"Your police are far more dangerous to us than the drug dealer."

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"thunderflash" stun grenade thrown through their front window by members of the "Emergency Response Unit" of the Minneapolis Police Department.

The attack that killed Smalley and Wiesse was one of 400 such raids by Minneapolis cops in the past year. Ten percent of the raids involved the use of grenades. Other raids involved the use of huge front-end loaders driven through the walls of homes and explosive devices thrown by cops into "suspected crack houses," mostly in the city's Black community. During the fatal Jan. 25 raid, police threw a grenade and then stormed into the house, forcing two men to the floor and handcuffing them. As the house burst into flames the cops ran outside, leaving the men on the floor and the elderly couple inside. The handcuffed men managed to get out by themselves, screaming to police that the old couple was still inside asleep. Police ignored all warnings by neighbors before and during the raid that the couple was still inside until the flames were so high and so dense that rescue was impossible.

The stun grenade that killed Smalley and Wiesse is spurned even by the notorious U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, which calls its use unjustified for a law-enforcement agency.

A police search of the house after the fire was put out recovered no drugs and no weapons. The two men arrested at the scene were not charged. Lloyd and Smalley were casualities not in a war on drugs but in what the community is calling a war on Blacks by Minneapolis cops.

Attacks spur protests

Just 11 days later, Black university students going home from a birthday celebration at a were arrestea.

On Feb. 7, Black students from the University of Minnesota Law School organized a demonstration of over 200 people at the office of Minneapolis Mayor Donald Fraser to protest these two police assaults. University of Minnesota student Chris Nisan, the spokesperson for the protest movement, told the crowd, "We understand that this is a historic condition. This has been happening since 1619."

The protesters served several demands upon the Mayor, including one for the establishment of "a permanent citizen review board with full subpoena power consisting of one representative of the state/city Human Rights Department and 11 others to be appointed by the African American community."

Other demands call for a blue-ribbon panel investigation of both incidents, an end to harassment of private citizens involved in community organizing, antiracism training for all policemen, and disciplinary action and suspension of those police involved in both incidents.

The protest at City Hall was the first of a week-long series of broad community mobilizations led by the students. Testimony at meetings by victims of the Minneapolis cops exposed the lie of the liberal and enlightened image of the city so carefully cultivated by the news media, city officials, and Democratic and Republican party politicians.

One resident of the North side of Minneapolis told Police Chief Laux at a community meeting organized to protest the killings of Smalley and Wiesse, "The drug dealer is not going to bother me because I'm not a threat to him. Your police are far more dangerous to us than the drug dealer."

At the same protest meeting, a Cuban Cops exposed as drug dealers Nisan pointed out that there have been more cops charged with drug-related offenses during the past year than there have been drug dealers arrested as a result of the so called "war on drugs."

A number of Minneapolis police cars were discovered with large quantities of drugs hidden in their door panels and steering-wheel columns. Some Minneapolis police have been deeply involved in drug distributions and sales.

At the same time, the past year has seen the assaults on the Black, Latin, Native American and Southeast Asian communities strategy of trying to reform the Democratic Party by likening it to trying to get a chicken to produce a duck egg. The same can be said of attempts to reform the police.

More demonstrations and rallies are planned to keep the heat on the racist police department and its apologists in city hall. This protest movement has inspired the Black community and its allies to a level of mobilization not seen here for many years. Supporters have the highest hopes for this movement, which in one short week has turned the attention of the entire city toward a cancerous growth nurtured by official complicity and liberal indifference.