheriff for 16 years. “You’re not gonna wanna hear that. I want somebody to be treated exactly the same as somebody who’s whatever color. There shouldn’t be any color involved here.
“In fact, I guess I could say that I happen to be very close to an officer that responded to a Grand Forks incident that happened two nights after the George Floyd incident where a black man was being evicted out of the house and killed a white cop. I guess that’s part of the job. It’s a horrible part of the job. I didn’t see a whole lot in the media about that. Not a lot. So, is there racism? Probably so. Maybe it’s all over the place.”
The suspect in that killing, Salamah Pendleton, 41, of Grand Forks, N.D., has a history of run-ins with, and even violence toward, police officers, but there doesn’t appear to be any public information suggesting race was a factor; police were serving an eviction order when he opened fire. Pendleton is black; the officer he’s charged with killing, Cody Holte, is white.
State Sen. Jeff Hayden, DFL-Minneapolis, took issue with Ingebrigtsen’s words.
“It is insulting to suggest that racism is a sidebar to the pattern of police violence from the MPD against black and brown communities,” said Hayden, the Senate’s assistant minority leader. “Structural racism is a central issue in need of investigating, and our colleagues in the Senate majority would know this if they would make any effort to engage with members of the People of Color and Indigenous Caucus on criminal justice and policing reforms.”
The stated point of Tuesday’s news conference was for Senate Republicans to announce they’ve asked the U.S. Department of Justice to begin a thorough investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department.
Normally, the type of “pattern-or-practice” probe they’ve called for would be done by the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division “to reform serious patterns and practices of excessive force, biased policing and other unconstitutional practices by law enforcement.” In other words, the same issues that many Democrats — including Hayden — as well as police critics, Black Lives Matter causes and others have been asking for.
Republican senators have faced criticism from Democrats for not agreeing to as many changes to state policing laws as Democrats want. At the news conference, which also included Sens. Dave Senjem, R-Rochester, and Scott Newman, R-Hutchinson, they seemed to be trying to position themselves as hardly obstructionist in the matter, but as also seeking to probe the issue, which came to the fore of the state and the nation in the wake of the death of George Floyd on Memorial Day.
However, that message was immediately a bit confused when the very announcement of the news conference said the federal probe should look at “specifically, the department’s response to the riots that followed George Floyd’s death.” At the news conference, the senators suggested at least part of the focus should be on the Minneapolis City Council and Mayor Jacob Frey and their posture toward the police department, from Frey’s proposed funding for new officers to the city council’s recent shift in favor of dismantling the entire department.
Ingebrigtsen downplayed the notion of racism at several points in the news conference.
The first time the question was posed, he said this: “As far as the racism in Minneapolis, I don’t know exactly the numbers … but I think the police shootings that result in death nationwide are less than one and one half percent by police officers, period. … Most of the crime that you do see is race-on-race. In other words, black-on-black and white-on-white.”
Gov. Tim Walz earlier this month directed the Minnesota Department of Human Rights to perform exactly the type of probe that the Republican senators have asked the feds to do. The senators said that investigation couldn’t be trusted because Human Rights Commissioner Rebecca Lucero has already said systemic racism exists in the department.