Earlier this week, the Minnesota Department of Public Safety confirmed what many people had already witnessed first hand – that police were slashing tires in response to protests in Minneapolis over the weekend.
Video of the incidents circulated quickly on platforms like Twitter and Instagram, and now the DPS has confirmed that local departments did in fact take part in slashing tires. They stated that Minnesota state troopers and deputies from the Anoka County Sheriff’s Office punctured and slashed tires in “a few locations” during the protests. However, the DPS claims the tactics were only done “in order to stop behaviors such as vehicles driving dangerously and at high speeds in and around protesters and law enforcement,” said DPS spokesman Bruce Gordon.
Let’s Examine The Video
Now obviously the protest areas are places of high tension, and police should be doing everything in their power to help deescalate the situation. If there is a clear threat to the public or the police, they are well within their power to help mitigate that risk. However, we’re struggling to find any risk associated with the vehicles in the video.
Now, obviously we don’t have the full extent of the evidence in terms of where the vehicles were parked, where the protests were and how police felt they were in danger, but the video is just another strikingly poor visual for the local police. Nowhere in any of the vehicles in the video can a driver be seen. There is no threat that someone will use their car to ram protests or police officers if the vehicle is empty, yet the first two examples show parked or vacated vehicles having their tires slashed.
However, the most damning piece of evidence comes from the journalist near the end of the video, who shows that every car in a K-Mart parking lot had their tires sliced by police. The likelihood that a vehicle parked in a parking lot is threat to “drive dangerously” at crowds or police are infinitesimally small considering they are all unoccupied. More questions about the true intent of the officers are raised when you learn that many journalists have had their tires slashed simply because they are trying to do their job and cover the protests.
If a person is refusing to drive their vehicle out of a specific location, by all means police should consider tactics that reduce the risk of the vehicle being used as a weapon, but the video recording doesn’t back up the statement by the DPS. Instead, it just seems like another instance were police got to have some fun with weapons. The message they are sending by slashing tires is that they still don’t understand the message the protesters are trying to convey. Police should be deescalating situations, not intentionally escalating them.
