According to a new report from Intercept reporters Ryan Grim and Aida Chávez, more than half of the officers on the Minneapolis Police Union’s board have been involved in a least one armed confrontation. This comes along with a quote from union president Lt. Bob Kroll, who says that while police shootings have come with a “big influx of PTSD” cases among officers, he himself doesn’t feel a thing.
Telling reporters that he has “been involved in three shootings myself, and not a one of them has bothered me. Maybe I’m different,” Kroll just offered up a sociopathic statement for the ages that seems to mesh with his condoning of clearly unjust, violent practices by the men and women he represents.
This news comes a day after The Guardian reported that Kroll, in a letter to the union’s members, called George Floyd a “violent criminal” and described protesters as “terrorists.” It’s this pathological, pigheaded, and callous response by Kroll that led Minnesota’s AFL-CIO to call for his resignation on Tuesday.
Grim and Chávez point out that Kroll did an interview at the end of April discussing local officials’ attempts to get police officers to forgo raises due to fiscal issues being confronted during the COVID-19 pandemic. And while no one would find fault in a union president fighting for first responders’ and civil servants’ wages, here’s Kroll’s attitude on what the problem was: “The first thing we said was OK, let’s see the budget, let’s see the city budget. And guys they’re pissing away, millions and millions of dollars to projects. Like, you know, they’re giving $15,000 a year to the transgender coordinator of the city.”
For one, $15,000 isn’t the money Kroll’s police officers aren’t getting. But, as Kroll explained, city officials told Kroll that they would save over $400,000 by pushing off law enforcement raises. According to Kroll, this was bogus as the city paid out that kind of money in wrongful death lawsuits—where police officers’ actions were decided to have caused the wrongful death of citizens. Kroll believed that these costs were the city’s fault, not the police officers who keep acting in such a way as to warrant wrongful death lawsuits.
Even with the right-wing reaction and sideshow of looting and “riots,” George Floyd’s killing will result in, at the very least, a wrongful death lawsuit that the city of Minneapolis will likely pay out millions for. Cities around the country pay out millions on top of millions in wrongful death and police brutality lawsuits, every single year.
It’s Kroll’s attitude and these harsh financial facts that have led many activists to promote the defunding of the Minneapolis Police Department. The belief is that the only way to get change, from the top down, in these organizations is to hurt them financially and use the money toward proven violence prevention programs and social safety programs that lead to less crime.
Kroll’s attitude is not surprising. He’s a big supporter of Donald Trump, a similar suspected sociopath with a similarly fascistic, authoritarian, and racist concept of justice. In November, Kroll appeared on stage with Trump at one of his pre-COVID pandemic rallies. Kroll and Trump patted each other on the back and Kroll received a lot of well-deserved flak for being such a tool. As Mayor Jacob Frey told the Star Tribune at the time, “If he was sincere about wanting to bring trust and support about a public safety … in Minneapolis, he should spend more time getting to know residents and less time getting publicity from Donald Trump.”
Guys like Kroll don’t want to figure out anything about the public. They don’t feel empathy for people and families brutalized by their bad training and their bigotries. “Maybe I’m different,” Kroll says … and yes, maybe he is different from a lot of decent people. Unfortunately, he isn’t that much different from a lot of public officials.