Thumpers
By Scam Likely
Before his death in 2015, David Carr, culture and media critic for the New York Times and former editor of Minneapolis City Pages, gave an interview to the folks at Mediabistro about his “big break” as a fledgling journalist, when his story about systematic police brutality (or as Carr described it, “a story about state-sponsored violence and torture”) perpetrated by the Minneapolis Police Department against the city’s African American population, "Citizen Trebtoske vs. The Police vs. The Mayor vs. The Council," (live link not available) ran on the cover of the February 4, 1982, issue of the Minneapolis Reader.
Carr wrote:
A crowed gathered to witness a routine southside arrest. Two cops stopping a car with three black males and two children. Something began to go wrong...words flew...tempers flared...and the arrest became an "incident." The locals didn't like what they saw. But they were resigned. In situations such as this the die was cast at the outset. On July 29 at about 8:45 p.m. Pete Trebtoske and about 20 onlookers witnessed the arrest of three black males at the corner of 22nd St. and Third Ave. There was an argument with the third man and a scuffle broke out. Trebtoske felt the man was beaten without provocation and he spoke up. Trebtoske claims he too was then brutalized.
In the interview, Carr describes his a-ha! moment while speaking with a friendly police records clerk in the basement of Minneapolis City Hall. After days of bothering the clerk with what must have seemed like an endless stream of random record requests, the clerk said to Carr, “I tell you what, why don’t you tell me what you’re up to here?”, and Carr said, “Well, I think these two guys (police) are serial perpetrators, what are known as ‘Thumpers’ in the police department, and they have a history of rough arrests.” The police clerk said, “OK, I got it” and soon was showering Carr with documents about the Trebtoske incident and other accounts of “rough arrests” of the African American underclass in South Minneapolis by largely white cops. Carr relates that Minneapolis and its surrounding suburbs in the 1970s had a dominant white overclass and a largely disadvantaged black underclass, and the Minneapolis Police Department mirrored this set of social relations and didn’t look anything like the minority population it was oppressing with state-sanctioned violence, and that the police rarely, if ever, faced accountability for the non-judical violence they inflicted upon their largely minority victims. Referring to the Trebtoske incident, Carr relates that as the police were violently arresting the two black males, a large crowd of neighborhood people gathered around and loudly expressed their displeasure at being “under control” of the cops, and so the cops decided to administer a little “street justice” to the two cuffed suspects. Carr speculates that the friendly police records clerk gave him access to the records “probably because he was a good cop” and not a thumper himself. The Trebtoske story launched Carr’s distinguished career as a journalist, newspaper editor, and Times media critic.
Fast forward to Minneapolis today, after three days of citizen protest and violent cop riot by Minneapolis’ latest generation of police Thumpers. Like Carr, this correspondent is also from Minneapolis, and I can relate that most folks living there today know that the systemic racism and oppressive race relations documented by Carr in 1982 are as bad there today as they were then, and are as bad as in any other major US city in which concentrated disadvantaged minority populations are surrounded by wealthy white suburbs and policed by racist police departments full of violent racist police officers. Because of the ingrained power of the white overclass and the ongoing systematic racial segregation and oppression of the city’s communities of color, whether they be Hmong, Somali, Latinx, Native American, and especially African Americans, Minneapolis still has ethnic ghettos like South and North Minneapolis and certain close-in suburbs like Robbinsdale and Brooklyn Center into which the city’s oppressed populations are concentrated, disenfranchised, and viciously patrolled by the city’s thumpers in blue. Mutata mutatus.
Under such conditions, an arrest for “suspected forgery” becomes a capital crime via summary execution during a lynching of a black man at the hands of thumper cops acting as prosecutor, judge, and jury meting out “street justice” to someone they never recognized as a human being with rights to equal protection under the law. Credit to Minneapolis’ Mayor Jacob Frey and other public figures for calling for the arrest and investigation for murder of the four thumpers involved, especially George Floyd’s immediate cause of death, Minneapolis Police thumper extraordinaire Derek Chauvin. Of course, as MintPress reports, Chauvin and his thumper partner have been investigated for complaints of police brutality 17 times during their “careers”, all but one being dismissed without sanctions. Then Hennepin County Attorney and now senior senator from Minnesota, Amy Klobuchar, failed to bring charges against more than two dozen cops who killed citizens on duty, including Chauvin, who according to MintPress, was “involved in a fatal accident in 2005, killed Wayne Reyes in 2006, shot another man while in uniform in 2008, and had a litany of complaints against him”.
So, with this long tail, the sad, enduring story of Minneapolis Police Department thumpers and their murdered minority victims, it is not at all clear if the family of George Floyd will receive justice.