(Photo: Sipa USA via AP)
For community organizer Anthony Newby, the recent shooting of Philando Castile in a St. Paul suburb carries echoes of the 2015 death of another black man, Jamar Clark, at the hands of Minneapolis police. Clark's death sparked an 18-day occupation outside a Minneapolis police department precinct.
At the heart of that protest was Newby, executive director of Minnesota Neighborhoods Organizing for Change (MNNOC), a community organizing group that helped lead the precinct occupation. In tandem with the local Black Lives Matter movement, MNNOC has become one of the most successful and innovative forces in the national movement. Among their successes is a ban in Hennepin County on the use of grand juries to adjudicate shootings that involve police.
The Prospect spoke with Newby following the July 6 police killing of Castile, who had been driving back from the grocery store with his fiancée, Diamond Reynolds, and her four-year-old daughter, when he was pulled over by police. As Castile reached for his ID, the officer fired multiple shots into Castile, and Reynolds began streaming the events on Facebook Live. The world watched as Castile died, his white shirt soaked in blood. The previous day, police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had killed yet another black man, Alton Sterling. These and other recent killings have reignited a nationwide call for justice, even as the nation reels over the fatal shooting of five Dallas police officers by a sniper upset over police violence.
Castile's death came just three months after Minnesota officials had announced that there would be no charges against the police officers involved in Jamar Clark's shooting death. Amid renewed demands for an end to the state-sanctioned police killings of black and brown men, Newby reflected on what his group learned in the aftermath of Clark's killing, and how it plans to organize now in response to Castile's killing.
Justin Miller: Can you describe the local reactions and feelings on the ground over the past few days in the wake of the killing of Philando Castile?
Anthony Newby: Well, we've been in similar moments before-Jamar Clark being the most recent-at the end of the year a big public, viral campaign with people in the streets. This is more of the same. There are some similarities and some differences, but fundamentally people are fed up. And it's not just black people who are in the streets; it's also a whole set of allies who have never had direct experience with being intimidated and harassed or killed by police who are saying, "I can't continue to watch this in my newsfeed everyday. I can't continue to act as if there isn't real fundamental structural problems and structural racism built into our current system."
In some ways, it's just a continuation of the arc we've been on; in other ways, it feels like an escalation.
Can you talk about the St. Paul Police Department's actions in response to the Saturday night protests on Interstate 94, which included the use of tear gas and arrests of dozens of protesters, including some of MNNOC's staff?
We think it's unfortunate that the St. Paul Police Department and city leadership didn't learn lessons from Minneapolis.
In St. Paul, we saw, really, they've learned nothing. Instead of figuring out how to de-escalate, how to pull in some movement leaders and strategists to think of how to get through the moment, they simply sent waves of militarized police to escalate the situation, which is dangerous. And not only did it end up with massive unnecessary arrests, but it put people in real danger. That's how additional people get hurt and killed, and we're lucky, frankly that it didn't end more violently than it did.
Governor Mark Dayton said very clearly that if Philando Castile were white, this wouldn't have happened. Then you have U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar echoing the talking points from the St. Paul Police Department during the protests. Does that range of responses indicate how far political leaders have come on police violence, but how far many still have to come?
Those two responses are very indicative of the political climate in the state and in the country. On one hand, you have folks like Governor Dayton who have no lived experience with this type of police violence but has moved and has shifted his thinking as he has had to, and has chosen to, embrace negotiating with folks on the ground and really rolling up his sleeves and saying, "I need to actually be a part of the solution." Frankly, his movement and his, what some consider harsh, criticism of the officers involved in that incident really is indicative of the shift in the country. There was nothing radical about it; it was actually pretty centrist when you think about the climate in the country.
On the other hand, you have folks like Amy Klobuchar, also with no lived experience, but a very different read. She has fallen in line with police talking points, which is not new in this country. Historically, that's where the majority of self-identified white Americans have aligned themselves: Law enforcement is right, they're here to protect and serve, protect my property interests, and keep the peace. And that's their lived experience. So it's not surprising that Klobuchar would come out with that statement, but it's frankly tone deaf in this moment.
It's a dying political ideology. It was, at one point, centrist and moderate; it is now socially conservative. We'll see how the politics of those two different worldviews play out going forward.
What were lessons learned you've taken from the organizing after Jamar Clark's death?
Organizing works-on-the-ground direct action harnessing the energy of movements that are happening locally and all throughout the country. If we're able to harness that and tie it to pragmatic policy ideas and shifts in narrative, it's working. It's slowly reconfiguring what power looks like and reconfiguring the structures that have historically been used as tools of white supremacy. So if we can leverage the energy of these moments, we're able to shift the country and really improve the political landscape.
Instead of saying, "We want to win an argument and be right, and we don't want to engage with those people," there's been a shift. Not only are we going to engage with those who hold the levers of structural power, but we are going to control and dictate the terms. We are going to control the tone of the negotiation, the aspirations of those negotiations, and we're not going to be fed a line about what's possible.
MNNOC has recently declared that it will no longer focus merely on the prosecution of police involved in Castile's killing, but more broadly on the abolition of the police state. Can you explain what that shift means, what the distinctions are, and how this stems from the lack of police prosecution for the killing of Jamar Clark?
I think in the moment of Jamar Clark, there was an extensive overemphasis on prosecuting the individual officers involved. The net result of that is that all of that energy was directed into, in this case, two individual police officers. And not surprisingly, they were not indicted. They're still working for the department, they are still getting a check, and they are still engaged in exactly the same sort of behaviors as before. It really shifted very little within the department.
That's not unusual. That's actually the norm. So if that's the case, we cannot continue hemorrhaging energy collectively, both locally and nationally, on these individual stopgap mechanisms within the department. So abolition for us means stopping the flow of money from a state, local, and federal level into this antiquated mechanism of public safety, while simultaneously thinking about alternatives.
Is that how you anticipate the organizing response to Philando Castile's killing to develop-shifting the focus from just prosecution to wholesale reform?
That's certainly going to be our goal. I think it will manifest itself in different ways in different parts of the country, but we are encouraging all folks who are thinking about police accountability and reform to make this fundamental shift.
We are not talking about some utopian vision where we ban policing and everybody simply gets along and there's no more crime or violence.
There are some pragmatic ideas that are being tested around the country and have been shown to increase public safety and decrease costs. There's a real moment to reimagine.
What are the challenges for MNNOC as a community organizer in having to constantly shift from one crisis to another, and how do you overcome those challenges?
We have to learn to perpetually assess the problem, be able to pivot in real time, and connect that to policy. That's embedded into our organizing model, because no matter what particular campaign track or priority we're on, there will invariably be things that are not planned for that pop up and we have to respond to.
So we've developed a model, as imperfect as it is, but it is something we hope to be able to share with others because every under-resourced community around the country is living under similar conditions. We're expected to solve our own problems related to policy and offer up a pragmatic set of solutions while being bombarded with issues connected to poverty, much of which is connected to over-policing, and violence more broadly in the community.
It's a simple three-point solution about assessing the problem in real time, being able to connect it to a broader set of policy solutions and systemic problems as opposed to individual acts of the moment-trying to find the origin, where does this structurally lie beyond the individual act? Then being able to pivot a set of organizing tactics connected to that. Jamar Clark's case was one example of that. An incident happened, it was a mass mobilization. Then we were able to connect that to the ban of grand juries.
The question in this moment is, Can we expand that out into a much broader narrative, tied to the end of the police state as we know it?
