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.
