Melvin Carter, the mayor of St. Paul, Minnesota, took office in January, 2018, promising dramatic change to the city’s racial and economic inequities. Carter, who is forty-one and St. Paul’s first black mayor, was sworn in on the same day as Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a civil-rights lawyer who also ran on a progressive platform. In the wake of a series of high-profile police shootings in the area, including the killing of Philando Castile in a St. Paul suburb, in 2016, Carter instituted reforms of his city’s police department, to decidedly mixed results. (His director of “community first” public-safety initiatives resigned and criticized the mayor for insufficient support at the beginning of 2019; leaders of a local civilian body that looks into police misconduct stepped down six months later.) Now, however, following the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, on May 25th, police and protesters have been involved in violent conflicts across the Twin Cities.
On Tuesday, I spoke by phone with Carter about the state of relations between the St. Paul police and the city’s African-American community. Carter, whose father was a St. Paul police officer, has said that all four officers who were present at the time of Floyd’s death should be held responsible for his killing. Last Saturday, Carter appeared at a press conference with Frey and Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, in which he said that every person arrested at protests in St. Paul on Friday night had come from out of state. Carter later walked back that statement, saying that he had been given inaccurate information at a police briefing. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the need for further police reforms, whether it was helpful for Minnesota to call in its National Guard, and why he initially blamed outside agitators.
Why have there been so many of these incidents in the Twin Cities area recently?
I think the bigger question is why there have been so many of these incidents in the country, over and over and over and over again. Not just over these ten years. We have seen, over the last decade, cell-phone video after cell-phone video, but the only thing that is new is cell-phone cameras. My father and my grandfather and my aunts and uncles and my great-grandfather would tell you that they have lived through moments like this. We have seen these moments in the Twin Cities, and we are traumatized by them, and we are frustrated by them, and we will be until we prove our justice system’s capability of holding people accountable when the life of a black man—an unarmed and unaggressive African-American man—is taken by law enforcement. And I don’t just mean Officer Chauvin. I mean all four of them, because I am astounded by the fact that all of humanity can look at this video and be disgusted, yet there can be three officers guarding the scene and doing nothing to intervene. And so it seems that until we prove our ability to hold people accountable for the value of black life, and until we prove our ability to create deep systemic changes to prevent this same scene from playing out over and over again, we will continue to be stuck in this disgusting and vicious cycle.
What reforms have you tried to put in place, and what further reforms are needed?
My father is a retired St. Paul police officer, so I ran for mayor both as someone who grew up praying for our police department and the safety of our officers every day and as someone who knows what it feels like to get pulled over for driving while black. The question you just asked is a central part of why I ran for mayor in the first place, and what our administration has been up to since Day 1. In the first two months of our administration, working in partnership with our police department and neighbors and police chief, we completely reviewed and revised our police department’s use-of-force policies, through a public-engagement process. We are one of the only law-enforcement agencies that I am aware of that has asked community members to weigh in on what our use-of-force policies that govern our police officers should be. And we have expanded our civilian oversight of the department and worked very hard to expand our view of public safety beyond just showing up to catch somebody after something bad happens. We are saying, “How do we proactively invest in our community, both the physical space and the people, so that we have done the work on the front end?” It isn’t just about us responding to someone calling 911. Our public-safety philosophy in St. Paul centers around reducing the number of times we have to call 911 in the first place.
You asked the question of how these officers could sit and watch this while most people who saw the video were outraged. Do you feel like you have insight into this, or is this something you have talked to your father about, if he is still with us?
My father is still with us. His name is Melvin Carter, Jr. He patrolled the neighborhood that I went to school in and lived in and went to church in and went to the grocery store in and knew intimately—the neighborhood he himself was raised in. There were Friday nights where our phone would ring at eleven or midnight, and someone holed up somewhere would say, “I am only giving myself up for Sergeant Carter.” They knew him. They trusted him. They knew that, while he would hold them accountable for their actions, he would treat them with respect and dignity.
It’s a rhetorical question of why is it that three officers can just sit there while Officer Chauvin so casually squeezes the life out of George Floyd. We had the national-security adviser, [Robert O’Brien], tell us a couple days ago that he thinks the challenges of policing in America are limited to a couple bad apples. If Officer Chauvin was in the video by himself, you might be able to call him a bad apple. But the fact that there are three other officers at the scene who don’t see anything wrong with what is going on undeniably points to a culture of abuse, a culture of violence, a culture of aggression and escalation that we all know is the ugly part of the history of policing in America, and that we cannot accept as a part of our future.
Have you talked to your dad about this?
Constantly, yes. Like I said, we have a great police department and work very closely with them. Our chief always asks our officers three questions: Were your actions reasonable? Were they necessary? Were they done with respect? And every police officer I know—from my father to our chief to the officers who provide my security detail to the officers in our community today protecting protesters’ rights to peacefully protest—is disgusted by that video. I was talking to an officer the other day who said that he went to work every day with the knowledge that he could be injured on the job. And that is part of the work, but he said he would be really upset and disgusted if he were injured on the job about something some other knucklehead in some other department did.
Is there any tension between what you are saying about this culture running deep, as seen by the officers sitting around and watching, and your feeling that all the cops you know are just people trying to do their best?
The change absolutely needs to be very deep and systemic. Former officer Chauvin and George Floyd had just a heartbreaking interaction. And we have to know that that interaction is symbolic of a much bigger picture and much bigger problem. I was sharing with some friends that my grandfather was a Pullman porter. He was a Navy vet and an accomplished musician who played his trumpet for four different United States Presidents. But, instead of trying to go seek fame and fortune as a musician, he stayed home and worked as a janitor in our local public schools for thirty years. When he worked as a Pullman porter, his name was Melvin, Sr., but nobody knew that, because they called them all George. There is a movie called “10,000 Black Men Named George” that chronicles this history. No matter who you are or what you do. The reason this is so deeply personal for me and so many people is that every African-American lawyer and accountant and painter and athlete and musician and certainly mayor in this country knows that, minus this suit and tie, I am George. I literally am George.
Our call has been to peace. We obviously don’t want to see folks destroying things. We won’t allow it, and we won’t accept people running through our neighborhoods and destroying our barbershops and restaurants and family-owned businesses. But we are not asking people for patience, and there shouldn’t be patience.
Do you have a sense of why an officer like Officer Chauvin remained on the force, despite the number of complaints against him? Do you think that the way complaints are addressed needs to be reformed? Is this the same in St. Paul?
Look, absolutely. I absolutely have a sense of why that officer is still there. And this is our call. As we call people to peace but not to patience, we should not be patient with the structural inequities and racism and microaggressions, and certainly not with the legal or court precedents or the obstacles in police-union contracts all over the country, that prevent us from holding people accountable when this happens. The president of the police union in Minneapolis wrote a letter to his members articulating his frustration that the national press wouldn’t smear George Floyd as a “violent criminal.” And, as long as we have that element there, and people like that are the stewards of the contracts between police unions and cities, we are going to be frustrated with this.
And my hope is that the folks who are in the streets and screaming and posting and are desperate to make sure the world knows that George Floyd should still be alive, and that those officers must be held accountable—my hope is that they are never patient with us and never accept slow and incremental change. And that, when we see these protests stop, it won’t be because of what the President suggested yesterday about sending federal troops in to “dominate” our cities—that is insane. It will be because we have eliminated the reasons and purpose that cause people to feel so traumatized over and over and over again.
Is it helpful to bring in the National Guard in situations like this? Are they better or worse trained for this stuff than your officers?
Our National Guard has been very helpful for us, honestly. We have asked them to come in and help us secure strategic locations and government buildings and spaces like that, and our neighborhood commercial corridors, as well. But our goal . . . And I mentioned my father, and this is the paradox—is that I live on a block where on occasion I hear shots fired. I had my house burglarized a couple years ago. I need a police department and officers I can trust. I need officers who recognize my humanity and really know our neighborhood. If our lives are on the line, then we really, really need them to show up in the first place knowing what is right for the community. Because our police officers are the ones in our community day in and day out, and are the ones who know our neighbors and community organizers and leaders—our police chief always talks about the bank of trust we will have to put a lot of deposits in before we ever have to take a withdrawal out. Our goal wasn’t to send the troops in to dominate. They are providing a security detail so our officers can maximize their capacity and be on the front lines doing that dual mission of protecting protesters’ rights while preserving and maintaining our basic rights to life, health, and safety.
You initially claimed that all the people who were arrested last Friday night were from out of town, which turned out not to be true. You said you were given bad information. Have you made any attempts to insure you are given better information, and do you understand how that happened?
Yes, of course. We have installed protocols to make sure that we have accurate information and we are able to move on accurate information. My goal has been to communicate directly with accurate and timely information, so I have shared what I know when I know it. When I found out that wasn’t true, I came back and said I found out something new. In the end, though, we have two different groups of folks right now. We have those moved out into the streets by a genuine and insatiable desire for justice. And then we have people setting out into the streets with the goal of breaking a window or starting a fire and creating trauma in our community, which only further traumatizes the same communities that have already been traumatized over and over and over and over. No matter where you sleep, if you are willing to burn down and threaten our local businesses and libraries and churches, then you are an outsider to me.
But you don’t know why the initial information was bad?
We are working to get to the bottom of that, and our law-enforcement partners and the police department are all working very hard to trace how all of this is being coördinated, and how those folks are tragically taking the focus away from where it ought to be. It ought to be on the trauma and tragedy of George Floyd’s life. It ought to be on holding those four officers accountable. It ought to be on those sweeping systemic changes that we were just talking about. We are working to get to the bottom of who is trying to take that focus off and be destructive in those same communities. And we want to make sure they are not able to do that. And we are eagerly awaiting information regarding that.
How concerned are you that some of the same communities that were hit hardest by the coronavirus will be hit hard again after these protests?
You know, that is the question. I am very worried about the possibility that this will become a major superspreader event. Our goal is to ramp up our testing and treatment capacity. We are fortunate in Minnesota that we had a governor who took strong action early. That helped us to flatten the curve while our health-care professionals have boosted our testing and treatment capacity. But, yes, there is a great threat and likelihood for this to result in a spike in cases in a way that further traumatizes and victimizes all of those communities that we are working to stabilize.
Race, Policing, and Black Lives Matter Protests
- The death of George Floyd, in context.
- The civil-rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson examines the frustration and despair behind the protests.
- Who, David Remnick asks, is the true agitator behind the racial unrest?
- A sociologist examines the so-called pillars of whiteness that prevent white Americans from confronting racism.
- The Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi on what it would mean to defund police departments, and what comes next.
- The quest to transform the United States cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police.
