In November 2015, after watching the media reports of the 4th Precinct Takeover, I predicted that Minneapolis Police would end up killing a white woman. It would be a white woman blissfully ignorant of Minnesota law, infected by an extremely contagious bias, which started in St. Paul and then spread throughout the world.
I’d been observing this bias for years, and had been planning on writing about how it’s exploited, and how it spreads, for several years.
In 2017, two weeks after Officer Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted of killing Philando Castille, I began to write a five-part weekly series for AVFM, about this bias. The week of the last article, Justine Ruszczyk Damond was shot dead by officer Mohamed Mohamed Noor.
If Noor receives a fair trial in the State of Minnesota, he will be a free man next month. Noor, the first Somali Officer in Minneapolis, has now become the first police officer in Minnesota history to be charged with murder. Twenty four police officers have been cleared of all charges in killings in Minnesota since the day Justine Ruszczyk Damond was shot.
Is Mohamed Mohamed Noor on Trial or Minneapolis, M.N.?
Noor would never have been a cop were it not for two women: Mayor Betsy Hodges, who wanted a Somali officer, and Police Chief Janee’ Harteau, who obliged. Those two facts are not in dispute, though Judge Kathryn Quaintance has decided Noor’s psychiatric exam, which should have raised red flags, and work history be excluded from evidence.
There are a lot of things Judge Quaintance would like to protect the public of Minnesota from hearing and seeing in this precedent setting case. The Judge set aside only 11 public seats for the 1.252 million people in Hennepin County. There are 15 reserved seats for media. The adjacent AV “viewing” room is a farce.
The judge is currently weighing a decision to determine whether the public should be protected from graphic video evidence suggesting the victim slapped the back of the police SUV and of Noor performing CPR trying to save her life.
During jury selection, Judge Quaintance has protected potential female jurors from having to answer basic questions regarding presumption of innocence, and has chided defense attorney Thomas Plunkett for being an older male who is intimidating younger women in the jury pool. The cognitive dissonance has been palpable, with some jurors literally taking 15-20 seconds to answer if they could understand that a presumption of innocence was even required.
When the Judge refused to remove these women for cause, Plunket asked to have their pauses added to the record. Judge Quaintance then reprimanded him, in open court, for this pattern of being a man, making young women uncomfortable. I swear to fucking god.
In the last year, I’ve written about bias, discrimination, taboos, stereotypes, perception, persuasion, the media, and propaganda all to bring attention to the research paper by L.A. Rudman, Gender Differences in Automatic In Group Bias, because I believe it is a major driver of gynocentric moral panics.
I’ve used what I call my “Minnesota Nice Filter” to look indirectly at dark realities with some humor. Andy Mann’s response to my writings in his article, “Nihilism and beyond for the zeta male,” stopped me in my tracks.
For those readers who’ve wanted to know what the hell I’ve been hinting at but not directly saying, here we go.
In this, my final series for AVFM, I’ll be exploring my theories and reporting directly from one of those 11 seats.
