Outrage around Jamar Clark’s killing by police has rippled through the last decade
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Before George Floyd. Before Philando Castile. Activists in Twin Cities streets were chanting Jamar Clark’s name.
It was nearly ten years ago that the killing of Clark, a 24-year-old Black man, during a confrontation with two white Minneapolis police officers sparked spirited protests in the Twin Cities, and a more than two-week occupation outside the north Minneapolis police precinct.
Even though the officers involved in Clark's killing were never charged, many people see Clark’s death as a turning point in the fight for police accountability and racial justice, when the system finally started to flex to respond to their anger over killings of civilians by police officers.
People close to the case say they can see a throughline as the momentum built in those early protests after Clark’s death in 2015 to the global uprising that spread from Minneapolis after George Floyd’s killing in 2020.
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Questions about what happened
It was the early morning Nov. 15, 2015 that Minneapolis police officer Dustin Schwarze shot and killed Clark after he and his partner Mark Ringgenberg responded to reports of an assault at a birthday party in north Minneapolis that Clark had attended.
There’s no video of the actual shooting and no body-camera footage. To some, that was reason enough to question the official account of Clark’s killing provided by law enforcement and the city.
Police said Clark confronted paramedics, and later struggled with the officers. Ringgenberg said Clark grabbed his firearm before Schwarze shot Clark in the head. But bystanders leaving a local club told activists they saw Clark not resisting, and some claimed Clark was handcuffed when he was shot.
Clark’s killing came a little more than a year after Michael Brown had been killed by police officers in Ferguson, Mo., launching the Black Lives Matter movement onto the national stage.
Civil rights attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong was then head of the Minneapolis NAACP. She remembers getting a call from a police official at 4 a.m. after the shooting, and asking them if the man was unarmed. She and others went out to the scene.
“The streets were completely empty, so there was no sign or evidence that this police killing had happened, the only thing that I could see was some blood on the leaves near the tree where Jamar Clark was killed,” Levy Armstrong said.
Levy Armstrong said the local Black Lives Matter movement, to which she was an adviser, started the year before Clark’s killing in solidarity with Ferguson. They’d already organized actions including a protest at the Mall of America.
After Clark was killed, these and other experienced activists led a number of protests, including a march to the city’s 4th Precinct that grew into an occupation of the area in front of the precinct that lasted for 18 days, in sometimes freezing Minnesota temperatures.
“Some people brought food, they brought water, mittens, hats, coats and all the things that people needed,” Levy Armstrong said. “While we were demanding justice for Jamar Clark, meeting with the Department of Justice, meeting with Betsy Hodges and other officials, we were holding space and creating a sense of community.”
Council member Jeremiah Ellison didn’t consider himself to be much of a protester when the occupation broke out, but his art studio was nearby so he’d bring them hot coffee in the mornings.
“I found myself more and more drawn to that space, especially to protect young people who were going out there and to just sort of be a body to protect my community against a police department that I felt like had us, had the community, feeling under attack,” Ellison said.
Although Clark’s killing alone didn’t inspire Ellison’s successful runs for Minneapolis City Council, he said it “played a role, either in waking me up to some of the failures of leadership or in allowing others to maybe see me in a position of leadership.”
Levy Armstrong said the occupation helped grow support in the broader community, and showed activists that they didn’t need to just accept the city’s explanations of what happened at face value. Instead, activists gathered accounts from neighbors and bystanders that they said contradicted the official story.
“People started feeling comfortable coming out of their homes and talking to us and sharing their stories in terms of what they witnessed, as well as the trauma that they felt and the fear that they were experiencing,” Levy Armstrong said.
Disruption to business as usual
This is how it typically went when someone was killed by police in the Twin Cities before Jamar Clark.
Police and perhaps the police union would release statements. To activists, it seemed as if local journalists were taking the city’s statements at face value. If there were enough questions about whether a crime was committed, prosecutors would bring the case to a grand jury for possible charges — it’s a secret process that activists, and even many legal professionals, are suspicious of. No grand jury had ever indicted an officer for an on-duty killing in the state.
After Clark's killing, and facing mounting pressure from protesters and the public, then-Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman made a choice. Rather than bring the killing of Clark to a grand jury, he would personally decide whether charges would be filed.
Levy Armstrong said the activism helped break the silence on what many saw as the longtime abuse of Black and Native residents by Minneapolis police.
“I believe that if that had been the case sooner, before Jamar Clark, and prosecutors had to stand on their own two feet and share information as to why they would or would not bring charges, that there might have been a stronger system of accountability in place before the brutal killing of Jamar Clark,” she said.
Freeman ultimately decided that charges against the two officers were not justified, saying that investigators found that Clark hadn’t been handcuffed at the time of the shooting, and that the officers used lethal force to prevent themselves or others from being killed or gravely injured.
Reflecting on the fact that the confrontation between Clark and the officers transpired in just over a minute, Freeman told the gathered reporters and activists that “If Clark had taken his hands out of his pockets he’d be alive today.”
What’s the legacy of the movement?
At a protest on the afternoon of Freeman’s announcement, longtime activist and independent journalist Mel Reeves told the crowd that “our job is not to have them have the last word. We can still win this thing if we don't quit.”
Reeves and others would form Twin Cities Coalition for Justice 4 Jamar, which is still active under the name Twin Cities Coalition 4 Justice. Many of the young activists involved in Black Lives Matter would go on to form influential groups like Black Visions Collective and MPD 150, which would help organize after George Floyd’s death and supported an ultimately doomed ballot measure that would have replaced the Minneapolis Police Department with a new Department of Public Safety.
University of Minnesota sociology professor Michelle Phelps said Freeman set a precedent by publicly going through available evidence and explaining his legal reasoning.
“The detailed case records that have been released from the prosecutor’s office since then on, all cases where it’s officers who are accused of criminal conduct, have been a move towards greater transparency that have been welcomed by the public,” Phelps said. “Even when those decisions were not what folks in the advocacy community or the families wanted to see.”
The ripple effects in how the legal system responded to these sorts of incidents didn’t stop there.
The year after Clark’s killing, a Black man named Philando Castile was shot to death by a police officer in the St. Paul suburb of Falcon Heights. After Castile’s killing, Ramsey County Attorney John Choi personally decided to charge the officer with killing Castile. Although a jury acquitted the officer, it was the first time an officer had been charged with an on-duty killing in the history of the state.
Then in 2019, after the killing of Justine Ruszczyk in southwest Minneapolis, the first officer in the state was convicted of taking a civilian’s life. That was followed by more convictions, including the four officers charged with killing George Floyd.
The activist organizations that formed or found purpose organizing around Clark’s killing, were many of the same that helped mobilize after George Floyd’s murder, and pushed for accountability both for the department and individual officers.
Phelps said authorities continued to act more responsively after George Floyd’s killing, when the officers involved were quickly fired and evidence released to the public.
“Investigators take months and months and months to reach a decision, they know, of course, that the kind of public momentum and public attention to the case is fading,” Phelps said. “Once they’ve shown it, obviously, to the family members of the victims, releasing that information, I think helps to address the public’s questions.”
Ellison said it’s really the family members of people killed by police and dedicated activists who have kept the issue of police accountability on the table in Minneapolis. But a lot of the protest infrastructure in the city, and even the mutual aid in neighborhoods during the 2020 unrest was honed and sharpened during the actions around Clark’s killing.
“When people found themselves needing to rely on their neighbors and trust one another and get resources from one another after the murder of George Floyd, I think that there was just a little bit of muscle memory built up,” he said. “That muscle memory comes from a very dark place, but when stuff’s hitting the fan, I guess you learn to appreciate that you have it.”
Some of the focus on holding officers personally or criminally accountable may have overshadowed the overall goal of making policing as a whole accountable. Ellison points to the police department’s recent failure to protect residents like Davis Moturi, who was shot by a neighbor after repeatedly reaching out to the department for help.
Or Mariah Samuels, who was shot 10 times and killed by her ex-boyfriend even though she’d repeatedly communicated with the department.
“It’s hard to see the cost of our failures, and then see that be coupled with a defensiveness, obstructionist behavior or ambivalence [from the police department], and then think, ‘Oh, but we’ve done some good, too,’” Ellison said. “That feels like the kind of backsliding that makes me really worried about the future.”
While protests have still happened in some cases, there is a sense of burnout around public safety in the city that Ellison said contributes to the lack of systemic change at City Hall. He believes that Mayor Jacob Frey, who has authority over the police department under the city’s charter, is sincere in wanting to improve the city’s police department and how it engages with residents.
“But I also think that if he can be celebrated for outcomes that he hasn’t quite yet earned, because the collective sort of exhaustion on this topic is at a critical point, and people are just really starving for good news,” Ellison said. “Then I think what he’ll opt to do is ignore the bad, accentuate the small wins and call that systemic change.”
Ripples from 2015
Minneapolis likely wouldn’t have become the epicenter of the “defund” the police movement if it hadn’t been for these earlier years of activism and police reform efforts that were largely perceived as failures, Phelps said.
Some of those efforts live on in Minneapolis’ efforts to create alternatives to armed police, including the city’s successful Behavioral Crisis Response team, which responds to mental health calls.
Levy Armstrong sees a connection to the mobilizations around Clark’s death and the bystanders who refused to walk away from George Floyd as then-officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck, including then 17-year-old Darnella Frazier, who recorded video of Floyd’s killing that went viral.
“That entire incident, the community fighting back, particularly folks in north Minneapolis, folks who lived near Jamar Clark or knew Jamar Clark, as well as organizers and activists, played a huge role in the shift that we have begun to see in Minnesota regarding police accountability,” Levy Armstrong said, adding that there’s still a lot of change that’s needed.
After Floyd’s death, the city agreed to a court-enforced agreement and another federal consent decree mandating reforms to the Minneapolis Police Department, although President Donald Trump’s administration later dropped the federal agreement.
Phelps said some might assume that the national political climate, and the president’s hostility to tools like Minneapolis’ federal consent decree on policing, means that the movement for police accountability is dead. She said it's important to take a longer view to fully account for the impact events like Jamar Clark's death have had.
“There have been multiple periods now where folks have been eager to say that this was the sort of end of the movement, only to have it rise back again in a new form,” Phelps said. “We really need to take a longer historical view. These things don’t play out in weeks and months. They don’t even play out over the cycle of years. It’s going to be a generation before we have a full accounting.”
Clark’s sister, Tiffany Burns, said her family honors her brother’s life every year. This year, they’re putting up a memorial bench in his name.
“When you think about reform, that’s not something that happens overnight,” Burns said. “That’s not something that we see readily. We have to understand that it is a process.”
