Hopeful that Minneapolis policing will change? Meet the police union's chief ...
Donald Trump shakes hands with Bob Kroll, head of the Minneapolis police union, during a campaign rally.
Bob Kroll, who described George Floyd as a ‘violent criminal’, has a history of resisting any reform of a department with a history of racial abuse
Amid the worst civil unrest in the US in half a century, there have been notably few Americans willing to speak up on behalf of the man who lit the fuse: Derek Chauvin, the now former police officer charged with the murder of
George Floyd in Minneapolis.
The video of Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes seems too clear cut and painful to try to make excuses.
Step forward Bob Kroll, leader of the Minneapolis police union. Kroll wrote to his members this week
describing Floyd as a “violent criminal”, because he did prison time, in an apparent attempt to imply Chauvin’s treatment of the unarmed man being arrested on suspicion of a non-violent minor crime was legitimate. The union chief also described those protesting over Floyd’s death as terrorists, and the dismissal of Chauvin and three other officers facing charges as depriving them of their rights.
A former Minneapolis police chief, Janeé Harteau, who battled Kroll in attempting to reform a department with a long history of racial abuse, quickly hit back, saying he was unfit to be a police officer and calling on him to resign from the force.
“A disgrace to the badge! This is the battle that myself and others have been fighting against. Bob Kroll turn in your badge!” she
wrote on Twitter.
That will not have bothered Kroll. By Harteau’s own admission, the union chief is in many ways more powerful than the police chief in Minneapolis – as is the case in many other cities across the US.
