In this post:
- City of Minneapolis says its willing to sell the Roof Depot to East Phillips for $16.7 million
- MPD misses red flag in hiring new police officer
- LaDuke’s Line 3 trespass case dismissed
- TigerSwan used its Standing Rock spying marketed its counterinsurgency tactics to Other Oil Companies
City of Minneapolis says its willing to sell the Roof Depot to East Phillips for $16.7 million
Minneapolis officials are willing to sell the Roof Depot site to an East Phillips organization for $16.7 million, the Star Tribune reported this week.
The city and the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute (EPNI) have vied over the site for years. EPNI wants to redevelop the 7.6 acre site and empty warehouse into a community-owned amenity, with affordable housing, an indoor urban far, a large solar aray and more.
The city bought the property to expand its Public Works yard, a plan residents strongly reject because of the added pollution it would bring to their already overpolluted neighborhood.
A bill moving through the legislature would provide $20 million to support EPNI’s project, the Star Tribune article said. The city has given EPNI until the end of session, May 22, to come up with the money. Mayor Jacob Frey will lobby at the legislature for the state money.
MPD misses red flag in hiring new officer
Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara has ordered a “complete and thorough investigation” into the hiring of Officer Tyler Timberlake who in a previous job was accused of striking and using stun gun on an unarmed Black man, the Minnesota Reformer reported.
O’Hara said “he was ‘extremely concerned’ to learn about the hiring,” the story said. The officer was hired Jan. 9 and is “still in training and hasn’t yet been deployed into service.”
The former Virginia police officer “was charged with — but acquitted of — assaulting an unarmed Black man in distress,” the story said.
“Body camera footage showed that within seconds of arriving on the scene, … Timberlake repeatedly used his Taser on the man and hit him in the head with the stun gun, then kneeled on his neck and back after the man fell to the ground.”
LaDuke’s Line 3 trespass case dismissed
A state district court judge in Aitkin County has dismissed all Line 3-related criminal charges against Winona LaDuke, the co-founder of Honor the Earth and its former co-executive director, according to a media release from the Climate Defense Project.
The judge found no probable cause for the misdemeanor trespass charges.
LaDuke’s attorneys, Frank Bibeau and Climate Defense Project Staff Attorney, Claire Glenn, defended her right to peacefully practice her religion inside the prayer lodge on the banks of the Mississippi River as Enbridge crews prepared to clear-cut the forest and thread the tar sand oil pipeline under the river on December 5, 2020. As Judge Metzen’s dismissal details, the defendant alleged “violations of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.”
“Judge Metzen’s prudent decision to dismiss these exaggerated charges against Ms. LaDuke once again illustrates that Winona’s rights to exercise her religious and First Amendment freedoms were not in any way criminal trespass,” noted Bibeau.
Glenn added, “The charges in this case were ridiculous, and further illustrate the widespread overreach by Minnesota law enforcement – including officers from the DNR and Aitkin County Sheriff’s Office – who were incentivized by massive amounts of money to control, if not silence, public dissent to pipeline construction because of an arrangement between Enbridge and the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to establish an escrow fund for policing during the building of Line 3. The judge got it right, but only after more than three years waiting for Ms. LaDuke’s day in court. In the meantime, law enforcement got paid and Enbridge got its pipeline.”
Climate Defense Project
TigerSwan used its Standing Rock spying to market its counterinsurgency tactics to other oil companies
Documents obtained through a court case “provide startling new details about how TigerSwan used social media monitoring, aerial surveillance, radio eavesdropping, undercover personnel, and subscription-based records databases to build watchlists and dossiers on Indigenous activists and environmental organizations,” during the resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), at Standing Rock.
The Grist and The Intercept collaborated on the stunning revelations in the documents.
For those who don’t recall, TigerSwan is the security firm Energy Transfer hired to suppress DAPL opposition. It was “founded by James Reese, a retired commander of the elite special operations Army unit Delta Force,” the story said.
To TigerSwan, the emergence of Indigenous-led social movements to keep oil and gas in the ground represented a business opportunity. Reese anticipated new demand from the fossil fuel industry for strategies to undermine the network of activists his company had so carefully gathered information on. In the records, TigerSwan expressed its ambitions to repurpose these detailed records to position themselves as experts in managing pipeline protests. The company created marketing materials pitching work to at least two other energy companies building controversial oil and gas infrastructure, the records show. TigerSwan, which was staffed heavily with former members of military special operations units, branded its tactics as a “counterinsurgency approach,” drawing directly from its leaders’ experiences fighting the so-called war on terror abroad.
TigerSwan did not just work in North Dakota. Energy Transfer hired the company to provide security to its Rover pipeline, in Ohio and West Virginia, the documents confirm. By spring 2017, TigerSwan was also assembling intelligence reports on opponents of Energy Transfer and Sunoco’s Mariner East 2 pipeline in Pennsylvania.
The Intercept and Grist
healingmnstories.wordpress.com 