Minneapolis mayor Besty Hodges used her blog to go after the police in a response to #pointergate.
Hodges tells the head of the police union, though she joins the public in speculating the whole story was an attempt to discredit her, it won’t stop her from holding cops accountable.
There is a critical difference between our good officers who have a bad day on the job, and officers, however few, who have a standing habit of mistreatment and poor judgment when relating to the public, particularly people of color. I am as concerned with the negative effects of this conduct on the police department as a whole as I am with its effects on our community. I am convinced that we can change it, even if it takes years.
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#Pointergate, for those not following, was sparked by a KSTP story claiming the mayor and a get-out-the-vote volunteer were throwing up gang signs when they pointed at each other in a picture.
KSTP said the cops tipped them off about the story. In October, she wrote an open letter to the community saying “some officers abuse the trust that is afforded to them, and take advantage of their roles to do harm rather than prevent it.”
Her blog post lays out four possible paths she could take to appease the head of the Minneapolis police union, but warns she won’t stop pointing, “Because as the internet has documented in great detail, I point. I point a lot. Lots of people point. The President. Bill Clinton. Stephen Colbert. Babies. It is the earliest form of human communication.* I’m not going to stop pointing.”
Her remaining four points boil down to her saying Minneapolis chose a mayor who will continue talking to people with a criminal past she may be unaware of, standing next to young African-American men and “working to raise the standards of police culture and accountability.”
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