National Guard Deployments: Why Chicago, Portland Aren’t Minneapolis скачать в хорошем качестве

National Guard Deployments: Why Chicago, Portland Aren’t Minneapolis

Medaria Arradondo: 'These soldiers cannot occupy our cities indefinitely' Former Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo explains why he wanted National Guard assistance after George Floyd's murder and the ways it's different from the deployments in Portland, Memphis and Washington, D.C., under Trump. by Kevin Johnson, National Press Foundation In the hours after George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officers, then-police chief Medaria Arradondo was forced to make a difficult decision: to request the assistance of the National Guard to secure the city as riots turned deadly. “We had suffered unprecedented unrest like we had never seen in the history of our state … and I no longer had the capacity as police chief to help our city stay safe,” Arradondo told the National Press Foundation’s Federal Action, Local Impact journalism fellows program. Five years later, there are no fiery emergencies requiring military intervention in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Portland, Memphis and Los Angeles. Yet, the Trump administration has pushed ahead with deployments in those Democratic strongholds, bypassing state officials and falsely citing rising violent crime and civil unrest, actions that Arradondo says threaten local sovereignty and fragile community trust in law enforcement. “It is my belief that having our National Guard soldiers and citizen soldiers and airmen come into your city works best when local authorities have both retained operational lead and an operational voice,” Arradondo said. “I strongly believe that those who are closest to the community are in a much better position to lead.” Arradondo noted that there have been many high-profile cases in which the National Guard was called upon – such as responding to Hurricane Katrina (Title 32), but doing so under the Insurrection Act is much more rare. Under Trump, federal authorities have tapped soldiers from other states for the deployments, circumventing state control of local National Guard units, prompting a flurry of lawsuits challenging the action. Washington, D.C., is one of the cities that has taken legal action, and Mayor Muriel Bowser, in a separate appearance at the NPF event, said out-of-state troops on city streets was not acceptable. “When you bring in soldiers to an urban community, environments that they’ve never been trained for, that creates a lot of different dynamics,” Arradondo said. “My test as chief was a really three-part approach: Is there an operational necessity? Do we need them first and foremost? Is there a community legitimacy, meaning that is the community going to look at our soldiers coming into our communities as a protective presence or are they going to look at it as an occupying force? And every leader will have to – whether that’s a chief of police or mayor – is going to have to really make that decision.” Perhaps the most important consideration following deployment is an exit strategy, Arradondo said. “These soldiers cannot occupy our cities indefinitely,” the former chief said. “The National Guard, if they are deployed into cities, and certainly as it was in the summer of 2020 in Minneapolis, they’re a bridge of capacity. I did not as chief have the capacity to deal with just the regular 911 calls … there’s all of these things going on.” But Arradondo said the soldiers should never be regarded as a long-term solution and that communities understand the limits of their mission. “When our National Guard soldiers came in to Minneapolis, it was important that we were giving daily briefings to them, and it was mission specific,” Arradondo said. “You’re going to see National Guard soldiers at this intersection; they’re going to be in this business district … If there was an incident of force, we had promised our communities that we would investigate, look into those and report back to them within 72 hours. Community has to be a part of that and any of those discussions, because eventually the National Guard soldiers will leave, and we don’t want to erode any sort of trust that was there to begin with.” Speaker: Medaria Arradondo, Former Chief, Minneapolis Police Department Summary, transcript and resources: https://nationalpress.org/topic/natio... This fellowship is sponsored by Arnold Ventures. This video was produced within the Evelyn Y. Davis studios. NPF is solely responsible for the content.