On July 14, Minneapolis police officers shot and killed Andrew Tekle Sundberg following a six-hour standoff at Sundberg’s apartment complex in south Minneapolis. Sundberg, who preferred to be called Tekle, was a twenty-year-old Black man whose family says he was experiencing a mental health crisis when he was killed.
The incident began on July 13, when a woman in a neighboring apartment called 911 to report that shots were being fired into her home by Sundberg. The woman, Arabella Yarbrough, reportedly told police that she and her children felt threatened, and a standoff soon ensued between police officers and Sundberg.
While the details surrounding Sundberg’s killing have yet to be sorted out, including the pending release of body camera footage from the officers who shot him, his death has become another flashpoint in the troubled history of the Minneapolis Police Department.
Since George Floyd was murdered by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who has since been sentenced to more than twenty-two years behind bars, there have been numerous other deadly interactions between the city’s police force and area residents. In the meantime, however, there has been little if any progress on substantive reforms to either the police department itself or the broader way in which public safety is handled in Minneapolis.
Instead, it seems we keep ending up in the same tragic place, with little willingness to break what feels like a very entrenched, destructive cycle of unchecked police violence followed by seemingly futile public protests.
Here’s a clear example of that. Minneapolis officials recently announced that they will pour more than $1 million into a controversial approach at reform centered around an early intervention system for the city’s police department.
Early intervention systems for law enforcement agencies are nothing new—nationally or locally. Many police departments across the country already use some type of software program that promises to monitor and analyze police officers’ behavior, in the interest of flagging and ultimately preventing problematic incidents.
It’s important to point out that police misconduct has been rampant in Minneapolis for decades, long before Chauvin suffocated Floyd on a street corner in 2020. Along the way, police and city officials have attempted, at least on paper, to implement other data-centric, early intervention systems that were supposed to provide an easy way to get a handle on so-called “bad apple” officers.
It didn’t work. In 2014, then-police chief Janeé Harteau implemented a computerized early warning system upon a recommendation from the U.S. Justice Department. But rather than inspiring a significant wake-up call among Minneapolis police officers, the program Harteau brought on board appears to have been treated as an HR mandate that officers could and did ignore.
Data on officers’ conduct was entered incorrectly, if at all, according to a report by the Star Tribune. One officer confessed that the early intervention system was little more than a poorly maintained spreadsheet; others noted that the department didn’t have the capacity to track and analyze data regarding officers’ behavior. Some claimed not to be aware of the program at all.
It’s hard to see what will be different this time around.
In the days after Floyd’s murder, when civil unrest roiled Minneapolis streets, former Chief of Police Medaria Arradondo promised to restart the police department’s early intervention system. This time, he told reporters, things would be different, although he didn’t spell out just what that would mean.
Instead, in June 2020, Arradondo and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey announced a new partnership with a local philanthropic outfit run by Frey’s predecessor, R.T. Rybak. Rybak heads the Minneapolis Foundation, which manages charitable donations from wealthy corporations and individuals. His organization was prepared to fund a contract between the Minneapolis Police Department and Benchmark Analytics, a Chicago-based purveyor of early intervention systems.
Protestors helped scuttle this plan, however. Anti-police brutality activists were quick to call out Rybak’s own mayoral record on police reform, noting in an online petition that nearly forty people were killed by police while he was mayor but “not a single police officer was held accountable for killing a civilian.”
It also turned out that Rybak had been a founding board member for Benchmark Analytics, although he was no longer officially involved with the company in 2020. Still, this whiff of a conflict of interest, coupled with Rybak’s abysmal track record on police accountability, was enough to kill the deal.
Mayor Jacob Frey vowed at the time that he would continue to pursue a contract with Benchmark Analytics, with or without funding support from the Minneapolis Foundation. He doubled down on this insistence in 2021, after city council members denied his administration’s funding request for the early intervention system, citing its past failure to bring about any reform to the police department.
Rather than accept the city council’s wishes, Frey applied for and won a $700,000 grant from the Pohlad Foundation—another wealthy, local philanthropic outfit—without seeking approval from council members. Pursuing and implementing another early intervention system in Minneapolis clearly ranks high on Frey’s list of how to reform the city’s troubled police department, but if it failed before, why wouldn’t it fail now?
Today, the Minneapolis Police Department has shrunk in numbers while its budget has continued to creep upwards. There are far less officers on the payroll now, thanks to a mass exodus that took place in the wake of Floyd’s murder and the public fallout that accompanied it.
Many of these exiting officers have complaints against them on the books, yet they are still walking away with six-figure workers’ compensation or disability settlements in hand. Accountability seems virtually nonexistent, despite the prosecution of Chauvin and the three officers who were there with him the night Floyd was murdered.
As Tekle Sundberg’s family prepares to bury their son, Minneapolis officials appear bent on throwing more money at police reform measures that have so far accomplished nothing.