The need to subpoena officers highlights the culture of US law enforcement when it comes to shootings by one of their own

The county attorney who announced charges against former police officer Mohamed Noor, accused of killing Australian woman Justine Damond, had harsh words for one group prosecutors rarely take on so publicly: police and the union representing them.

“I’ve been privileged to have this job nearly 18 years. I’ve never had police officers, who weren’t suspects, refuse to do their duty and come forward to talk to us,” Mike Freeman said on Tuesday. “We therefore had no alternative than to subpoena them to a grand jury and take their testimony under oath.”

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As Freeman noted, those officers had been acting under the advice of their union, the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis. When the city’s local paper, the Star Tribune, broke the story of tensions between Freeman and the union in the investigation earlier this month, the union president, Bob Kroll, responded in the combative and bombastic style that has become his calling card.

“They need to figure out whose side they’re on,” Kroll said, referring to the prosecutor’s office. “Law enforcement should work collectively with city and county attorneys to prosecute criminals.”

Among Kroll’s many critics is Rachel Paulose, a former federal prosecutor in Minnesota who is also a well-known conservative.

“This isn’t about sides, it’s about justice, it’s getting to the truth,” she said. “I think it’s very unfortunate that anyone would make this about sides. This is about truth, transparency and giving citizens confidence that their government is working.”



The exchange highlights the way in which the Damond case has underlined systemic issues in the US criminal justice system. Police are known for closing ranks, but the recalcitrance of the police union in the Damond case has stood out, in part because of the international attention the case has received, and because of the stark details of the case itself: ultimately, an officer killed an unarmed woman in her pyjamas who had called police to ask for help.

But the stance of the union, whose representatives declined to speak to the Guardian, has also been nuanced. Kroll has opted not to publicly defend Noor in the way he did officers involved in the last controversial police shooting in Minneapolis, that of Jamar Clark, an unarmed black man killed by police in 2015. But in Noor’s case, he did tell officers not to talk to investigators.

It creates a mentality that comes across like this: ‘We’re the cops and you’re not’ Norm Stamper

For activists working on policing in Minneapolis, Kroll’s stance was unsurprising. As union president, Kroll represents rank-and-file officers and they’ve supported him. Last year he was re-elected to his post, thumping a challenger who called him “abrasive” by a margin of 423 to 184 votes.

“Bob Kroll’s job, ultimately, and what he sees his job as, is to prevent officers, as much as possible, getting in trouble, ever, for anything,” said Tony Williams, a member of the activist collective MPD 150, which wants the city’s police department dissolved. “If it helps to think of him as a defence lawyer, that’s what he is. It’s his job to get officers off, pretty much no matter what happened. That’s one of the reasons he’s getting re-elected to the union spot.”

Williams sees Kroll’s intervention in the Damond investigation as being less about the case itself and more about preventing the establishment of a precedent.

“He doesn’t want people getting subpoenaed for talking about police brutality. He doesn’t want there to be this sort of ‘activism’ on behalf of prosecutors, who are actually doing their jobs and trying to hold police accountable when they do things that are dangerous or criminal,” Williams said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A memorial service for Justine Damond a month after she was killed in July 2017. Photograph: Aaron Lavinsky/AP

The kind of resistance to outside pressure shown by the police union in the Damond case is not unique to Minneapolis. It’s a topic Norm Stamper, who was a cop for 34 years and police chief of Seattle for six years, has written extensively about since he retired in 2000. He sees the mindset as having to do with the insular nature of police culture. Officers, he argues, have an intense shared experience that is starkly different from regular citizens and they often end up spending most of their spare time with other officers.

“That produces an attitude, because you’re constantly being fed and fueled by like minds,” Stamper said. “It creates a mentality that comes across like this: ‘We’re the cops and you’re not’. That kind of an attitude is perceived within the ranks as normal and reasonable and necessary. From outside the ranks, citizens in general, other members of the justice system, civic leaders, community activists are all saying, ‘My God, the arrogance of these people’.”

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The fact that the police union also opted not to defend Noor, a Somali American, has been a sore point in Minneapolis’s large and influential Somali community. Many see it as just one of many contrasts between the Damond case and cases of unarmed black men – Clark and Philando Castile – being shot.

“The police union, the leadership of the department and the city, they have all definitely left [Noor] behind,” said Jaylani Hussein, the executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “We know that this is definitely not just because of this officer. We know that his race, his religion, all of that has an impact.”

Hussein supports Freeman’s decision to press charges and hopes the case might set a precedent for police accountability that will extend to all communities.



“We believe we need justice for Justine and this justice cannot just be for Justine, it has to be for every person who is involved in similar circumstance, so we hope this is not just a one-off case,” he said.