St. Paul's Mayor on Violence in The Twin Cities [newyorker.com]

By Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker, June 2, 2020

Melvin Carter, the mayor of St. Paul, Minnesota, took office in January, 2018, promising dramatic change to the city’s racial and economic inequities. Carter, who is forty-one and St. Paul’s first black mayor, was sworn in on the same day as Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a civil-rights lawyer who also ran on a progressive platform. In the wake of a series of high-profile police shootings in the area, including the killing of Philando Castile in a St. Paul suburb, in 2016, Carter instituted reforms of his city’s police department, to decidedly mixed results. (His director of “community first” public-safety initiatives resigned and criticized the mayor for insufficient support at the beginning of 2019; leaders of a local civilian body that looks into police misconduct stepped down six months later.) Now, however, following the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, on May 25th, police and protesters have been involved in violent conflicts across the Twin Cities.