By Dominic Taylor-
Minnesota State Patrol officers purged emails and texts after protests over the death of George Floyd last year, according to a transcript of court testimony released Friday.
Maj. Joseph Dwyer said he and a “vast majority” of the Minnesota State Patrol deleted the messages during the summer of 2020, according to testimony from a hearing July 28 in an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit alleging the agency used unnecessary and excessive force to target journalists who covered the protests.
The lawsuit, which names city and state law enforcement officials as defendants, was filed in Federal District Court in Minnesota in June 2020 on behalf of Jared Goyette, a freelance journalist who has contributed to The Washington Post and The Guardian. Other journalists not named in the original law suit have since been added as plaintiffs.
The law suit says: “The protests were marked by an extraordinary escalation of unlawful force deliberately targeting reporters,”
Dwyer said supervisors did not order the purge; it is a “standard practice” for patrol members to delete texts and emails periodically or after a major event.
“You just decided, shortly after the George Floyd protests, this would be a good time to clean out my inbox?” ACLU attorney Kevin Riach asked, according to the transcript.
Minnesota law requires the State Patrol to keep records of official activity and allows members to delete messages only under a schedule approved by a state records panel, a spokesperson for the nonprofit Minnesota Coalition on Government Information said.
Gemberling said Dwyer’s testimony does not seem to be consistent with the statute “to make sure there’s a record of why government does what it does.”
“What they’ve done raises a whole lot of questions,” he said.
The ACLU said nobody reviewed the communications before they were deleted to determine whether they were relevant to the lawsuit.
“This destruction of public records makes it nearly impossible to track the State Patrol’s behavior, and the ACLU-MN questions whether that was by design,” the statement said.
The testimony is part of a June 2020 class-action lawsuit that alleges the Minneapolis Police Department and the State Patrol violated journalists’ constitutional rights by pepper spraying, firing rubber bullets, attacking and wrongfully arresting many who covered the protests last summer.
Jared Goyette, a freelancer for The Washington Post and The Guardian and lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, said police shot him in the face with less-lethal ballistic ammunition.
Many journalists reported tense interactions with law enforcement during nationwide protests against systemic racism and police brutality, and the lawsuit is one of several filed against law enforcement regarding use of force last summer.
‘They do what they want’: Minneapolis police injured protesters with rubber bullets. City has taken little action.
The email purge and the State Patrol’s failure to investigate “show an alarming lack of accountability for misconduct and complete disrespect for the right to assemble and the right to a free press,” Teresa Nelson, ACLU-MN legal director, said in the statement. “It is time for police and our community to stop turning a blind eye to police misconduct, and we hope this lawsuit helps stop this reprehensible behavior.”
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Minnesota state Rep. Cedrick Frazier called the deletion of the messages “very poor decision making considering the timing.”
“At worst, it is the continuation of the type of behavior that breeds distrust,” he tweeted Monday.
Minnesota state Rep. Carlos Mariani tweeted Monday that he has “lots of questions for our state patrol.”
Contributing: The A