When a police chief doesn’t want you to look at police body camera videos, then you know you need to look beyond the lies and see the facts for yourself. From the very beginning, many of our so-called leaders misspoke and misjudged what was necessary to keep the peace and let justice truly prevail in Minneapolis.
Following the arrest and heart attack of George Floyd, police bodycam videos were withheld. Lawyers engaged in lawfare, and riots, protests and politics made any hope of a fair and impartial trial for the four accused officers nothing more than an impossibility.
Even now, after a defamation lawsuit filed by the assistant chief of the Minneapolis Police Department has been dismissed, police leaders, politicians and the media are still warning all of us about trying to “rewrite history” by telling the facts. But we believe the facts should always speak for themselves.
On the stand in former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s state trial, both former Police Chief Medaria Arradondo and since-promoted Assistant Police Chief Katie Blackwell said they either did not recognize the technique that Chauvin and the officers deployed on Floyd, or that it was not trained by the Minneapolis Police Department.
“I don’t know what kind of improvised position that is. So that’s not what we trained,” Blackwell said under oath.
Is this a trained Minneapolis Police Department defensive tactics technique?
“It is not,” former Chief Arradondo (aka “Chief Rondo”) said on the stand.
“When I heard that part of the testimony, I really wanted to get up off my chair and yell bullshit,” Carolyn Pawlenty, Derek Chauvin’s mother, said in “The Fall of Minneapolis.”
“I heard our police chief say on the stand that he didn’t recognize that technique. I heard him say that. It’s tough to hear people lie. Just straight lie,” retired Lt. Lindsay Herron said in the documentary as well.
Former Minneapolis police officers speak out
In the final installment of a three–part series, Alpha News senior reporter Liz Collin spoke with former Minneapolis police officers to get their perspectives. Retired Minneapolis police officer Bill Kenow weighed in on the trial testimony of Arredondo and Blackwell.
“I know that I was trained in it. It was a huge thing that we did. ‘Where the head goes, your body follows,’ we always would say that, and that was part of our testimony. We did it over and over and over for years and to hear, like the chief said … and Katie … when she said that, I’m like, how can you say that? I mean, this is what we all did,” Kenow told Collin.
“We were trained in it over and over and over. And I’ve done that technique numerous times, both in training and on the street,” he added.
Kenow is one of 34 officers who signed court declarations to say the maximal restraint technique (MRT) was trained by the Minneapolis Police Department. Over a dozen current and former officers say they believe Blackwell perjured herself during the Chauvin trial.
Kenow said he decided to speak out because “you have to give the good people the benefit of the doubt also, like you do the criminals all the time.”
“When you come in and you say something that is completely untrue for whatever reason, that’s what I can’t figure out,” Kenow said. “I just, I can’t stand the way that things are going nowadays where people just can’t let the truth out.”
Former Minneapolis Police Sgt. Ken Tidgwell also spoke to Collin. Tidgwell said he remembered thinking that more of the real story would eventually come to light.
“You know other angles and other recordings were going to surface like they always do and always have, and that the truth would actually be told of what took place out there and not the messages that we were receiving, by the media, and hearing over social media,” Tidgwell said.
“It was shocking, I guess, that we weren’t getting more of that picture, not even internally,” he added.
Tidgwell was also among the current and former officers to provide declarations.
“When the verdict came out, I think it just gutted us as a profession, as a police department, the rank and file cops. Because those that were complicit in it at the top levels clearly took some active roles in making it happen,” Tidgwell said.
Included in that remark, Tidgwell mentioned Blackwell and Arradondo, who, “in my opinion, lied to the public about what transpired and about what training we’d had,” he said. “It made me angry and made me sick.”
“There’s just no way that with the training that we’d all received, extensively over years and years and years and those exact techniques that we all used and were trained in, that she used and was trained in, that she’d (Blackwell) sit on a stand and lie, and lie under oath. She, Arradondo, Zimmerman, all of them broke their oath,” Tidgwell continued.
“They broke the oath that they took as police officers. They broke the oath that they took when they got on the stand that day and held up their hand on a Bible and said that they would tell the truth. They broke it and that made me angry.”
Derek Chauvin responds to Katie Blackwell’s testimony
In an exclusive phone call from prison, Chauvin himself said then-Inspector Blackwell committed perjury.
“Well, one would think that the commander in charge of the training unit, who is supposed to be supervising and overseeing all training operations delivered by training personnel from the Minneapolis Police Department, that she would know darn well what training is delivered and what isn’t,” Chauvin said.
Chauvin flatly described Blackwell’s testimony as “outright perjury.”
Donations can be made to Derek Chauvin via GiveSendGo.
