Acting beyond public purview and bourgeois instruments of accountability, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has expanded the Minneapolis security architecture dramatically. Outside the view of the city council and using millions in funds outside the regular police budget, Frey acquired armored vehicles, Flock cameras, advanced surveillance software, and anti-crowd munitions. At the same time, Frey’s new public budget advocates for an additional 20 million dollars to be allocated to the Minneapolis Police Department budget.
Additionally, it’s been discovered that MPD used the memorial to Renée Good, killed by ICE thugs during Operation Metro Surge, as a staging ground for a surveillance campaign that targeted those who mourned her. This stunt saw its most ridiculous form in an operation that utilized at least 101 Minneapolis Police Department personnel, including SWAT teams, drones and other surveillance equipment and cost the city a million dollars in overtime pay alone; all of this was deployed to counter and surveil seven Minnesotans who came to pay homage to Renée Good’s memorial. The city authorities were terrified of the potential of even non-violent solidarity.
Working and immigrant neighborhoods crumble alongside the deteriorating conditions of the many unhoused neighbors, all while Mayor Frey spends money extracted from the masses on the very weapons of war that will be used against them. As the mayor who presided over both Metro Surge and the killing of George Floyd, it should be very clear which side of the imperialist State Frey and the Democratic Party machinery stand on when disaster strikes our community. This acceleration in militarization comes only weeks after Jake Lang and his thugs were shepherded to safety and released by uniformed police, while the community members who challenged them were arrested and charged.
What Jacob Frey has offered this city has been a double-sided rule in which he cries and sympathizes and even swears on behalf of the people of Minneapolis for the cameras, and then in his office he ensures that the machinery of State violence has all the money, fuel, and weaponry it needs to continue the ongoing oppression of the masses.
Even as the city claims not to maintain relations with Flock, it still ensures that MPD officers have access to the surveillance capacities that Flock offers; it simply utilizes a market competitor with a less tarnished image. The company Safeware supplies Insight ALPR cameras, which scan thousands of license plates a day. They provide automatic alerts for “hot” plates and store the license plates of every vehicle that passes by in their database. The cost of these cameras is extremely unclear, as it is not stipulated in the contract with Safeware and is likely to be noted only in internal MPD budgets and records.
MPD is also now attempting to use the profits of civil asset forfeiture, which is the police seizure of public property “suspected” to be related to criminal activity, to purchase MORE ALPR cameras. This highly invasive and poorly regulated camera technology is being purchased with money extracted from the masses to make terrorizing, fining, and arresting them more efficient.
The elected officials who operate the local government understand that their priority is to serve the interests of capital and the State, regardless of what they tell their constituencies or the Janus-faced resistance they offer for the media. Elected officials who may more sincerely believe the falsities they are selling are rendered ineffectual at stopping those more cynical or hardline than themselves from effecting the desires of the ruling class. The so-called “progressive” elements of the State find themselves complicit through either malice or ignorance, being entirely unable to prevent the ongoing fascitization of society and militarization of our communities. The public embrace of Renée Good’s image and the Mayor’s melodramatic rhetorical resistance, next to the private reality of criminalizing resistance to her murderers as well as arming them, is the perfect emblem of this duality.
Both of the Twin Cities continue to invest in technologies of repression and surveillance, while the people they police and surveil continue to toil and suffer under the exploitation of the capital and the brutality of State terror. No matter how many sweet words or bitter condemnations Mayor Frey offers the cameras, his position as a loyal soldier of capitalism and administrator of the State are clear. As life becomes more challenging, costly and bitter for the masses, we know that increased police budgets, austerity, and militarization will continue to rise, no matter how many heads they can crack or license plates they can scan. It is clear that the City Council is neither capable nor willing to be a check on police expansion or Mayoral authority. Only the development of institutions rooted in the masses can develop power beholden to the masses.
Building true power among the masses means creating systems of collective authority and power that allow our neighborhoods to be responsible for their own safety, driving out the reactionary soldiers, State agents, and spies observing and oppressing our communities.
[Minneapolis Mayor Frey with Minneapolis Pig Chief Brian O’Hara, Image Source: Matt Sepic]
