This is What Police Abolition Looks Like

with John McWhorter and Shane Hachey

In this clip from this week’s episode, blogger Shane Hachey runs down some harrowing incidents from the intersection that came to be known as George Floyd Square in Minneapolis. After the police withdrew from the square, leaving it to protestors and gang members, the situation deteriorated. Shane relays stories of organized looting, gunpoint robberies, shooting victims unable to receive medical attention, and general lawlessness, much of it inflicted on residents and business owners who had nothing to do with the death of George Floyd.

Shane’s secondhand account demonstrates how quickly a once-orderly pocket of a major city can deteriorate in the absence of law enforcement. I’ve written previously that one of the strongest cases against defunding the police is the deterrent effect of police presence. If potential law-breakers know there’s a chance they might be caught by the cops, they will be less inclined to actually break the law. When the ambient threat of arrest dissipates, the incentives to break the law increase.

In other words, the disorder that overtook George Floyd Square in 2020 and after gave us a taste of what the theory of police abolition looks like in practice. Who or what was culpable for George Floyd’s death is an important issue, but it’s not nearly as important as the disastrous natural experiments in police abolition that cropped up in its wake. Anyone who believes that the absence of police will make black communities safer should do a quick search for violent crime in George Floyd Square. If “autonomous zones” like that are supposed to test the theory of police abolition, we can confidently call it a failure.

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This is a clip from the episode that went out to paying subscribers on Monday. To get access to the full episode, as well as an ad-free podcast feed, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.

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GLENN LOURY: What is George Floyd Square?

SHANE HACHEY: So that's where George Floyd was killed. And it's crazy. I don't even know where to start. I'll start with my own experience. In the area where George Floyd was killed, they've made it into a shrine. Again, I know you guys have talked about this kind of religious experience of stuff like this. And it's a shrine, it's completely a shrine.

Are we talking about an intersection, a city block, a neighborhood? What are we talking about?

You're talking about several city blocks, actually. It happened in an intersection, and the intersection itself is walled off. It didn't use to be. It's set up now like Columbus Circle, with a raised fist. The last time I was there, there was a giant, artistic race fist that the city approved of and helped install. It was not a circle before. It's an intersection where Cup Foods was.

But what they did was they turned it into an autonomous zone after George Floyd was killed. So it was basically like CHAZ. CHAZ in Seattle, the Seattle autonomous zone, was a reaction and was part of the George Floyd riots across the country. That's what they did here.

Meaning there are no police there? What does it mean, an autonomous zone?

Now there are police. But no, for around a year, there were no police. I have a friend who lived down the street from where George Floyd was killed. I got constant firsthand reports of what was happening in that autonomous zone. So what happened was the people, the protesters, turned it into autonomous zone of about five or six blocks. Again, I want to be generous. I don't want to be super-partisan. When you think about what happened during that summer, we all know all the bad things that happened. But the way it took place, based on my friend's observations across the street from Cup Foods, it was a day and night thing. There was a day shift and there was a night shift.

During the day, there some peaceful protestors. When they say protests were mostly peaceful, these were the peaceful people. These were the concerned citizens. These are your average people, your working people in the neighborhood, your white couples with strollers protesting for justice.

As soon as the sun went down, all hell broke loose. As soon as the sun went down, barricades went up, Antifa came out, thugs came out, gangs came out. And so in the daytime, a news crew could go there and show a very respectable portrait of people who are concerned about policing and racial justice. At night, things went nuts.

And this went on for a year. The police told my friend, because he had a lot of stuff happen to him, they were not allowed to go within some vicinity. It was autonomous. For about a year, it was autonomous from the police. Which means things like, a pregnant woman was shot in that area and the police weren't able to go in and get her body. My friend's neighbor had to drag her dead body about five blocks.

Oh my God.

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Guys, it's hard to believe. There are things that happened in this time that will make you question the fabric of the civil society you live in. When I tell you I'm concerned and upset, it's because there are things that happened here that are really just unbelievable.

There was a gas station on the corner across from Cup Foods that was routinely looted. It was just happening all the time. And my friend asked one of his neighbors and said, “Aren't you concerned that the police don't come in here and there's looting all the time and people are shooting all the time?” [The neighbor] said, “Oh, don't worry about it, man. Bloods got it.” The Bloods got it. The Bloods controlled security. The Bloods were keeping us safe and keeping that neighborhood safe, in charge of security during that year of the autonomous zone. And the police were not present.

Excuse me, the Bloods meaning the street gang, as in Crips and Bloods.

That is correct, sir. That is correct. On that note, from the very first day ... honestly, I've been thinking about this, and maybe someone should write a book about it. From the very first day, my friend was telling me what was happening. They're protesting. And there's peaceful protesting. Everyone's gathering and whatnot in the middle of the afternoon. While everyone was gathering to protest, some guys started shooting at each other. Like a gun battle happened in the middle of daylight on the very first day of the protest. I'm not against protesting. If you're wrong, I disagree with you, go ahead and protest. But it was a very bad situation. So it became autonomous fairly quickly.

Here's a crazy thing. This is just a wild story. There's a more concerning story I have to tell you. But one thing that happened was, when they were robbing this gas station one night—they got robbed over and over again, because this lawlessness continued for months. And one night when they were robbing, people were going in. Because [the Bloods] control security, there was a guy wearing a security jacket making sure people were wearing a mask when they went in to loot the Safeway gas station. It's just crazy.

But on a more serious note, another night that summer, one of my friend's neighbors was very upset about it. Imagine this is your neighborhood. And this is why I'm upset. It's hard to be calm when you know about these things. These are people's lives. My friend had a neighbor who was a 50-year-old white woman. She was mad! She was gonna go tell these guys off and tell them where to go because they're ruining her neighborhood. My friend says, “Hey, no. Don't think about it.” After he did that, he turned around and someone put a gun in his chest and said, “Keys, boss.”

He gave him his keys. [The robber] stole his car. Gun in his chest. Who knows what could have happened, right? The next day that person was found. They found the stolen car. A couple of cops chased that guy, and he crashed the car. As he was crashing the car and getting arrested, he backed the car up and tried to run over the police.

Now, imagine you're a Minneapolis police officer and a criminal—he's a black kid, probably a gangbanger—tries to run you over in a car a month after George Floyd happened. Are you going to shoot him? What are you going to do? So these are the situations that people were put in.

They arrested that guy. My friend went to get his car from the police impound lot, talked about pressing charges, and they said, “Oh, he's already out.” The protester bailout fund bailed him out.

That's how insane George Floyd Square was for the first year. After that, I was not about to go investigate. The next year, 2021, I wanted to go see what George Floyd Square looks like. The city had basically helped the protesters, because they're on their side, and so they created these crazy speed bumps that were out of the road. They pushed the pavement together. It was something like I'd never seen before. So if something happened and someone started chasing me, I really wouldn't be able to get out of there. They want to keep people out of that area.

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